A visit to the frontline city of Mykolaiv suggests casualties have risen little
, a key region in the south of the country. Its forces are pressing at several points along a 150-mile frontline. The stakes are high. Success would help secure Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, and thus its ability to import and. A failed operation would put huge strains on the country’s leaders, especially if large numbers of Ukrainians were to die. Reports suggest that Ukraine has taken a modest amount of territory in an area north-east of Kherson city.
Many of the roughly 200,000 people who have remained in Mykolaiv know all too well. A few are already expert morticians. Nelly Yarovenko, an accountant before, is in charge of dealing with the fallen. She accompanies soldiers’ bodies from battleground to underground—in Mykolaiv or beyond. She knows every detail of the process, from the documents needed to ensure families get compensation to the way the Ukrainian flag should be draped across the lid of coffins.
Ms Yarovenko insists that the number of funerals, running at around a dozen a week since the end of March, has not changed in the past week. Marina Ryabovolik, a local clothes manufacturer turned army volunteer, offers her own evidence. The Ukrainian military has not yet asked for two things that would usually raise alarm bells: underwear and flags.
For both women the low point of the war came in mid-March, when a Russian bomb fell on a military barracks in Mykolaiv. Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers died there, though the exact number was never made public. Ms Yarovenko says she struggled to get hold of enough coffins and crosses. Ms Ryabovolik couldn’t produce enough flags. “Experiences like that are why you won’t see panic, even if the body bags come,” she says. “Anyone who panics has long left this city.
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