Russia’s Fictitious Casualty Counts Come From Where?
I am fascinated by how Russian officials decide how many military deaths they want to report to the public. Just contemplating it brings home how grotesque this war is, because every possible approach they might take is more disgusting than the last.
Why not just report zero? Someone must have actually decided they didn’t want to, because it is most definitely an option. The Russian government controls all mass media, and they made criticism of the war a crime. They’ve lied about what they’re doing. Why not just lie about there being any deaths at all? No, someone must have decided that the cost of claiming zero was higher than reporting some.
Do the published numbers have some basis in fact? Authoritarian regimes do this sometimes. It’s a cruel flourish meant to turn their critics into liars. China did it in Tiananmen Square. They were very careful not to kill anyone in the square itself, so they could say that “no one died in Tiananmen Square.” When their critics loudly proclaimed that wasn’t true, the critics were — in a strictly technical and very pedantic sense — wrong.
Do the Russians somehow find some classification of death that is less than 100% and report that? If so, what? Only report the deaths that have been confirmed beyond all doubt as being caused by a Ukrainian bullet? That doesn’t seem quite right, because even that number has to be higher than what they’ve published. Ukrainian forces have likely killed so many Russian forces that even a very fractional number would still be larger than what Russia has shared.
Do they just make the number up? Do a bunch of people sit in a room and debate what a “good” number would be, knowing that the real number is indefensible? I can’t think of much more of an insult to the those who have lost their lives or have lost a loved one in this “special military operation.”
“Hey, how does 1,234 sound?”
“Too obvious. How about 1,357?”
“Come on. That’s just counting by odd numbers. How about 1,351?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
Another possibility is that they have some long process for paperwork, such that there’s a several-week delay in any death being officially recorded. You report the official number, knowing that the hurdles to the official count will keep it artificially low for a very long time. Hope the war ends soon enough that you never have to report a number that would piss people off too much.
Yet another possibility: you make sure the people on the ground know that you don’t want the full number. Outsource the inaccuracy. The commanders know to report a majority of the deaths under some nonsense category and leave some acceptable remnant total under the killed in action category. Just enough to reflect a “special military operation,” not enough to reflect a bungled invasion wherein you sent thousands of young men to their unwitting deaths by under-supplying them and misdirecting them.
There isn’t a single one of these methods that isn’t a callous, cynical affront to the memories of the lives squandered in the belief they were going into a brief peacekeeping mission or that they might fight a Nazi or two. It’s especially galling when the Russian defense ministry likely knows the real number. The Kosmolskaya Pravda release of 9,861 deaths strongly suggests they do, since that number aligned with both western government estimated and Ukrainian numbers. If it was the work of a hacker, as Kosmolskaya Pravda claims, that hacker can count.
It’s made all the worse by the fact that people will know. You can’t simply misplace 10,000 souls (or more likely by now: 15,000 or 20,000) and think no one will notice or care. You know they will know you’re lying, and they know you’ll know they know. You do it only because you don’t care about the young men lost or the people who loved them and you don’t care if you shit all over their memories.
