Almost half of the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers during Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas have been non-combat losses, according to Anatoliy Matios, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor.
Since it started in 2014, the
war has claimed the lives of at least 2,880 Ukrainian soldiers. But 1,294 of
the deaths were not the result of combat, but of disease (405), road accidents
(112), use of alcohol or narcotics (96), injuries (148), careless handling of
weapons (111), ignoring safety rules (40), fights with comrades (121), suicides
(259), and “other reasons” (2).
Igor Kurilets, a neurosurgeon serving
in an emergency hospital in Mariupol, a town in Donetsk Oblast 800 kilometers
southeast from Kyiv, says that only about 20 percent of the soldiers admitted
to his hospital, have combat injuries.
The rest of them are either
sick, or have non-combat traumas, Kurilets said.
“When there was an active
phase of war, they were occupied, they were fighting,” he told the Kyiv Post.
“Now a lot of them are just sitting and waiting. They have plenty of spare time
– some start drinking, some start fighting…”
While some injuries are slight,
as in the civilian life, such as when a person falls, or dives into water
carelessly, many of the injuries, Kurilets said, are caused “by foolishness,”
especially when it comes to handling weapons.
“This is a human factor. He (a
soldier) finds a mine and decides to defuse it for some reason. So one is defusing
it, and he has several on-lookers. There – we have three or four injured
people,” he says. “Or when a person puts a grenade into a pocket and it goes
off.”
Another major group of
non-combat losses is related to health problems. Kurilets said he often sees
soldiers suffering from back pain.
“The bulletproof vests are
heavy. Of course, if a person weighs 90 kilograms, then 20 kilograms of body
armor is bearable. But if he weighs 50 or 60 kilograms then he gets back
problems, back aches, hernias,” Kurilets said.
According to Matios, the high
number of deaths from health problems indicates the low quality of the work of conscription
commissions.
“A village or a district or
some other doctor decided that Ivan, who does not have a job, has to go and
serve, because he is healthy, even if he has symptoms of tuberculosis or
something else,” Matios said in an interview with Ukrainian television’s 5th
Channel on June 10.
Kurilets agreed, saying that
given that the conscription commissions had to meet mobilization plans that
required the calling up of a certain number of soldiers, they mobilized sick
people.
However, there were also
volunteers who intentionally lied to the medical commission to get into the
army, he said.
“They hide their chronic
health problems, serve for couple of months, receive their military license and
then they start saying they got their health problems from serving in the
army,” Kurilets says.
He said this problem would
fade away when Ukraine has a contract army: “They have already served, their
characteristics are available, and they are trained. I have never met anyone
that was sick or weak among the contract soldiers.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]
