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Russia-Ukraine conflict: With high casualties, is Ukraine still able to hold out against Russia?

Russia-Ukraine conflict: With high casualties, is Ukraine still able to hold out against Russia?  - Photo 1.

A Ukrainian soldier attends the funeral of Army Colonel Oleksander Makhachek in Zhytomyr, Ukraine on Friday, June 3, 2022. According to his comrades, Mr. Makhachek was killed in a skirmish with Russian forces on May 30 in Luhansk. (AP photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Former Ukrainian colonel Oleksandr Makhachek was killed, leaving behind his wife Elena, daughters Olena and Myroslava-Oleksandra.

During the first 100 days of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, his grave was the 40th grave dug in the military cemetery at Zhytomyr, 140 kilometers west of the capital Kiev.

Colonel Makhachek was killed on May 30 in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, where fighting is raging.

Near the grave of Colonel Makhachek is the newly dug grave of the soldier Viacheslav Dvornitskyi. Information on the grave said he died on May 27. Other new graves also show that Ukrainian soldiers were killed within days of each other – on May 10, 9, 7 and 5. And this is just a cemetery, in one of hundreds of thousands of cities, towns and villages in Ukraine, where the dead soldiers rest.

This week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine is losing between 60 and 100 soldiers a day in the Donbass battlefield in the conflict with Russia.

Among the comrades who went to the funeral to pay their respects and mourning for Colonel Makhachek, 49, on Friday, June 3, was General Viktor Muzhenko, who was once the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. until 2019. He warned that losses in the conflict could be worse.

“This is one of the key moments in the war, but it’s not the peak yet,” General Muzhenko told AP.

“This is the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. That explains why the loss is so great. To reduce the loss, Ukraine now needs equally powerful weapons. or even surpass Russian weapons. This will help Ukraine to respond accordingly,” added Mr. Muzhenko.

Russian artillery fire is currently causing many casualties in the eastern regions of Ukraine.

Retired lieutenant-general Ben Hodges, the former commander of American forces in Europe, described Russia’s strategy as a “medieval strategy of attrition” and said that unless Ukraine was supplied with American weapons, England and other advanced weapons, they will still suffer great casualties.

“This battlefield is much deadlier than what we are used to over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we don’t have numbers like these. The level of force attrition will include commanders, sergeants. They’re the ones who suffer a lot because they’re directly on the battlefield,” Hodges said in a phone interview with the AP.

Colonel Makhachek was a military engineer who led a detachment specializing in laying mines and other defense systems, said Colonel Ruslan Shutov, who attended the funeral of his friend of more than 30 years.

“When the shelling started, he and a group of people hid in a bunker. There were four people in the group, and he told them to hide in the cellar. And he was hiding in another cellar. Unfortunately, a shell hit the bunker where he was hiding,” Shutov said.

Ukraine had about 250,000 men and women soldiers before the war and is in the process of adding 100,000 more. The Ukrainian government did not say how many people have died in more than 14 weeks of fighting with Russia.

No one really knows the exact number of Ukrainian civilians killed or how many combatants were killed on either side of the war. Casualty claims by Russian and Ukrainian government officials, which can sometimes exaggerate or downplay their own casualty figures for propaganda purposes, cannot be independently verified.

Western analysts estimate Russian military casualties higher. However, as Ukraine’s losses increased, the ferocity of the war required the country to find replacements. With a population of 43 million, Ukraine has the manpower.

“It’s all about recruiting, training, and putting them on the front lines,” said retired U.S. Marine Colonel Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“If the war now is turning to a long-term struggle of attrition, then you have to build systems to have a replacement. This is a difficult moment for every army in the war,” Cancian said.

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