Half a year of Russia's war against Ukraine in 10 figures

On the 31st Independence Day of Ukraine, half a year has passed since the beginning of the Russian army's invasion of Ukrainian territory. Tens of thousands of dead and wounded civilians and soldiers, destroyed cities and villages, an unprecedented migration crisis, economic losses estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. This is a picture of today's Ukraine, which is resisting Russian aggression.
BBC News Ukraine collected the most important figures of the war - about casualties, losses, occupied territories, refugees, economic losses.

Conquered and liberated territories

At the beginning of June, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, stated that the Russians had taken about 20 percent of the territory of Ukraine. This figure also includes seven percent of the territory occupied by the Russian Federation before invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea and establishing control over the self-proclaimed "DPR" and "LNR".
According to the Ukrainian president, "Russian troops have entered 3,620 settlements in Ukraine." 1,017 of them have already been released. Another 2,603 will be released."
Since then, neither side has made significant territorial gains. Fighting continues from Kharkiv in the northeast to Nikolaev in the southwest.
"The distance between the battlefields is 454 kilometers, but the entire front line is more than a thousand kilometers long," says President Zelensky.
 According to information from NASA Harvest satellite images published by SciTechDaily, Russian troops currently control about 22 percent of Ukraine's agricultural land.
According to Canadian geopolitical risk assessment company SecDev, cited by the Washington Post, Russia has captured 63 percent of coal deposits, 11 percent of oil deposits, 20 percent of gas deposits, 42 percent of metal deposits and 33 percent of rare metal and other important mineral deposits in the occupied territories among which lithium.

Civilian casualties

According to United Nations data, 5,587 people died from the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine until August 22. According to UN estimates, there are 362 children among them. 7,890 people were injured. This is only data on cases that have been fully confirmed and identified.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights emphasizes that the actual number of civilians killed is much higher, as there are delays in receiving information from places where intense fighting is taking place, and numerous reports of civilian killings continue to arrive.
Experts say that in Mariupol alone, the number of dead may exceed 20,000 people.
According to the Ukrainian government, 373 children were among the dead. 723 children were injured. In addition, around 200 children are considered missing.

Losses of the Ukrainian army

A few days before Independence Day, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny, announced that during the six months of the war, almost 9,000 soldiers had died, including not only military personnel, but also members of the territorial defense and all those who took up arms. The president, representatives of his office and the minister of defense previously presented somewhat different figures on daily casualties.
Thus, at the beginning of June, Volodymyr Zelensky stated that every day 60-100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed, 500 are wounded.
In the same month, the adviser to the president's chief of staff, Mihajlo Podoliak, said in an interview with the BBC World Service that the losses of the Ukrainian army range from 100 to 200 people every day.
In July, Defense Minister Aleksij Reznikov said that the peak of losses in the Armed Forces was in May - when there were up to 100 dead and 300-400 wounded per day.
And already in August, Mihajlo Podoliak reported that the losses of the Armed Forces after receiving new western weapons decreased by 2.5-3 times and amount to 30-50 soldiers every day.

Refugees

According to estimates, around 13 million Ukrainians have left their homes, fleeing the war to other regions of Ukraine or abroad. According to the latest study by the International Organization for Migration, as of July, more than 6.6 million people in Ukraine were internally displaced. This figure is 15 percent of the total population of Ukraine.

It increased slightly compared to the end of June, when IOM counted around 6.3 million displaced persons. According to IOM information, people continue to leave the east, south and north of Ukraine.

Will the Ukrainians return home?

According to UN data, 6.65 million Ukrainians left for Europe in mid-August. Of these people, almost four million - mostly women and children - received temporary protection in one of the European countries. Poland is among the first countries to accept Ukrainians. Almost 1.3 million Ukrainians went there. The second European country that accepted the most Ukrainians is Germany, where 867,000 people found refuge by the end of June. In third place is the Czech Republic, where 388,000 Ukrainian citizens ended up.

Deported to Russia

According to UN estimates, by mid-August more than three million Ukrainian citizens were voluntarily or forcibly deported to the territory of Russia from the occupied territories of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Russian state media announced that as of August 1, the number of people displaced from Ukraine to the Russian Federation exceeded three million, while half of this number are residents of the self-proclaimed "DPR" and "LPR", who left before the war began.
President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that around two million people were deported to Russia. According to the estimates of government officials and human rights defenders, a significant part of Ukrainians was taken to remote regions of Russia: Altai Krai, Siberia, Yakutia, Bashkortostan.

