Russia-Ukraine exchange of dead bodies: 78 Russians for 6060 Ukrainians Why the vast difference?

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Russia-Ukraine exchange of dead bodies:  78 Russians for 6060 Ukrainians   Why the vast difference?

I am pleased that News X put this question to me in a brief interview yesterday.  As I explained, many more Ukrainian soldiers and officers have died in the conflict than Russians, but the usual ratio we speak about is 7:1 not 78:1 as in the current exchange of corpses.

The answer likely is to be found in the low priority Ukrainian military give to retrieving the dead and wounded from battlefields, whereas the Russians do everything possible to retrieve their own.  But there is also the mention by the Ukrainian side which the NewsX presenter cites at the start of the interview that many of the Ukrainian dead lost their lives in the fierce battles for the cities Bakhmut and Mariupol in the first year of the war. Particularly in Mariupol, many of the ultranationalists of the Azov battalion continued fighting when they were totally surrounded and largely hiding in underground industrial buildings, so that retrieval of bodies was just not possible.

I call attention to the ‘breaking news’ which interrupted this interview:  the presenter asked me about the just announced cancellation of scheduled meetings between the USA and Russia, cancelled at the initiative of the U.S. side.  Since I had no additional information to go on, I gave a nonspecific answer which, now that the facts are better known, should be corrected.  The talks in question were about improving the working conditions of the respective embassies and consulates in each country. Upon reflection, it would appear that Washington cancelled not only because its full attention right now is on the Middle East, but as a sign of displeasure with Putin that Trump could use at the G7 meeting in Canada yesterday, to hold out the possibility to his enemies there that he might yet come around to their views on why the war should be continued until Russia is defeated.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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