Two Years of a Real War, But No Change at the Pentagon.

As we pass the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, the air is thickening with analyses of the state of play. Overall, assessments of Ukraine’s prospects have taken a bearish turn, a turnabout from last year’s rosy projections of prospective Ukrainian victory. The mainstream media still dutifully reports a gross imbalance in casualties, with Russian losses far exceeding Ukrainian killed and wounded. President Zelensky now implausibly claims that just 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the outbreak of the war, less than half the 70,000 number conceded by U.S. officials six months ago. In January this year, Yuri Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general declared that his country had already lost 500,000 killed and seriously wounded since the February 2022 invasion.

According to the independent Russian news site Mediazona, as of February 24, “around 83,000” Russian troops have been killed in the war. Mediazona, working in collaboration with the BBC Russian language service, bases its figures on publicly recorded deaths (obituaries) and on probate records. There are no such records for combat-wounded, but the researchers, working off budget allocations and data from specific military units, calculate the number of severely wounded - and therefore permanently out of action - soldiers at around 130,000, putting total Russian casualties at just over 200,000. As noted, as of last August U.S. officials were reporting a figure of 70,000 Ukrainian dead , but given general agreement both that artillery is the principal killer on the battlefield, and that Russia enjoys major quantitative superiority in artillery and shells, it stands to reason that Ukraine is suffering bigger losses than Russia.