The forgotten war
Do you know how many people have been killed or wounded, or gone missing fighting Russia's war in Ukraine since 2022? Almost 2 million people. So why does it feel like most of the world stopped paying attention?
In Kherson, people have started stringing nets over their streets, the same kind of nets fishermen use, hanging them above roads, hospitals, and apartment buildings. And these nets aren't decoration. They’re there to catch drones from small drones before they even reach the ground, by tangling them or setting them off in the air instead of on top of someone's home. Local officials say that netting and jamming systems now stop around 95 percent of incoming drones, increasing from an estimated 80 percent a year earlier. The city used to have 250,000 people living in it. Now it has about 60,000. That's what more than four years of war looks like up close: a neighborhood covered in fishing nets, hoping they catch the next bomb. Almost two million people have been killed, hurt, or gone missing on both sides since 2022. The war hasn't slowed down. Most of the world has just stopped watching it happen to them.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 with the stated aim of taking the entire country; that effort failed, and the war settled into a prolonged fight over eastern and southern Ukraine. Russia currently holds portions of four Ukrainian regions in addition to Crimea, while Ukraine has retained control of the rest of its territory despite years of sustained attacks. Neither side has achieved a decisive victory. Recent diplomatic efforts have followed a familiar pattern: American envoys travel to Moscow and Kyiv, meet separately with Putin and Zelensky, describe the talk as “substantive”, and depart without reaching an agreement.This cycle reflects a broader pattern of continuous diplomatic activity without a meaningful resolution.
The forgetting didn't happen all at once, and it didn't happen because things got better. It happened slowly, the way attention always fades. Several reporters that used to broadcast live from Kyiv rooftops went back home. Searches for the word “Ukraine” went up when the invasion started and then dropped back to nearly their pre-invasion level, according to Google's own data. German TV stations found the same thing happened even with refugees stories from Ukrainians, which used to be one of the most watched areas of the war content.
Meanwhile, the war hasn't slowed down even as Google search interest and German TV coverage of the war have dropped off. The front line has changed into what Ukrainian soldiers call the “kill zone”, which is a stretch of land filled with drones, where any truck or tank that moves gets spotted and destroyed within minutes. A few years ago that zone was only three to five kilometers wide. Now soldiers and officials say that it stretches 15 to 20 kilometers or more, and it keeps growing as Ukraine extends the range of its strike drones. Drones are now responsible for up to 80 percent of all battlefield damage, according to Ukraine's own defense ministry. Russia is still pushing forward in the south, having taken the town of Huliaipole and dozens of nearby villages over the winter, even as the analyst who watches the front line most closely says Russian generals are lying to their own president about how well the war is going. Independent estimates put total military casualties on both sides, killed, wounded, or missing, at close to 2 million people: roughly 325,000 Russian soldiers died out of about 600,000 Ukrainian casualties. Civilians haven't been spared either. The United Nations humans rights office said that in just six months this past winter and spring it confirmed over 1270 civilian deaths and nearly 7,000 injuries, a 40% jump from the same period the year before, driven mostly by Russian missile and drone attacks that can hit hundreds of targets in a single night; one wave in May involved more than 1500 drones and missiles launched across eight regions in 2 days. Total verified civilian deaths since the invasion began now stand near 14,000 out of more than 57,000 verified civilian casualties overall. And the UN itself says the real numbers are almost certainly higher. These aren't just statistics. This is proof the war got worse in the exact time the world decided it wasn't news anymore.
There's something troubling about a war continuing largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Wars that fade from attention don't necessarily end sooner and it is the exact opposite since there is less pressure to resolve them. Ukraine isn't losing this war and Russia isn't close to winning it. What is actually happening is simpler than either of those outcomes: a country still absorbing heavy losses in a war most people stopped following a while ago, with both sides waiting for something to change. Until then, the war keeps going, and most of the world isn't watching.
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