The decline of the economy

Ukraine's main international creditors - the IMF and the World Bank - predict that the Ukrainian economy will shrink by 45 percent in 2022. The forecasts of the Ukrainian government and the National Bank of Ukraine are somewhat "better" - they expect that this year the Ukrainian GDP will fall by about a third.
The NBU estimates the fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2022 at 39.3 percent, and in the first quarter, according to state statistics, the Ukrainian economy had a decline of 15.1 percent.

Prices are rising and the hryvnia is falling

At the end of this year, according to the NBU, inflation in Ukraine will exceed 30 percent. According to the data of the State Statistics Service, in July 2022 the consumer price index was 18.2 percent higher than in December 2021 before the war. The prices of transport (36.5 percent) and food (24.1 percent) rose the fastest due to the increase in fuel prices.
According to NBU data, consumer prices in July 2022 were 22.2 percent higher than last year. Despite the fact that the official exchange rate of the hryvnia against the dollar has been fixed since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian national currency is devaluing.
Initially, the official exchange rate was fixed at 29.25 hryvnias to the dollar, but on July 21, the NBU decided to adjust it to 36.6, bringing it closer to the market rate.
The National Bank changed the exchange rate to 36.6 hryvnias to the dollar and introduced new restrictions
from 36.6 to 40 per week.
According to the portal of the Ministry of Finance, on January 1, 2022, the exchange rate of the hryvnia against the dollar in commercial banks fluctuated at the level of 27.18-27.4 hryvnias per dollar. On February 24, they gave from 29.2 to 30.15 hryvnias to the dollar. After half a year of war, they give 40 hryvnias to the dollar.

Budget deficit and international aid

Back in May, President Zelensky said that due to the great destruction and shutdown of enterprises, the Ukrainian budget is missing five billion dollars every month.
He recently confirmed this figure, stating that the Ukrainian economy is "in a coma".
According to official data from the Ministry of Finance, in June the state budget was filled with revenues by 45.25 percent. Despite the fact that, the expenditures for defense and social protection far exceed the original plans.
In such conditions, the only source of financing the budget deficit was the emission and funds of international partners. In general, according to the data of the Ministry of Finance, from the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine until mid-August, the NBU financed the budget for 255 billion UAH (about 8.5 billion dollars
Both the foreign exchange reserves and the budget were supplemented with financial assistance from Ukraine's international partners. However, Kyiv notes that this is insufficient.
The largest financial donor is the USA, from which, according to the Ministry of Finance, Ukraine received almost four billion dollars. The second largest donor is the EU, with almost 2.5 billion dollars.

More than three billion dollars came from international financial organizations:

• IMF (1.4 billion dollars),
• World Bank (929 million dollars),
• European Investment Bank (720 million dollars).

In addition to the United States, among individual countries, the largest financial aid to Ukraine was provided by:

• Germany ($1.373 billion),
• Canada ($1.172 billion),
• Japan ($581 million),
• Great Britain ($577 million).
In general, Ukraine received more than 14 billion dollars from international partners during the Russian aggression.
Damages and losses

According to the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which, together with the government, calculates the losses caused to Ukraine by Russian aggression, the amount of direct documented damage to infrastructure as of August 22, 2022 is $113.5 billion.
As calculated by KSE economists, as well as reported by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health, in general, since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the least was destroyed and damaged:

• 15,300 tall buildings,
• 115,900 private houses,
• 2,061 educational institutions (261 schools were completely destroyed),
• 934 medical institutions (127 hospitals were completely destroyed),
• 798 kindergartens,
• 715 cultural facilities,
• 388 companies.

According to the experts of the project "Russia will pay", the minimum needs for the reconstruction of the destroyed property are approaching the amount of 200 billion dollars.

More marriages, less divorces
Despite the war, in the first half of this year there were almost twice as many divorces and twice as many marriages than in the same period last year - about 104,000 marriages and 7,600 divorces.
Last year, for the same period, there were 85,900 marriages and 13,100 divorces.
In the first half of this year, 104,900 babies were born. This is less than in the same period in 2021, but the birth rate in Ukraine has been declining for more than a year in a row.