Ukraine’s Forgotten War

http://rferl.org/content/daily-vertical-deadly-donbas-forgotten-war/27880993.html?ltflags=mailer

Don’t look now but it’s been one hell of a deadly month in the Donbas.

I know it’s easy to miss given all the excitement elsewhere, but according to statistics released by the United Nations last week, 27 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 123 wounded in the first part of July alone.

Yesterday, three Ukrainian servicemen were killed and three more were wounded. 

Six more were killed over one 24-hour period this past weekend.

The reports of this slow drip of death have been coming in every single day, each looking like the one before it.

Three killed and 16 wounded one day. One killed and five wounded another. Three killed and 13 wounded on another. And seven killed and 14 wounded on yet another. 

It becomes a blur.

But when you add it all up, you need to go back nearly a year to find another month as deadly as July -- and the month isn’t even over yet.

But despite all the death and destruction, almost nobody is noticing.

The war in the Donbas has become the forgotten war.

It hasn’t become a frozen conflict, like in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as many had predicted. 

Instead, it’s a simmering conflict that has slipped below the world’s radar. 

It’s a festering sore on the Ukrainian body politic, one that is sapping the country’s energy, wearing down its resolve, and killing its citizens.

And in this sense, the forgotten war in the Donbas is serving the purpose that Russia intended it to serve.