Counting the Dead... Again: How Many Have Really Died in Ukraine?

As headline figures go, it was truly eye catching. The sort of number that makes you think someone has accidentally added an extra zero, increasing the total by a factor of 10. In late April this year, the British Minister of State for the Armed Forces gave what appeared to be the UK's best estimate for Russian casualties in Ukraine.

The figure equated $450,000, not including those killed and wounded while serving for private military companies such as Wagner. A couple of weeks later, in May, the French Foreign Minister went one further, according to Paris, Russian military casualties in Ukraine have hit half a million. To be clear, these are casualty figures, rather than deaths.

While they include those killed, they also cover the wounded and the missing. Still, those are still shocking figures, so high as to be almost unbelievable. And I got us wondering, is there any way to go beyond the estimates to maybe come close to understanding the true death toll of Russian forces in Ukraine?