The Russia-Ukraine conflict broke the 100-day mark last week. Russian forces made their way into Ukraine in late February, and the war has upended millions and killed thousands on both sides.
The Kremlin continues to refer to the conflict as a “special operation” that has taken a significant toll on the Ukrainian people, according to FOX News.
The conflict has forced almost 15 million Ukrainians to leave their homes since the start of the invasion, according to the latest United Nations data.
Approximately 6.8 million have relocated to neighboring nations, and about 8 million stayed in Ukraine.
Poland houses the most Ukrainians, with 3,627,178 refugees. The next most likely landing places for Ukrainian refugees are Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Belarus, according to the UN.
Russian forces are advancing in the east, and The Dallas Express reported earlier this week that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russians control about 20% of his country.
The Ukrainian military has successfully kept the Russian forces out of Kyiv; however, Russians have won the battle for Mariupol and Kherson and continue to make strides in the Luhansk province in the Donbas, NBC News reported.
Russia may not be far from creating a land corridor to Crimea, a region it annexed in 2014, the NBC report continued.
Zelenskyy claimed in a television address last week that military action would not bring an end to the war.
He said the war “will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy.”
Peace talks have mostly stalled, and Ukrainian public opinion toward Russia may be hardening based on a recent study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).
The report found that 82% of Ukrainian adults believe that “no territorial concessions should be allowed” to reach a peace agreement.
“Russia wants to establish control of all of Ukraine, and Ukrainians do not want this,” KIIS Deputy Director Anton Grushetskyi said.
“When some politicians, experts in the West try to put pressure on Ukraine in this very complicated situation to concede some territory, they should understand that’s just not the real intentions of the population.”
It has been challenging to estimate the loss of life, according to FOX News. Moscow claims Russian forces have killed 23,367 Ukrainian troops, and Kyiv claims Ukrainians have killed 30,850 Russian troops.
The counterclaims are only fractions of those totals, with Kyiv saying it has lost between 2,500 and 3,000 troops and Moscow insisting only 1,351 Russian troops have died in combat.
