Truth about the Ukrainian War

Ukraine claims over 700,000 Russians have been killed to only 43,000 Ukrainians.

Russia claims 500,000 Ukrainians have been killed to 71,000 Russians.

Western sources estimate 80,000 Ukrainians killed, possibly 500,000 to 750,000 Russians.

These figures differ widely, mostly for propaganda reasons but also because soldiers killed may be reported as MIA if their bodies aren’t found and identified. Also deserters are ignored. They also ignore soldiers wounded and civilian casualties.

In WW2 each side under-reported their casualties by half and exaggerated enemy casualties by two to three times1. If we adjust for that and then average the resulting (and still widely differing) Ukrainian and Russian claims, (and I did the math right), we come up with about 186,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and about 296,000 Russians.

Those are just rough estimates to try to remove the slants of propaganda, but are probably much closer than each side’s claims! About 3 Russian soldiers are killed for each Ukrainian soldier killed. However, Ukraine is far less able to tolerate that level of carnage as long as Russia is. The longer the war drags on, the more likely a ceasefire or settlement is to be reached, and the less favorable it is likely to be for Ukraine. Therefore Russia has less urgency about reaching a settlement than Ukraine does.

NATO is being drained by the war, but several of its leading countries are fanatically obsessed with Russia. They are actually militarily unable to do much without the US, but seem to actually be willing to set off a nuclear conflict that they can’t survive. They are foolish, because Russia no longer has the population to be much of a threat to them. But of course, they are heading into the same demographic death trap.

The US is presently more concerned with the Middle East situation, and Donald Trump is going to be less concerned about Russia. However, the US should be much more concerned with what China is up to on the west coast of South America, especially in Peru where it is soon to open a huge new container ship port. Large numbers of young Chinese men of military age have been coming north from there and crossing the open border into the USA. The US and most of the Western countries are totally ignoring this threat.