“Our Honest Truth”—“Their Lying Propaganda”

Making Sense in the Polarized World

Somebody asked me recently, why do I devote so much space on this Substack to the War in Ukraine?

My overall goal in this blog is to understand the world, in which we live, through the lens of Cliodynamics. At the global level, the most momentous shift, which we are living through, is the waning of the hegemonic power of America and the possibility that world geopolitics is transforming into a multipolar configuration. This change is effected primarily through the conflicts between the West and Russia, Iran, and China. All of these are important, but I tend to write more about the War in Ukraine because I read Russian, follow both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian sources, and know about it more than about other conflicts (I wish I could read Chinese and Farsi…). The quantitative methods of Cliodynamics can help us understand what’s going on at multiple levels — international, internal politics, and outcomes of specific wars.

Specifically, what’s happening on the ground in the Ukraine War? Depending on who’s talking, we get completely opposite views. The Western mass media is drumming into our heads the message that Russia is badly losing. I usually cite reputable sources, such as the New York Times (for example, in my previous post on this theme), but here’s an even better example from a lowbrow tabloid, The Sun: The insiders dismantling Putin’s iron grip from within as Russia’s ruling elite turn on tyrant in humiliating blow. Meanwhile Putin himself continues to say that Russia will achieve all its goals in this war (for example, here).

A particularly contentious topic is the magnitude of the casualties suffered by each side (which is obviously relevant to who’s winning the war). As I discussed in the previous post, the CSIS report stated that

Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities. For much of the war, the Russia-Ukraine casualty ratio was between 2:1 and 3:1 (between two and three Russian casualties for every one Ukrainian casualty), though the rate has likely risen to nearly 8:1 in the first half of 2026. Ukrainian forces have suffered somewhere between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) and between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities between February 2022 and June 2026.

Meanwhile, the official Russian news agency, TASS, publishes articles like this one: Russian security officials put overall Ukrainian losses at roughly 3 million.

It is completely normal that we get such clashing assessments. After all, the West is not a disinterested observer, it is an active participant in this war. And in wars, it would be extremely naïve to expect either side giving you the truth, and nothing but the truth. Each side aims to impose its own view of the conflict, while suppressing the enemy’s. To this wonderful cartoon by Tom Gauld

we need to add “our honest truth”/ “their lying propaganda”.

So, how do we gain an understanding of what’s really happening? Here’s where I argue the quantitative approaches become very useful, because the question is essentially quantitative. Furthermore, a purely statistical approach is often not enough, we need to build an explicit mathematical model for the process we are trying to understand. Any model oversimplifies reality and may leave out something important. To determine whether a model adequately captures the main processes, we derive predictions from it and test them with data.

Keep in mind that a model that makes bad predictions is as useful as a model that makes good predictions (and, often, we learn more from model’s predictions going completely astray).

In addition to quantitative approaches and models we, of course, need data (and the more, the better). It is fortunate that we have other sources of data, apart from the propaganda from each of the warring sides. Of course, these sources are also biased, but the degree of bias varies. And the best approach is to use sources that are biased in opposite ways (in this case, by comparing pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian sources).

In my attempt to get at the truth in the case of Russian casualties, I used a pro-Ukrainian source, Mediazona, with the expectation that if there is a bias, it will be upward. My results can be thought of as a glass half-empty (or half-full). It turned out that the current Mediazona data could not provide a firm basis for estimating the casualties trend during 2026. On the other hand, they are sufficient to contradict the claims of 30-40 thousand Russian casualties per month (and note that the Mediazona people themselves don’t believe in such high casualty rates). Again, take this result with a grain of salt — we will really know only after the end of the war.

A final thought. An additional advantage of a quantitative analysis is that, if you adequately incorporate the different sources of uncertainty, it will tell you not only what you now know, but also what you don’t know. Thus the question marks in my conclusion graph in the previous post.

The truth is out there. And Cliodynamics can help us to get closer to it, even if imperfectly.