Wed 2025-Jan-08

Ukraine War: 800k Russian Dead

Tagged: MathInTheNews / Politics / Sadness / Statistics

Today the Russian deaths in Ukraine passed another milestone: 800,000 dead.

It Just Doesn’t End?

While I find it difficult to sympathize with Russian leaders, the soldiers are another matter. As we’ve written previously ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5] ^[6] ^[7] ^[8] ^[9] ^[10] ^[11], the casualties just seem unending and Russian solders deserve some sympathy.

Not quite as much sympathy as the Ukrainians deserve, of course. But clearly the Russian leadership is deeply evil here.

Today it appears we have passed the milestone of 800,000 dead on the Russian side, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. (Before you tell me that’s Ukrainian propaganda, have a look through the references for what I’ve written about this before. The Ukrainian MoD seems to be pretty middle-of-the-pack on Russian casualties.)

The previous milestone was 700,000 on 2024-Nov-04. That was just about 2 months ago, so Russian casualties are currently running at 50,000 dead per month.

It’s hard to imagine ever greater devotion to Moloch. They’ve already sacrificed about 3-4% of their male population of military age, as we calculated last November at the 700,000 milestone.

Comparison Against the Casualty Rate Model

Let’s check in with the regression model of Russian casualties that we built on the first 116 days of the war.

Shown here is the plot of casualties (vertical axis) versus time in days since start of the war (horizontal axis).
In the lower left you see the first 116 days of casualties, up to 200,000 dead in blue points.
The regression fit is the dashed line, while the 95% confidence limits and prediction limits are shown in gray bands around it. (If you don’t quite grasp what those mean, the practical import is that the regression model is very good and provides relatively tight predictions.)
In the upper right you see in red dots the more recent data (450k, 500k, 600k, 700k, and 800k dead) plotted against the model trained on the data with less than 200k dead.
- The practical import of that is we can compare casualty rates now versus those at the beginning of the war.
- The red dots are:
  - Above the trend line,
  - Statistically significantly above it (outside the gray bands), and
  - Appear to be accelerating.

Conclusion: Russians are faster now, compared to the beginning of the war.

Pigs. It’s Always the Pigs.

Whenever you see some horrible event like this, it’s always fruitful to ask why this is happening.

It could be that Russia is using human-wave tactics with soldiers of little to no training, resulting in mass casualties. Or it could be the Ukrainians are getting more clever and efficient at killing off the invaders.

Which is it?

Here’s some evidence for the latter, i.e., the efficiency of the Ukrainians:

It appears that the Russian killed in action to wounded in action (KIA/WIA) ratio is now worse than the World War I levels.
Russia apparently leaves behind their wounded, due to a lack of APCs, medical evacuation capability, lack of hospitals, soldiers going AWOL, expected deaths in human wave assaults, and so on.
There are enough bodies left behind to be a significant food source for local wildlife. In particular, a large number of formerly domesticated pigs are now regularly eating abandoned Russian bodies.

In the lower right picture above, a pig is investigating a Ukrainian drone. It appears that the pigs have learned to follow aerial drones or to wait with drones in ground ambush mode, because they know there will be Russian bodies soon.

The pigs have learned.

The Russian leaders have not. It seems like Russian soldiers should learn to look out for pigs, because that’s a signal there might be a drone nearby.

The Weekend Conclusion

I guess Ukrainian morale is high, at least as shown in this video reported last year by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (admittedly a source of likely bias).

On the other hand, for the rest of us this is anything but an occasion for merriment.

The Russian casualty rates are reminiscent of the worship of Huītzilōpōchtli in the ancient Tenocha Confederacy (approximately “Aztecs”), who required continuous mass sacrifices.

But that would be inaccurate: they sacrificed other nation’s peoples captured in war, not their own people. Russia is sacrificing its own people, now 3-4% of males of military age, in pursuit of an hallucination of power.

That’s Moloch: sacrifice your children to a red-hot metal idol, hoping he will grant you power.

Pure Russian Moloch, all the way down.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)