E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

About the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.

Commentary from Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin

[ColonelCassad] The War Tears project posted its research on the losses of Ukrainian formations since the beginning of the war.

Following commentary is from wartears.org
ABOUT THE LOSSES OF THE ARMED FORCES

Having a database of more than 125,000 records on the project, we decided to try to estimate the losses and the total strength of the VFU (the armed formations of Ukraine, which includes the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the NSU, and the territorial defense, and volunteer battalions) based on the data obtained by statistical methods. It is quite difficult to do this directly because of the many reasons that can significantly distort the statistics. But some of the records, namely the records of the dead, prisoners and applications from relatives, we manually check for uniqueness, so duplicates can affect the estimate of the total number, but not the estimate of losses.

We make the assumption that the distribution of people searched through the WarTears.org project ( https://wartears.org/), and the distribution of data obtained by the project from open sources are independent. For the most part, we receive information about the prisoners and the dead from open sources. Losses in the officers of the VFU regularly surface in the media, we monitor these losses on purpose, and also monitor posthumous awards, so in this case we can assume that we know about all or almost all cases of officer deaths.

For each state (dead, prisoners), the score was calculated by the formula: T = R / (A / Q)

where:

T is the total number of VFU soldiers in this state,
R is the number of records about this state in our database,
Q is the total number search requests from relatives,
A is the number of requests for which the soldier was found and is in this state.

In other words, we a priori assume that the probability that we have an entry about someone in our database is the same as the probability that it was found in our database, provided that we searched.

As of October 27, 2022, the loss of VFU by the dead: 100,523 people.
Prisoners - 22,940 people.

The active composition of VFU is 356,422 people.

<...>

The real losses of the VFU, in addition to these numbers, include the wounded, deserters and actually missing. We assume that the total irretrievable losses of VFU (both dead and wounded, unfit for military service) may be twice as high as our estimate. The numerical composition, perhaps, is exaggerated.

It should also be remembered that this is a delayed smoothed estimate. Firstly, it takes into account the fact that relatives applied to our project. This can happen both in two weeks and in five months, as was the case with the attack on the location of 137th OBMP in Nikolaev on March 18, 2022. The jumps in our estimates, for example, on October 5 or 24, are directly related to the fact that we stumbled upon some a fairly large list of the dead and made it at once.

We did not make an assessment of the missing and other categories. In the case of the missing, we know for sure many cases where the Kyiv regime informed relatives that people were missing, while this person died during a rocket attack on a location deep in the rear.

For the time being, we consider the assessment of other categories to be premature, because the number of known cases in them is not enough to obtain statistically significant values.

We also understand that the estimate of the total number of HFU is likely to be overestimated. We plan to clean up the database from duplicate entries and, accordingly, adjust the estimate.

The full text and graphics are available in a post on our website
Posted by: badanov 2022-10-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=647957