Experts say that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) provides the most accurate daily statistics on civilian casualties in Ukraine. But the OHCHR itself says it can greatly underestimate the actual loss rate. “The OHCHR believes that the actual numbers are significantly higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities are taking place has been delayed and many reports are still pending confirmation,” he said.

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Since the invasion on February 24, the OHCHR has confirmed that 1,232 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 1,935 injured. Of the civilians killed, the UN said it had confirmed that 250 were men, 176 women, 18 girls and 36 boys. Another 58 children and 694 adults were also confirmed dead by the UN, but the agency could not determine their gender. Experts say that wartime political authorities – unlike the military – usually do not have the resources and time to accurately measure civilian casualties. Howard Coombs, an assistant professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, said modern soldiers need detailed battle damage assessments to formulate targeting plans, evaluate current operations, and direct troops. “You have systems and calculations that are standardized and can be used to be more accurate, because if you do not have accurate information you can not configure your operations properly and you do not know if you are successful.” Coombs told CBC News. “It’s a very different thing from the citizens. There is no calculation, in a systematic way, like when we measure military damage.”

The full death toll is unbelievable, says the UN

Coombs said an accurate count of Ukrainian civilian deaths could take years. He stressed that no one knows for sure how many Russian civilians were killed during World War II. An OHCHR official told CBC News that while a full count of any civilian deaths may never occur, the agency should be able to account for about 90 percent of civilian deaths within a few months of its expiration. of war. “An accurate picture of how many civilians were actually killed could be obtained relatively quickly, and the process of recovering and identifying all the dead bodies would probably never reach the stage where one could claim that every civilian death was estimated,” the official said. he said. The official said the UN was aware of many “makeshift graves” and “individually marked graves” that could be verified once the OHCHR entered – but that would depend on the level of disaster that UN workers find on the ground. “There may be a significant number of bodies whose identification would remain problematic for years, as well as those who are missing and have probably died,” they said.

Refugees and the fog of war

Experts say that if a mass accident, such as a gas explosion, took place in an urban setting in a western democracy, it would take days to determine how many people died. When the authorities doing such work – police and paramedics – no longer work, this work does not happen. Walter Dorn, a professor of defense studies at the Royal Military College, said the heavily bombed cities lacked local services and could not wait for outside help. “In the case of Mariupol, their ambulances can no longer operate,” Dorn said. “They have run out of fuel and can not reach the sites. So there are people dying of starvation in their apartments, something the UN and local authorities do not even know. “In these serious conditions of war, it is impossible to really know the situation of all citizens. And even local authorities do not have the ability to control people.” View of an apartment building destroyed in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine on March 30, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
The United Nations says more than four million Ukrainians have fled the country and countless others have been displaced from their cities and villages in other parts of Ukraine. “When you have a mass incident in many areas, it would be incredibly difficult for authorities in a stable area to deal with it and report it accurately,” Coombs said. “You add immigration, displaced people, disruption of governance, disruption of security and safety, emergency services and it is almost impossible to understand what is happening.” Experts say that if a chariot with a three-member crew is hit by a rocket while moving, it is safe to assume that the entire crew has been killed. But without knowing where the people are – how many have fled, how many remain – officials can not calculate the losses from a missile strike on a political target.

The UN has only released confirmed death tolls

Military experts told CBC News that the attack on the World Trade Center provided a good example of the difficulty of monitoring civilian deaths. According to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people could be found working in the Twin Towers every day in 2001 – but the official death toll from the attack was only 10 percent of the low number in that range. . Another reason for the lower-than-expected estimates of civilian deaths in Ukraine is the cautious approach taken by the UN and the 37 staff members of the human rights monitoring mission to collect and verify information. A Polish firefighter is holding a baby at the Medyka border crossing on March 17, 2022. More than four million Ukrainians – mostly women and children – have fled across the border, according to the UN. (Wojtek Radwansky / AFP / Getty Images)
“Neutrality is a key element in all UN-type operations, military or otherwise. Without neutrality they can not work with all sides in the conflict,” Coombs said. “So if the UN is not very prudent in how it counts civilian casualties, it’s playing a role in the information war that is actually going on.” of Ukraine published by the Advocate General a list of war crimes committed against Ukraine by Russia, but offers only exact numbers of dead civilians for children. Ukraine says 148 children have been killed in Russia’s war to date, while the OHCHR estimates 112. Dorn said Ukrainian authorities were trying to build a reputation for accuracy and refrained from announcing unconfirmed civilian deaths. An OHCHR official told CBC News in an email that it only reported civilian deaths “based on the independent verification of the incidents and losses involved” and that the service did not provide “sums provided by others, including government agencies”. The UN official said that because his officials could not travel to much of Ukraine, “it was very difficult to get information from certain locations where there was or is intense hostilities and so many reports need to be verified.”