Politics of Distorted Numbers: How Russia is Counting Displaced Ukrainians and Why?
By Lidia Kuzemska. The scales of displacement and return have symbolical meanings for state actors, either of political failure (massive outflow of population) or political success (high number of returns). In the case of forced displacement of Ukrainians to Russia, the inflated and unverified number of border crossings between Ukraine and Russia, moreover, provided only by the Russian side, mistakenly transformed into a number of supposedly real individual Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion in the direction of the aggressor state.