What has been the human cost of the armed conflict in the Donbas?

As of February 19, 2015, the official number of casualties in the Donbas war, as recorded by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, had climbed to 5,793 killed (including 63 children) and 14,595 wounded (including 169 children).

Keeping track of the number of casualties remained a challenge in subsequent years. In early 2020, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated some 13,000 to 13,200 killed since the start of the conflict including 3,350 civilians, and total casualties including the wounded at between 41,000 and 42,000 people.¹³

Population displacement from the Donbas, which used to be a densely populated area, has also reached catastrophic proportions. By February 19, 2015, the number of officially registered Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Ukraine passed the one million mark, reaching 1,042,066. At the same time, in February 2015 the Russian authorities also estimated some 900,000 Ukrainian refugees in their country, with 265,000 of them granted temporary shelter, a legal status that allows them to stay and receive some support, but which falls short of recognizing them as refugees under international law.¹⁴ For its part, the Ukrainian government has also been reluctant to deem the conflict a war or to declare martial law even in the Donbas, primarily because doing so would disqualify Ukraine from receiving international economic assistance.

As the residents who fled the war-torn areas have attempted to re­build their lives elsewhere, those who stayed have survived for weeks or months in buildings without water or electricity, risking death from artillery fire. Controversial Russian humanitarian convoys of trucks containing food supplies that the Ukrainian authorities have not always had a chance to inspect provide only symbolic relief for bigger cities, as do similar convoys of trucks sent from Kyiv by the Donbas's supreme oligarch-in-exile, Rinat Akhmetov.

The war led to the region's economic collapse, and the fleeing oligarchs who lost political control to radical pro-Russian nationalists left behind the lifeless carcass of what used to be the economic en­gine of the Donbas, its metallurgical and chemical industries. Even those enterprises that have not been damaged in fighting still face production stoppages caused by the breakdown of the region's commercial transportation network. The Ukrainian government or­dered all institutions funded from the state budget to evacuate from separatist-controlled territories, and it stopped all money transfers

there, including state pensions, which is the only type of pension currently available in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of retirees were forced to register elsewhere in the country in order to obtain their meager state pensions; some 200,000 failed to do so by the deadline. The war also made life difficult for Ukrainians elsewhere in the country, and especially those living on fixed incomes, as it led the national currency over a cliff in the winter of 2015.

Over the next several years Ukraine absorbed an estimated 1.4 million internally displaced persons, most of whom accepted that the war would not end in the near future and were thus forced to try to rebuild their lives elsewhere. A fragile “new normal” devel­oped along the front line with many thousands of seniors from the self-proclaimed republics crossing monthly to the Ukrainian side to collect their pensions there. Death and injury from land mines have remained constant in the contact zone, and its residents faced the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in the conditions of largely destroyed healthcare infrastructure.