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There are ways of estimating casualties including visually confirmed losses, obituaries, social media, espionage, etc. These will give estimates with significant error bars of course, but most credible estimates put UAF casualties below those of Russia's. In the Discord leaks the pro-RU side had to photoshop the CIA's casualty estimates since it was embarrassing.
Ukraine has a growingly serious ban on publishing any video/photo evidence of war stuff. There used to be multiple phone videos of almost any fighting that occurred near Ukrainian civilian centers and nowadays Russia's 50 cruise missile salvos into Kiev will have perhaps one video showing a distant explosion and almost everything is blurred. They got good at finding anyone sharing such videos and punishment is severe.
On the front, Ukrainian military is enthusiastic about making slick edits of any Russian death and publishing to often tasteless music. It makes sense since they are toast without their foreign patrons and they need to show some results. Russians don't have such constraints and rarely put out anything official other than suicide drone hits on expensive military hardware.
There was a lot of hype around open source intelligence at the beginning of the war when everyone was uploading everything to snapchat. But it is no longer to an accurate way to keep track of the action. There has since been a lot of Western media effort to inspect Russian information which can be a proxy for casualties and make calculations (new graveyard space, small town recruits returning with less men than they left with etc) but nothing for the Ukrainian side. So it is quite pointless to try to keep any ratio. We simply don't know.
If the leaks have shown anything actually important, it was that the Americans don't have a good insight of the workings of the Ukrainian military, and in some case maybe know more about the Russian side. So this should be taken with a large grain of salt as well.
Everything will be an estimations until after the war. The radical skeptic's take is to just throw a big question mark on everything, and in some ways that'd be more epistemically hygienic. In that case, you should still see the confident claims of 2-4x Ukrainian casualties as improbable. I'm personally still in favor of trusting Western (especially US) intelligence since it's been pretty accurate in this conflict.
I am basically ignoring any casualty figures for the reasons I have detailed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russians truly have significantly fewer casualties since they have a superiority on hardware and munitions and they have been very risk averse in some situations that can lead to mass casualties, preferring to just withdraw. But I wouldn’t be surprised by the opposite either.
I am sure US intelligence has a good picture of the conflict and they sometimes put it out for mass consumption when it’s useful. But I don’t think the numbers at the discord leaks was such an occasion. They were simply taking Ukrainian mod at their word for their own casualties and repeating OSINT numbers for Russian side. My expectation is that there was an intelligence sharing mess up deliberately or not deliberately.
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