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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, analysing statistics has always been central – but he is not very good with numbers and this is now put centre stage by the news that Russian casualties in Ukraine are this month likely to reach a million, yet the sources are from journalists, as well as outside the Russian government.
As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not very good with numbers.
This has long been a problem as being an investigative journalist, I must look at company reports about profits, examine the number of times an individual said he or she did something, in order to compare it with the reality, and tot up proclaimed social media ‘likes’, again to contrast it with the truth.
All of this is highlighted for me by information today that Russian casualties in Ukraine are, this month, likely to reach one million.
This is a significant figure, and it is right to be marked, but there is a problem.
This total does not actually come out of the Kremlin, and is arrived at after diligent work by independent journalists in Russia, and the Ukrainian or Western intelligence services.
It does, though, have the ring of truth about it and shows that while Russia has sustained enormous losses following its invasion of Ukraine, it doesn’t really care about them because there are plenty more people to throw into the meat grinder!
It roughly tallies with attempts by Russian independent media, such as Meduza and Mediazona, to count the bodies.
By this time last year, Meduza reckoned that between 106,000-140,000 Russian soldiers had died, and there are estimates that about 1,000 military personnel have been killed or injured per day.
Much of their analysis was based on close examination of inheritance records, as well as obituaries on social media and in other outlets.
An estimate of excess mortality among Russian men based on probate records gave a figure of 165,000 by the end of 2024 with 90,000 having been added in the previous six months.
Given the intensity of Russian operations for much of the past year it would not be hard to reach a figure of about 250,000 killed by now.
The ratio of severely wounded to killed is thought to be about four to one, a reflection both of the severity of injuries in Ukraine and the low priority Russia gives to medical evacuation and the prompt field hospital treatment that saves lives.
Russia has lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000 armoured infantry vehicles since the war began. Now it depends largely on infantry attacks by small groups of men, sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorcycles.
Russia needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines, and to put this into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s in the Second World War.
They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today.
The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war.
Russia’s losses are also about 10 times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Another reason to attach relative fidelity to the casualty figures that journalists and others have established, is that, to an unusual degree, they are attributable to those sustained by soldiers in action generally.
In most wars, a high proportion of deaths, even among combatants, are the result of disease, famine, accidents and deliberate persecution of people in occupied territories, which inherently defy the best attempts at statistical accuracy.
A good example is the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003 which was by far the most lethal conflict of the 21st century.
The war is believed to have been responsible for 5.4 million deaths, most of which were from disease and hunger.
In the Second World War, out of the nearly 27 million Soviet citizens who died, ‘only’ some 6.3 million were killed in action or died from their wounds.
So it can be seen that knowing how to count numbers is crucial.
Pity I don’t, and always have to double-check the total figure, then use a calculator!
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when being able to add things up was paramount) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why huge concerns have been raised about public money being flung at controversial green energy companies, including some in Wales, after the Prime Minister (PM) was condemned in the media for “…putting more money into a couple of millionaires’ pockets than anyone else’s”.
