The New York Times wrote: “This is the first comprehensive picture of the place where Ukraine’s war and mass devastation took place.”
The New York Times published a major poll assessing the extent of the devastation that has befallen Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion (what Ukraine lost during the Russian invasion).
The journalists, in collaboration with scientists, analyzed satellite images of every building in the country that was damaged or destroyed over the past two years. “This is the first comprehensive picture of where the war took place in Ukraine and the totality of the devastation,” the newspaper wrote.
Between February 2022 and December 2023, nearly 210,000 structures were destroyed in Ukraine, most of them along a front line about 1,300 kilometers long.
This is more than if all of Manhattan disappeared four times, the newspaper wrote, noting that “in some places, Ukraine looks like Dresden or London after World War II or the Gaza Strip after six months of bombing.”
Mariupol, as the New York Times wrote, is a city almost completely destroyed, subjected to the greatest amount of damage, and is being hastily rebuilt to hide the traces of war crimes.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, also suffered heavy damage – and continues to receive daily rocket and artillery fire from the Russian Federation.
Other cities that were completely or largely destroyed by Russian forces were the cities of Marinik, Rubizny, Bakhmut, Irbin, Zaporizhia, Orekhov, Kherson, Novaya Kakhovka, Alioski, and the ports of Reny and Izmail. The largest Ukrainian cities, Kiev, Dnipro, Odessa and Chernihiv, were severely damaged by missile strikes.
More than 900 schools, hospitals and churches were destroyed. They are protected under the Geneva Conventions. The New York Times estimates that at least 106 hospitals and clinics (including 18 in Mariupol), 109 religious sites (churches, temples, mosques, monasteries) and 708 educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) have been destroyed in Ukraine.
The study notes that these estimates are deliberately conservative, adding that the true scale of the disaster is likely larger and still growing.
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