Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
Are we looking at the same thing? Was it deleted somewhere?
Surrendering to Russia does not bring peace to Ukraine only more suffering.
They have to fight on, Russia does not.
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
Slava Ukraini!
The audacity of those bots these days.
A bit like some of the conscripted Ruzzian orcs, eh?
Simple, Putin talked about this for decades, you can read about it:
The goal is the re-establishment of the Russian empire in it's largest borders, beginning with his massacres in Chechnya and the invasion of Georgia.
Russia settled Russians in Ukraine to control/destroy it for decades (like in the Baltics, Georgia and in many different places, the usual Russian tactic). Then Russia instigated a civil war in Ukraine and finally invaded Ukraine in 2014, so there were fights in Donbass back then with deaths (Russia also shot down a Malaysian plane in 2014 from Donbass).
"Your weapons are murdering Russian civilians right now, but you don't care, why?"
Because those Russian civilians voted and supported a dictator who wanted and wants to invade Europe and re-enslave the population. And Russians loved it, they loved it plundering and murdering and torturing people in Europe before and they will again.
Russia encouraged Serbs to start WW1 because Russians wanted to invade Europe through their puppets on the Balkans, later invaded Europe in 1939 in a joint military operation with the Nazis/Germans and will do so again whenever Russians see the chance to do so.
I would prefer no war but a big wall, mile deep minefields and drone/ballistic/SDI defenses instead to keep Russians out and stop them from invading Europe again, but I guess Russia needs to first lose this war to make this a reality.
Looks like Ukrainians don't believe in "turn to him the other cheek".
When Russians will take responsibility - like decent humans do and start to ask for forgiveness to Chechens and others that they have invaded and killed(in Chechnya alone death of Chechens was up to 300 000) and genocided - the list here is quite long for hundreds of nations(that would even be a reason to spawn religion), but up till that is not happening Russian decency level ends in Bucha.
What led to it? Putin wanting to re-establish the Russian empire as he said and wrote many times about.
It's a mystery to me, Hitler wrote exactly what he wanted to do, he did it and people were surprised. Putin wrote exactly what he wanted to do, he did it and people were surprised. A mystery.