Home ›› 15 Feb 2023 ›› World Biz
When Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he started a war that has killed tens of thousands of people, ravaged cities, and pummelled the country's economy.
A year on, here is the cost of the conflict:
Military losses
According to the latest estimates from Norway, the conflict has wounded or killed 180,000 Russian soldiers and 100,000 Ukrainian troops.
Other Western sources estimate the war has caused 150,000 casualties on each side.
In comparison, some 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in a whole decade of fighting in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
Ukrainian soldiers often use the term "cannon fodder" to describe the Russians sent to their death along the frontline. They are often poorly trained conscripts who stand little chance against Ukrainian forces determined to defend their country.
Others are convicts recruited in Russian jails to swell the ranks of Russian paramilitary group Wagner, who Kyiv and its allies say are deployed on near-impossible missions with the equivalent of a gun pointed to their head.
The onslaught has also taken its toll on the Ukrainian side, as shown by the endless blue and yellow national flags fluttering above cemeteries across the embattled country.
Civilian losses
By the time Moscow's forces seized control of Mariupol in late May after three months of heavy bombardment, the southern port city had been reduced to a sea of rubble strewn with dead bodies.
Kyiv said at least 20,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed.
In total, some 30,000 to 40,000 civilians have lost their lives nationwide in the conflict, Western sources say.
In late January, the United Nations estimated that 18,000 civilians had been killed or wounded in the fighting, but said the real figure was likely much higher.
Ukrainian authorities say at least 400 children have been killed.
The United Nations says most of the killed civilians lost their lives during Russian bombardment.
Long term, landmines will also be a huge threat to civilians.
Kyiv says 30 percent of Ukrainian territory has been contaminated, while Human Rights Watch accuses Ukrainian troops of having planted banned anti-personnel landmines in the eastern region of Izyum.
Experts warn demining could take decades.
War crimes
Several images have come to symbolise the war's devastating impact on ordinary Ukrainians.
When AFP journalists entered the Kyiv suburb of Bucha on April 2, 2022, they found one street littered with the bodies of civilians.
One man had fallen onto his bike, another still had a shopping bag in his hand. Yet another had his hands tied behind his back.
Days later, a child's toy lay bloodied at a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, after a Russian missile hit as thousands of civilians waited for a train to flee the violence. At least 57 civilians were killed.
The previous month, people around the world saw the photograph of a heavily pregnant woman on a stretcher being evacuated from a Mariupol hospital after it was bombed. Neither she nor her baby survived.
Around 65,000 suspected war crimes have been reported throughout the war, the European Union's justice commissioner Didier Reynders says.
UN investigators have accused Russia of committing war crimes on a "massive scale" in Ukraine -- bombings, executions, torture and horrific sexual violence.
Kyiv alleges Moscow has forcibly deported more than 16,000 children to Russia or areas controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.
Several NGOs have condemned Ukraine, meanwhile, for violating the rights of Russian prisoners of war, but on a much smaller scale.
The International Criminal Court launched an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity last year.
But it cannot prosecute either country for any possible war crimes since neither Russia nor Ukraine are members of the Hague-based court.
Kyiv is instead pressing for a special tribunal to be set up to prosecute Moscow for the crime of aggression because it sees this as a way to achieve faster justice and more easily target the Kremlin's top officials.
1,500-km frontline
On the eastern battlefront, entire villages and towns lie in ruins, and the earth is dotted with huge craters.
Exhausted soldiers lie in wait at the bottom of muddy trenches, while the dull thud of artillery fire booms overhead.
The "active" frontline runs north to south along 1,500 km (900 miles) of territory, according to Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine's armed forces.
Among the hotspots is the town of Bakhmut, dubbed "hell on earth" by many Ukrainian soldiers, where Russian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries have been steadily inching forward in recent weeks.
A few thousand civilians still live in the town, hunkering in cellars without running water or electricity, taking great risks when they venture out for fresh air, food, water and fuel.
