It's been interesting to watch the reported number of Russian losses. In war the warring parties exaggerate the losses of the enemy wildly,so I have looked at Ukrainian claims with a good dose of scepticism. But it's becoming clear their #'s are not off by as much as I assumed https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1511089246794301448

I initially started discounting Ukrainian claims by 60%-70%. If they said they destroyed 10 Russian tanks, I assumed they destroyed 3 or 4 of them. No hard data behind the discount, just a ballpark number from what I have seen in other conflicts.

But then videos and pictures of burned out Russian military equipment started flooding social media. It looked like they were doing a number on Russian convoys. So, I lowered my discount to 50%. I figured western weapons are helping them achieve better results than expected

But 6 weeks in and there is just too much evidence indicating the 50% discount is too high. Accounts like @oryxspioenkop have done an excellent ( and gruelling!) job doing a visual count of equipment losses (with pictures for each claim).I am going to use tank losses as example

Oryx has *visually confirmed* Russian tank losses at 425. But he says he still has backlog of a couple of hundred pieces still not cataloged. I am going to assume there are 25 more tanks in that pile. So, we are at 450 lost tanks.

I am also going to make an educated guess and say some destroyed/captured tanks will never make it to the social media to be counted. How many? I am going to be conservative and say 5%. So, that means we add another 22 tanks for a total of 472 tanks.

So, how does this stack up against Ukrainian claims? Not bad actually. Ukrainians claim 647 Russian tanks were lost. So, that's only a 27% inflation from the (likely) true number (472). Way lower than the 50% figure I assumed.

So, from there we can extrapolate ( won't be perfect across the board) the rest of Russian losses:
Troops: 13,359
Planes: 107
Helicopters:98
Tanks: 472
Artillery: 241
Armored vehicles: 1346
Mobile SRBM: 3
MLRS: 78
Boats: 5
Vehicles: 929
etc

Bottom line: Russia has lost a lot of military equipment in Ukraine! Yes, Ukraine is likely exaggerating the losses, but not by as much as people ( including myself) assumed.