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© Reuters. Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva reacts as she visits the grave of her husband Denys Bondarev, 38, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, at a cemetery in Poltava, Ukraine May 25, 2023. REUTERS/Dan Peleschuk
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By Dan Peleschuk
POLTAVA, Ukraine (Reuters) – In peacetime, Viktor Tkachenko tracks local tenders, court registries and other open sources for a news outlet in central Ukraine.
These days, the reserved 33-year-old fills a spreadsheet with the names of Ukrainian soldiers from Poltava region killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began – 1,072 at last count – which is used in regular round-ups that typically contain between 10 and 40 names.
“It’s a frightening system, but it’s a system,” Tkachenko said of the grim task of cataloguing the fallen and informing readers of Poltavshchyna, an online outlet of local news covering everything from political intrigue to power outages.
“It’s clear this won’t end soon.”
Poltava, which borders the war-scarred Sumy and Kharkiv regions but has been largely spared fighting, had a pre-war population of around 1.3 million people out of a national total of around 43 million.
Ukraine has not disclosed the number of casualties it has sustained from Russia’s invasion, launched in February 2022, saying such information could help the enemy.
A recent U.S. intelligence estimate from the Discord leaks in April put Kyiv’s dead at 15,000-17,500. Reuters has not been able to independently verify widely varying claims of battlefield losses on both sides of the conflict.
In a rare private initiative, Tkachenko and his colleagues trawl open sources such as Facebook (NASDAQ:), where relatives and local officials often post individual death announcements – an imperfect method that may under-report the true toll of war.
But the spreadsheet offers a glimpse into the human cost of the war in one of Ukraine’s 27 regions.
Inside his cramped office in part of a former accordion factory, festooned with old campaign posters and political jokes, Tkachenko described his work as an “emotional seesaw”.
Most entries in his Google (NASDAQ:) spreadsheet, which he edits from research collected by staff members, are accompanied by dates and locations of a soldier’s birth and death.
A separate, smaller section – titled “No confirmation” – is dedicated to missing troops.
The published roundups on Poltavshchyna feature photos of those killed in action and short biographies of around one to three paragraphs – a format, Tkachenko…
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