Fifteen thousand dead and far more wounded. About 6 million refugees. Half of businesses closed and 4.8 million jobs lost. More than 1.5 million people displaced internally. At least $100 billion in damage to infrastructure.
One hundred days into Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is still counting the cost.
For people who have lost someone they love, of course, the toll of the war, whatever its outcome, goes far beyond a statistical accounting. And for the war’s leaders, any assessment of the price of the conflict will eventually be made with reference to its winner.
Neither side demonstrated any appetite for ending the conflict on Friday. Peace talks have long been stalled. NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, warned the conflict has become “a war of attrition,” with no end in sight.
The Kremlin’s spokesman said the fighting would continue until Moscow had reached its objectives. Russia now controls one-fifth of the country.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a defiant video to mark the grim milestone that “Victory will be ours!”
Yet Mr. Zelensky’s nightly speeches are often a litany of damage done and lives lost. They usually end with a list of state medals he has given to combatants, including those awarded posthumously. On Thursday, that figure stood at 72.
“It would be hard to exaggerate the toll that the international armed conflict in Ukraine has had on civilians over the last 100 days,” said the director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Robert Mardini.
“The scale of destruction in cities defies comprehension,” he added. “Homes, schools and hospitals have been destroyed and civilians have suffered the horrors of conflict, with lives lost and families torn apart.”
Losses on the Russian side have been harder to calculate. In late March, Russia’s military said 1,351 soldiers had died, but has not provided an update since. Mr. Zelensky has said Ukrainian officials estimate at least 30,000 Russian troops have been killed, while a British intelligence estimate suggested that Moscow may have lost 20 percent of its military capacity.
There was little attempt on Russian television on Friday to mark the milestone of 100 days, perhaps reflecting the Kremlin’s suggestion at the outset of the conflict that its “special military operation” in Ukraine would likely be over quickly.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Friday that many populated areas had been “liberated” from the Ukrainian military, whom he described as “Nazi-minded,” as well as from other, unspecified “nationalist” forces.
Mr. Peskov said Russia’s military operations were focused on taking control over the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, two breakaway regions in the east of the country.
In a statement, the United Nations’ crisis coordinator for Ukraine, Amin Awad, said that regardless of who won the conflict, the toll was “unacceptable.”
“This war has and will have no winner,” Mr. Awad said in a statement. “Rather, we have witnessed for 100 days what is lost: lives, homes, jobs and prospects.”
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
