The merciless accounting that measures the losses from Russia’s invasion now includes about 6.2 million Ukrainian refugees elsewhere in Europe, according to the United Nations, and another 6.3 million “internally displaced.”
That means that about 30 percent of the country’s estimated prewar population of 41 million has been forced from their homes, amounting to by far the largest migration crisis in Europe since the aftermath of World War II.
And that is hardly the full the toll. The country does not release public counts of military casualties, and civilian casualties in areas overrun by Russia are guesses, at best, but officials estimate tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and many more wounded. Major cities and smaller towns have been leveled. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that at least 140,000 residential buildings had been destroyed or damaged, robbing 3.5 million people of their homes.
And each day, the bloodshed, dislocation and devastation grow. Two civilians were killed and five others badly injured trying to flee Russian-held territory in the southern Kherson region on Monday, Ukrainian officials said. The administrator of the neighboring Kryvyi Rih region said Russian forces had fired on their red minibus at “point-blank range.”
In the east, the focus of recent Russian offensives, an emergency evacuation train carrying “women, children, elderly people, many people with reduced mobility” made its way on Tuesday morning to safer territory in the west, Iryna Vereshchuk, a deputy prime minister, said in a statement.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded with some 200,000 civilians in the east to evacuate the already depopulated areas near the front lines, where Russian artillery has laid waste to whole towns. But many cannot leave — because of age, illness or Russian attacks — and others will not, including Russian sympathizers and the merely stubborn. Most already lack essential infrastructure such as power, heat and clean water.
If they wait until cold weather sets in, there will be little the government in Kyiv can do for them, Ms. Vereshchuk said. By then, Russia may have resumed major offensive operations.
A month after seizing full control of the Luhansk region, the easternmost part of Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russian forces are regrouping for an expected push to conquer what they do not already hold of the neighboring Donetsk region. But the combat never fully lets up, and every day the Russians still pound targets around the country.
The Kremlin insists that it strikes only military targets, a claim belied by images of ruined apartment blocks, houses, schools, farms, hospitals and shops.
U.S. lawmakers have pressured the Biden administration to label Russia a state sponsor of terror, a designation that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has so far resisted. On Tuesday, Russia’s foreign ministry warned that it could react to such a move by cutting off direct relations with Washington, along with taking unspecified other measures.
“A logical result of this irresponsible step could be the breaking off of diplomatic relations, after which Washington runs the risk of crossing the point of no return with all the ensuing consequences,” said Maria Zakharova, the ministry spokeswoman.
Russia’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, a group with far-right roots whose members made a last stand in Mariupol, was a terrorist organization. That could clear the way for Russia to criminally charge captured Azov soldiers with terrorism, rather than treating them as prisoners of war.
Last Friday, an explosion at a prison in the Donetsk region killed more than 50 of the Azovstal fighters taken prisoner by Russians. Each side has blamed the other for the explosion.