A Russian strike took everything from Oleksandre Remez: his wife Natalia was killed and his apartment in the Ukrainian city of Uman ravaged.
He survived, because his morning awakening took him away from the bedroom.
At the end of May, a month after the tragedy, standing in front of the rubble of his building, he said he wanted one thing: that all the victims of this war be counted.
“We need to know the numbers, but also the names, because no one should be forgotten,” pleads the 63-year-old man, between several sobs.
But counting the dead is a difficult exercise, when around 20% of the country is occupied.
According to an updated toll released by Ukrainian authorities, at least 10,368 civilians have been killed and 14,404 injured since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022.
But “these are only known people”, explains Oleg Gavrych, senior adviser to the chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“We estimate that the most probable is that this number is five times higher. So around 50,000” victims, he specifies.
The data are more or less consistent with those put forward by the UN, which counted 8,709 killed and 14,666 injured at the end of April while noting that the real toll was undoubtedly “considerably higher”.
Russia “must be held responsible for each” death, claims in a cry from the heart Oleksandre Remez, in front of the memorial installed in memory of the 23 people killed, including his wife and four children, by the Russian strike which on April 28 gutted his building in Uman.
But one of the main obstacles for the count of the victims is the almost total absence of information in the areas occupied by Russia, such as in Mariupol, where tens of thousands of civilians have died according to the Ukrainian authorities during of the devastating siege in the spring of 2022.
According to experts, even if the Ukrainians managed to reconquer the occupied territories, finding and counting the victims could be a difficult task, the Russians having been able to hide bodies and evidence.
“They have an interest in hiding their crimes,” observes Philip Verwimp, an expert in demography in conflict zones.
In addition, in areas ravaged by fighting, such as Bakhmout in the east, it is often difficult to establish who is missing, who is dead and who has fled.
Establishing a full balance sheet could therefore take years, as the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s showed.
A database published in 2007 gathered the names of nearly 97,000 dead in Bosnia, a figure half the number used until then.
According to Mr. Verwimp, who participated in the evaluation of the data of this “Book of the Dead of Bosnia”, it is crucial to obtain verifiable data.
According to him, “the Ukrainians are very quick to do that: as soon as they take over villages, they send investigators to document Russian war crimes”, exhume bodies and question witnesses.
For Jakub Bijak, an academic who worked with the UN to establish the list of victims of the war in Bosnia, the precise count of the victims is important for the mourning of the families.
But “it is politically (also important) to establish the level of losses that a country has suffered during a war”, he adds.
Therefore, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian authorities have endeavored to record all alleged Russian war crimes (murders of civilians, sexual assaults, destruction of homes and cultural sites, etc.).
On the other hand, they fall into silence when it comes to evoking the toll of its soldiers killed.
For Oleksandre Remez, at this point, his only source of comfort is documenting the death of his wife Natalia.
“We must know everything, do everything possible to prevent this from happening again,” he swears. “Children, babies, why do they die?”
07/06/2023 13:54:42 – Ouman (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
