And getting a handle on official death and casualty numbers after the war is going to be great big mess.

Ukraine's claim for their own total losses is 10-13k - in actuality, Ukraine has lost that many men in the last month. Though Ursula von der Leyen did give the 100k number, which is at least physically plausible. Could well be tens of thousands higher. So unless Zelensky begins to tell the truth, and why would he, we're gonna have a gulf at the end of this war of an order of magnitude. Say, 30k to 300k. And a lot of mercenaries on top of that. But of course it depends on how long the war lasts.

Russia's claim for their own total losses is harder to pin down because it's difficult to tell exactly which groups are involved when, say, Shoigu comes out and gives his estimates - just the Russian Armed Forces pre-Donbass annexation or everybody including the militia, Chechens, Wagner mercs, etc? But somewhere in the realm of 25-35k for the military forces fighting on the side of Russia is within reason, at least for me. It could be a few thousand in either direction further, and might start increasing at a faster rate once the new forces come in in the next few weeks especially if we do in fact see real offensive operations happen (though likely not big-arrow offensives). Meanwhile, the Ukrainians claim something like 80k for Russian losses, maybe higher, though I think Ukraine and the US and Europe might have their own pet figures. But I've heard 80k recently, which made me chuckle a little at the absurdity. On our side of reporting, a ratio of 1-to-5 in terms of Russian deaths to Ukrainian deaths is commonly stated, so if we say that 300k deaths for Ukraine before the war is over (and if it continues for years and years it could be double that or more) then that's 60k Russian deaths, or 75k+ if you think that statistic is bull and prefer a 1-to-4 ratio or higher. Who can even say what numbers the West will be throwing out at that point; maybe 200k+.

So we're gonna have yet another big dividing line where people fundamentally do not agree on reality here. Who did Bucha? If you're Russian, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis did it; if you're a Westerner, the Russians did it. Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? The US/UK, or Russia. Who is blowing up Ukrainian residential buildings? Russia, who is also running out of missiles and wasting them on killing civilians, or Ukrainian air defence missing and not self-destructing before crashing to earth. What are total Russian and Ukrainian losses? And so on. It's going to make it ever more frustrating to discuss the war both in the present and when it's in the past when you're arguing a point about losses using some figures and then somebody comes in and is like "Uh, 50k Russian soldiers died? lmfao, okay Putinbot, multiply that by 5 or 6 times. The Russian authoritarian totalitarian state is hiding the remaining losses but we have an interview with a Russian grandmother who swears that their grandson's body hasn't returned from the war, so we can safely extrapolate that by a hundred thousand times. And 350k Ukrainian losses? More like 65k."

Propaganda is strong.