You tagged the wrong Ming.

The TikTok battalion certainly don’t put themselves at risk. I ran a regional analysis of Russian KIA on the hard data from poteru(dot)net. Chechens are the 3rd least likely to die in Ukraine.

If you prefer your data in Excel format, the source data plus my workings are here:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I'm a finance guy, not a data guy, so if anyone more qualified wants to have a go at this, like say
@ragnarbjartur.bsky.social or
@prune602.bsky.social, I've uploaded the raw Poteru data here, or directly at poteru.net. Any feedback/pushback much appreciated!
drive.google.com/file/d/1MHOC...

So to conclude, if Poteru has a 30-35% data capture rate, and the Russian army does indeed experience a 3:1 WIA:KIA ratio,
@defenceu.bsky.social's numbers are spot on.

Running this from the bottom up, I went with a fixed WIA:KIA ratio of 3:1 & a variable Poteru capture rate. The 3:1 WIA:KIA ratio qualitatively feels about right for Russia. For example they have no discernable "golden hour" policy, or fully equipped field operating theatres.

I first ran this top-down, starting with the
Ukr MoD
numbers & at different WIA:KIA ratios. You'll see a lower Poteru data capture rate = higher Russian casualties, vice versa for the WIA:KIA ratio. The test is, are the Poteru data capture rates plausible? I'd say the range broadly is.

There's 2 variables we don't know - the Russian WIA:KIA ratio, & the Poteru data capture rate. It's extremely unlikely for example that 100% of Russian deaths in Ukraine are captured by Poteru. It's also pretty unlikely that Russia WIA:KIA ratios get close to western levels.

The other thing I took a look at was to use the Poteru data as a way of sense checking the headline Russian casualty numbers from
@DefenceU, here's today's.

There's some weird outliers; Chechens look like they're more protected than St Petersburgers for instance. Again, at a political level this could well be true. Or maybe Chechens really do only show up to make Tik-Tok videos.

We've long suspected that the burden of Russian war-criming in Ukraine falls disproportionally on Russia's ethnic minorities, & this confirms it. So for example if you're Tuvan, you have a 50 x higher (!!) chance of dying in Ukraine than someone from Moscow.

One of the things Poteru does is give you the Russian region the dead soldier came from, where possible. This data is available for almost 51K of the entries, so that's a pretty good sample to run with.

Yawn. They said the same thing over 2 years ago.

Just read it, so followed you. Full piece from behind the paywall here. drive.google.com/file/d/1OBWx...

Here’s the full Economist piece from behind the paywall drive.google.com/file/d/1Kjdd...

Hi I’m currently researching an old Cold War libel case, details here. I’m particularly interested in Pankin & Sitnikov, would you have any pointers on how to find out more about them? www.icwa.org/wp-content/u...