Nearly 11 months ago, in August 2023, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War.
Both Russia and Ukraine under-report their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting.
In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime.
Yet some facts are no longer much in dispute.
Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity” — an effort to Westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO.