The Fog of War—Casualties Edition

James Billot has a pretty good post on the total number of military casualties in the war in Ukraine at UnHred. Here’s a snippet:

Gathering and assessing accurate casualty data, however, is a fiendishly difficult, and fraught, topic. I spoke to five prominent military analysts, some of whom did not even want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the subject. Most agreed that both Kristoffersen and Milley were likely downplaying the number of Ukrainian casualties while overestimating Russia’s — something that has been a constant fixture of this war.

“There are somewhere approaching 100,000 casualties for Ukraine,” Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND, says. But for the Russians, “the number is somewhere around 100,000-130,000 casualties (wounded and killed)— of that number, conservatively, probably 20,000-25,000 are killed in action”. Massicot believes that Milley is being “provided with the best possible information available to the US government”, but her Russian casualty figure is lower than both the U.S. and Norwegian estimates.

In part, this is because of the way information is recorded and delivered: journalists, intelligence services and governments regularly confuse kills with casualties, the latter of which includes those killed, died-of-wounds in hospital, wounded, missing and captured. It is different from KIA (killed in action). We also tend “to take government claims of other people’s losses at face value,” according to military historian Christopher Lawrence. He refers to the Ukrainian claim that 121,480 Russians have been killed, yet their own announced total losses as of 21 August was only 9,000 killed.

Russia, meanwhile, has only provided two casualty reports since the February invasion, the last of which was on 21 September when Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed. Mediazona, working with the BBC News Russian service and volunteers collecting data based on open source material, puts the figure at 11,662 deaths, with the caveat that it is likely much higher. “Russia underreports deaths to a significant extent and has made discussing combat deaths a state secret,” says Massicot. “To a lesser extent, Ukraine is believed to underreport losses as well”.

Both Russia and Ukraine are clearly incentivised to undercount their losses, both for domestic and international propaganda purposes. But even countries that are not directly involved in the conflict do not want to be seen to be highlighting their ally’s war losses. As such, there is a tendency to emphasise (and even inflate) the statistics that put their enemy in a bad light. “If it’s going to paint a bad picture about Ukraine, the U.S. will downplay the figures or talk about it obliquely,” says Bill Roggio, a military analyst.

The numbers being reported by the BBC seem to be those reported by the Ukrainian government without comment, citation, or editing. I think the actual answer is that we don’t know.