POLTAVA, Ukraine, June 8 (Portal) – In peacetime, Viktor Tkachenko follows local alerts, court registers and other open sources for a news agency in central Ukraine.
These days, the reticent 33-year-old is filling a table with the names of Ukrainian soldiers from the Poltava region who have been killed since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion – most recently 1,072 – used in regular raids that typically contain between 10 and 40 names.
“It’s a scary system, but it’s a system,” Tkachenko said of the grim task of cataloging the fallen and informing readers of Poltavshchyna, an online portal for local news covering everything from political intrigue to power outages covers.
“It is clear that this will not end anytime soon.”
Poltava, which borders the war-torn regions of Sumy and Kharkiv but was largely spared fighting, had a pre-war population of around 1.3 million out of a total nationwide population of around 43 million.
Ukraine has not disclosed the number of casualties it has suffered from the Russian invasion that began in February 2022, saying such information could help the enemy.
A current estimate by the US secret service based on the Discord leaks in April puts the number of dead in Kiev at 15,000 to 17,500. Portal was unable to independently verify the widely differing claims of battlefield casualties on either side of the conflict.
In a rare private initiative, Tkachenko and his colleagues scour open sources like Facebook, where relatives and local officials often post individual obituaries — an imperfect method that may understate the true cost of the war.
But the table provides a glimpse of the human cost of war in one of Ukraine’s 27 regions.
In his cramped office in part of a former accordion factory adorned with vintage campaign posters and political jokes, Tkachenko described his work as an “emotional seesaw”.
Most of the entries in his Google spreadsheet, which he edits from research collected by employees, are tagged with the dates and locations of a soldier’s birth and death.
A separate, smaller section entitled “No Confirmation” is dedicated to the missing troops.
Published summaries of Poltavshchyna include photos of those killed in action and short biographies of about one to three paragraphs — a format, Tkachenko said, that seems to strike a worthy balance and that most readers approve of.
A spokesman for the Poltava Regional Military Recruitment Center did not comment on the accuracy of Tkachenko’s statements. But he said his office takes seriously its role in notifying family members and honoring every person killed by Poltava at his funerals.
“If you look at every fallen soldier as a personal loss, then I don’t think you would last long,” said Roman Istomin, the press secretary. “You have to accept it as an unfortunately natural process. And Russia is to blame for that.”
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ukraine’s losses.
rows of dead
Soldiers, some visibly wounded, traverse the tree-lined streets of the city of Poltava, the regional capital of around 280,000 people known for its dumplings and rich Cossack history.
On the eastern outskirts, hidden behind railroad tracks, at least 134 soldiers associated with Poltava and killed in the full-scale invasion of Russia are buried in a separate area of the Zaturyne Cemetery reserved primarily for recent military dead.
Ukrainian flags wave in the wind over three long rows of graves. The near silence is occasionally broken by small arms fire from a nearby military training ground.
A sprawling adjoining lot of pristine grass, which city council leader Andriy Karpov told Portal could be used if necessary, is a macabre reminder of the deaths that are likely to come.
“There is not a single stranger among them,” Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva, who visited her husband’s grave on the first anniversary of his funeral, said of the bond she feels for the fallen.
Poltava-born Denys Bondarev, a 38-year-old film stuntman in Kiev who joined an airborne unit after the invasion of Russia, was killed on May 21, 2022, according to the wooden cross marking his grave.
His commander, who died two months later, was buried in the same row, Vatsenko-Bondareva said.
January was a particularly brutal month for the region, Tkachenko said, as a local force in the eastern town of Soledar, near Bakhmut, suffered heavy casualties.
According to his table, at least 25 soldiers from the 116th Territorial Defense Brigade were killed there that month.
Neither the unit nor the Department of Defense immediately responded to a request for comment.
“The entire region has felt these losses,” Tkachenko said. “You didn’t even need statistics for that.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL toll
As the war drags on, the psychological burden on Ukrainians increases.
In Poltava, the rush of eager volunteers at the beginning of the war has given way to a mobilization campaign by the less enthusiastic, said Istomin, the military press officer.
Disinformation on social media, depicting alleged altercations with recruiters or falsely accusing them of being after everyone, has also clouded public opinion against these military personnel, he added.
“It’s not about casualties, but rather about the awareness of the population,” said Istomin.
After her husband’s death, Vatsenko-Bondareva, 35, co-founded a Facebook support group for war widows, which now has more than 1,200 members.
She said the women sought comfort from one another, partly because they often found it difficult to find compassion in others.
“They understand that they will not be judged, that they will not be told banal things like, ‘You must live for the sake of your child,'” Vatsenko-Bondareva said.
She added that she sometimes takes calls in the middle of the night from widows whose nerves are on edge.
Officials are hoping a much-anticipated counteroffensive to retake more Russian-held territory will yield results.
For Tkachenko, the attack means there is likely no end in sight to his morbid data entry, which he believes is crucial to the historical record.
“But you just can’t avoid it,” he said.
Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Edited by Mike Collett-White and Alex Richardson
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