I get a much different picture from my reading of Johnson's Russia List, as well as presentations about the situation in Ukraine provided by dedicated analysts: at the YouTube "Military Summary" channel, by Alexander Mercouris, by Andrei Martynov, and by the "Moon of Alabama" and "Vineyard of the Saker" news sites. Johnson's Russia List presents news articles from both the Ukrainian and Russian perspectives. The other sources appear to be more persuaded by the daily reports from Russia's Ministry of Defense, Russian military analysts, and behind-the lines Russian reporters. Significantly, however, they go into much greater detail about daily events than do America's pro-Ukrainian mouthpieces.
One notices the differences immediately when one asks about military casualties -- the dead and wounded. The pro-Ukrainian mouthpieces in America frequently speculate about the number of Russian soldiers killed or injured in Ukraine. Often, they rely on data provided by pro-Ukrainian think tanks, like the neocon Institute for the Study of War, or by government agencies in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Their estimates of Russian losses are largely guesswork. As the Washington Post reported on 9 August 2022, "On July 20, the CIA said Russia had suffered 60,000 casualties in Ukraine since widening its war there Feb. 24. On July 27, the Biden administration told lawmakers Moscow's losses ran to 75,000 killed and wounded. On Monday, the Pentagon's number crept higher, to up to 80,000."
"'It's always a range. And, you know, there's no perfect number,' CIA Director William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum on July 20. "I think the latest estimates from the U.S. intelligence community would be, you know, something in the vicinity of 15,000 killed and maybe three times that wounded, so a quite significant set of losses."
(Typical of its outlandish propaganda, in the middle of May Ukrainian officials estimated that 28,000 Russian soldiers already had been killed. In late March, Russia claimed to have lost 1,351 soldiers. Perhaps one can extrapolate from that one-month figure for a six-month estimate. Nevertheless, one should expect the Russians to exaggerate on the low side of such statements.)
None of this uncertainty, however, seems to prevent the proliferation of guesses offered by Western sources to Western mouthpieces. On 11 August, for example, the New York Times reported that "With 500 Russian troops killed or wounded every day. according to the latest estimate by American intelligence and military officials, Russia's war effort has decelerated to a grinding slog, the officials said."
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