“All our smartest, bravest guys are dying. The toll of war on society is huge, “said Ivana Sanina, a 23-year-old activist, during a previous memorial service for Ratusni on Thursday. He was one of the student protesters beaten by violent Berkut police on the first night of the pro-Western Maidan revolution in 2013. The decision by then-pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych to crack down on student protests soon sparked widespread protests. Kyiv for Moscow. After the Maidan, Ratushnyi worked as an investigative journalist, exposing local corruption. But he is best known in Kyiv for leading a campaign in 2019 to protect Protasiv Yar, a green area in central Kiev that developers wanted to take over. It was near Protasiv Yar that mourners gathered last week. His death, just weeks before his 25th birthday, underscores the enormous record of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s promising new generation. “She was the voice of a free, independent Ukraine. “He had such a great future ahead of him,” Sanina said, adding that none of her friends were surprised when Ratushnyi decided to join the army at the start of the war. Thousands of young Ukrainians, who had only known an independent Ukraine, volunteered to join its army and territorial defense forces when Russia launched its invasion on February 24. And while the country has been successful in repelling Russian forces, it is now suffering some of its heaviest losses since the start of the war as the battle for the east of the country enters its decisive stages. Between 100 and 200 Ukrainians are believed to be dying every day as the fighting turns into a protracted endless war of attrition. Many are fighting with almost no military training against a Russian army that, while stuttering, is still 10 to one ahead of its opponent. In a recent interview with The Economist, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said the deaths of young Ukrainians were an inevitable consequence of the Russian invasion, blaming Ukraine for its lack of heavy weapons. “How else can it be? “Young children end up in the front line, where no one wants to be, and they die; people need to know.” Valya Polishchuk, a photographer from Kyiv, said her days were now “full of going from funeral to funeral”. “I was at another friend’s funeral when I heard about Roman,” she shrugged before kneeling as she passed the car carrying Ratusni’s body. The contrast is great, his friends say, between the deaths of Ukrainian activists who became soldiers like Ratushnyi and those of Russian contract soldiers. “Our golden generation is dying because it is fighting for an idea. “In Russia, many are fighting for money,” Sanina said. Russia last announced the official death toll in late March, but independent Russian media outlets are keeping track of Russian casualties, showing that the poorer, more remote areas have been disproportionately affected by the war. According to the independent Russian website Mediazona, only eight soldiers from Moscow have been killed so far in Ukraine and 26 from the second largest city, St. Petersburg. The largest number of confirmed deaths – 207 – were soldiers from the Muslim region of Dagestan’s North Caucasus, followed by Buryatia in Siberia (164), two areas where a career in the armed forces is considered one of the only ways out. poverty. Some analysts have also linked this discrepancy to Russia’s desire to keep the bleak reality of the war away from the largely prosperous urban areas. Not only did the Roman not die, but also part of the future of Ukraine. This will leave a mark on the friends of Masi Nayem, a lawyer who became a soldier. In an effort to expose the perceived hypocrisy of Russia’s elites in Moscow, anti-war activists have launched an online campaign asking senior politicians on Twitter questions about why they are not sending their children to fight. Masi Nayyem, 37, a prominent Ukrainian lawyer who became a soldier, said the war would harden Ukraine’s new generation for many decades. “It is not just the Roman who died, but also part of the future of Ukraine. “This will leave a mark on his friends.” Nayem spoke to the Observer from a hospital in Dnipro, where he was recovering from severe head injuries sustained while fighting earlier this month, blinding him in one eye. “The new generation of Ukrainians will be different – they will remember this war for the rest of their lives. “There will be no reconciliation with Russia for decades to come.” The war had certainly hardened Ratushnyi, who wrote on Twitter a month before his death: “The more Russians we kill now, the fewer Russians our children will have to kill.” In Kyiv, where anti-war and anti-Putin art can be seen in almost every corner of the city, young people who are not volunteers at the front have found other ways to help the military. When the war broke out, dozens of restaurants run by young people in Kyiv turned to cooking for the army and local hospitals, and popular young designers quickly turned from high fashion to making Ukrainian military uniforms. “The war has created a new sense of unity and awareness,” said Kiev-based designer Anton Belinskiy, one of the leading figures in Ukraine’s new fashion movement. However, they fear that the war will lead to a demographic catastrophe in the country, with millions having fled Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, while thousands of men are dying on the battlefield. Perhaps feeling the urgency, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, recently addressing Ukrainian students across the UK, called on them to return and rebuild the country. “I can build a state for all of us, for our generation and for the elderly. “We can try many things,” Zelensky said. “But building a future without a new generation is something that is impossible to do.”
