Ukraine’s claim that at least 1,300 of its soldiers were killed during Russia’s invasion has been accompanied by increasingly public recognition of the country’s losses.
Grim funeral processions have become an everyday sight, with photographs showing rows of flag-draped coffins being delivered to funerals in cities including Lviv, with its historic garrison church of Saints Peter and Paul.
While as late as last week the Ukrainian military was refusing to disclose the extent of casualties in the country, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s announcement on Saturday of the estimated death toll seemed inevitable, with social media including from the country. armed forces, increasingly honoring the fallen.
During the brief and brutal conflict, Ukrainian social media tracked a grim change in attitudes as the war progressed.
Where once there were reports of how young volunteers gave up their careers to go to war to defend their country, told in uplifting words, some are now accompanied by a grim code of how they went to fight and plunged into a growing public meditation on mourning. .
Among those who fell into the second category was the Ukrainian actor-turned-soldier Pasha Li, who was killed in action on March 6 while Russian troops shelled the city of Irpen on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Lee, 33, who served in one of Ukraine’s territorial defense units and worked as an actor, TV presenter and composer, was mourned on Facebook by fellow Ukrainian actress Anastasia Kasilova, who worked with Lee on the crime TV show Provincial.
“He was an actor, a TV presenter, my colleague and a good friend,” Kasilova wrote about Lee. “Never say goodbye!”
Other death reports were posted by the Ukrainian armed forces on their Twitter feed, with a simple photograph holding a candle and brief details of who they were and how they died.
Among the dead stands out Inna Derusova, a field physician, the first woman to be awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine posthumously and widely immortalized.
Derusova was killed during an artillery attack on Akhtyrka on 24 February, the first day of the Russian invasion, and is credited with rescuing more than 10 soldiers that day.
Public participation in Ukraine, with its fallen tribunes, contrasts sharply with the Kremlin’s restrictions on how Russian military families can bury and mourn those who have died in a conflict it refuses to publicly acknowledge.
Some families in Russia said that despite being informed of their sons’ deaths, they were told that the bodies would not be returned until the war was over.