Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been characterized by its sheer brutality — including cities leveled by bombardment and mass graves — and by how accepting much of the world has become of wholesale death and destruction. Casualty numbers — inflated, closely guarded and impossible to verify — are traded like sports scores between Kyiv and Moscow. Snuff videos of combatants being killed by drones, gunfire and artillery circulate like some digital token of battlefield action. None of that changes the reality that entire generations in Ukraine and Russia are being thinned death by death. Ukrainian soldiers also realize that to lose the war is to lose their country to an invader.

Source: New York Times October 30, 2023 04:39 UTC