Irretrievable Losses: Why the “Russia is suffering heavier casualties” narrative is simply untrueA conversation with Alexander Grable
Ukraine has lost at least ten times more soldiers in the war in Ukraine; this is based on official data and is at the lower end of the range of estimates. This goes sharply against the mainstream media narrative that Russia is suffering far higher casualties in the war, and reminds us the Ukraine’s future on the battlefield and in the war of attrition, looks bleak. I spoke with Alexander Grable, a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, to discuss his thesis that Ukraine has suffered far higher casualties in the war. I first came across Alexander on a YouTube video of a conference at the Finnish National Defence University where he was attending an academic conference on the war. His paper from that event has now been published and you can find it in this presenting his draft paper which has now been published. You can find it from page 147 in this record of the conference. The title of the paper is Irretrievable Losses: Estimating Casualties in the Russo-Ukraine War. Alexander’s argument rests on a simple premise: the widely repeated idea that Russian forces are suffering far higher losses than Ukrainian ones does not survive contact with comparable, confirmed data. He begins by testing source reliability rather than accepting any side’s statements at face value. In one March 2022 Kharkiv example, Ukrainian channels claimed a pure civilian apartment block had been shelled. The same video, also carried by a Ukrainian Telegram channel, shows an RPG-7 round in the wreckage—an anti-tank munition civilians do not casually store. The incident was therefore not the unambiguous Russian war crime it was presented as. A similar corrective appears with a famous February 2022 photograph from Kharkiv. A British Army Review article described a burning vehicle as a Russian APC amid abandoned light utility vehicles. The burning vehicle is in fact a Ukrainian BTR-4 (produced only in Ukraine after 2000), painted in Ukrainian camouflage, lacking invasion markings, and accompanied by a dead soldier in Ukrainian uniform. What the article framed as Russian failure appears on closer inspection to be a successful Russian ambush. These source problems extend to the Mediazona “confirmed dead” project, frequently treated as a floor for Russian losses. Grable checked individual cases against the Russian notarial (probate) registry and found some listed as confirmed do not appear. A 2025 prisoner cohort of roughly 4,000 men produced only about 800 claimed deaths by late summer, of which just 112 could be corroborated by obituaries. That pattern is incompatible with claims of 30,000–50,000 Russian dead per month, especially among high-risk prisoner units. Other projects sometimes cited as independent corroboration carry Ukrainian military intelligence symbols or rest on late Telegram posts that cannot be verified in the registry. The strongest evidence Grable presents comes from like-for-like confirmed categories rather than estimates. Ukrainian Ministry of Health and National Institute of Strategic Studies figures on war amputees, even when weighted generously toward Ukrainian medical care and evacuation (comparable to the best U.S. performance in the Global War on Terror), imply Ukrainian killed-in-action totals far above Zelenskyy’s public 50,000 or the BBC’s roughly 140,000. Parallel Russian military-hospital data (obtained via a defector) show far fewer amputees relative to admissions. Body-exchange ratios across the war average roughly 12.5 Ukrainian dead returned for every one Russian. Comparable casualty sets therefore point to Ukrainian losses 12–35 times higher in the same categories. These ratios are not mysterious once ammunition production is examined. Russian claims of a roughly seventeen-fold increase in munitions output are corroborated by missile and Shahed-drone firing totals that Western sources once deemed impossible. Zelensky himself stated that Russian artillery and bomb ratios reached 10:1 and 30:1. Artillery and stand-off fires dominate modern casualties; the side that can sustain them at volume dictates the body exchange rate. The fundamentals of both countries - population size, industrial strength, financial liquidity, and available energy - will always favour Russia in an attritional war and this has been clear from the start. Continuing the war under these conditions is not strategy, it is deeply dishonest, because. We are invited to believe that the fight is worth taking to Russia because Russia is suffering more, and yet this does not appear to be true. And, of course, Russia understands the basic mathematics of the war and is pursuing a longer-game of attrition to destroy Ukrainian manpower and Western political and economic will to sustain the proxy war. The only way out of this quagmire, is not another year of fighting, another 70 billion loan for Zelensky, more slogans that Ukraine is winning and more media lies and manipulations, but a negotiated settlement that ends the fighting on terms both sides can accept. That, too, has been clear from the start. You can watch the full conversation here: Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace. You're currently a free subscriber to The Peacemonger. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 ian |