Will mounting casualties change the debate in Ukraine?

At a small army field clinic outside Bakhmut, I watched as the body of a dead soldier was carried in. Two more soldiers followed, this time seriously injured – and this was what troops described as a ‘quiet day’. Ukraine doesn’t talk about its military deaths much and refuses to reveal any figures. There’s little in the way of victim culture here; the emphasis is on how brave its troops are, not how many have perished. Most people know someone who’s died in action, but treat the collective trauma as something to worry about when the war is over. In the meantime, there’s vodka.

Here and there, though, glimpses of the nation’s best-kept secret emerge. In every big-city cemetery, the ‘Heroes Alley’ of fallen soldiers now holds several hundred graves. Soldiers I know complain that their Facebook pages have turned into endless-scrolling obituaries.