The Big Picture

Vincent Boland: Each life lost to war is a person with a name and a story

The terrible conflict grinds on in Ukraine, with estimates of 200,000 soldiers from both sides killed and wounded up to November, along with 40,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths, and each number is an abomination

Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine: unlike Putin, he visits his troops on the front line and is visible and accountable at all times. Picture: Getty

One of the most terrible and necessary things in wartime is to account for and identify the dead, because every one of them is a person with a name and a story.

In 2008, a survey conducted by a London-based organisation concluded that one million Iraqis had been killed since the US-led invasion of their country five years earlier. Its methodology was dismissed by some survey experts as flawed, and the toll was disputed angrily ...