Authored by Larry C. Johnson via Sonar21,
In the intelligence business, timing is everything. On February 5, 2026, Finland's National Defence University, which is hardly a Kremlin front, posted a paper by Alexander Grable titled "Irretrievable Losses: Casualties in the Russo-Ukraine War (2022 - present)." Grable concluded that Ukraine's dead far outnumber Russia's and that Kyiv is losing the war of attrition. In polite Western company, that is heresy.
The paper was presented at the university's Russia Seminar a week later. It was folded into the seminar's proceedings volume this fall and began circulating widely in late October. Then, right on cue, the cavalry arrived. Two hacker groups announced they had breached Rosstat, Russia's state statistics agency, and come away with numbers showing between 393,881 and 450,100 Russian dead. The Moscow Times and Euronews ran the story on November 8. Narrative restored. Everyone can relax.
I don't relax that easily. I spent enough years at the CIA to know what a planted story smells like. This one smells. But before I get to the leak, let me get to something the casualty accountants keep leaving out of their spreadsheets: who has been shooting more.
The math nobody wants to do
Weapons cause casualties, so a casualty estimate that ignores the weapons is guesswork. In this war, Russia has held a lopsided edge in nearly every category that kills soldiers: artillery, mortars, missiles and FAB glide bombs. For most of the war it also led in drones.
Start with artillery. Estonia
