Yesterday Tucker Carlson released an interview with retired Col. Douglas MacGregor. If you’re not familiar with MacGregor he appears to be the person who is the source of Carlson’s own views on the war in Ukraine. He believes that Putin’s war machine can’t be defeated. I’m not going to go over every claim MacGregor made in this hour long interview but at the core of his argument that Russia is winning is his claim about casualties on both sides. Here’s what he said:

MacGregor: Russia today is stronger than it has been in 30 or 40 years. You have a Russian military establishment that is now more potent and more capable than the Russian military was in the mid-1980s.

Carlson: Why? Wars typically, don’t they degrade a military force?

MacGregor: Well, the Russians have been very, very careful and deliberate, very cautious about the expenditure of life.

Just to pause here a moment, there’s a lot of evidence that Russia has not been cautious about the expenditure of life. On the contrary, there have been many reports that mobilized soldiers were being sent to the front lines with little to no training and very little in the way of weapons or armor.

When her recently mobilised brother rang from the frontline last week, Olesya Shishkanova recorded the phone call – and with it, a litany of complaints.

“They gave us absolutely no equipment. The army has nothing, we had to buy all our gear ourselves,” complained Vladimir, 23, who was conscripted as part of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation earlier this month.

“I even had to paint my gun to cover the rust. It is a nightmare … Soon they’ll make us buy our own grenades,” he added in the call that Shishkanova uploaded on her page on the Russian social media site VK.

Again, there were multiple reports like this, some including videos, which seemed to confirm the mobiks were being sent to the front with very little chance of surviving. They were forced to carry out attacks in waves.

“Keep going until you’re killed.” That’s what Andrei Medvedev recalls being told by his commanders at the Wagner Group, a private Russian mercenary army that recruits people like him out of prison to wage the Kremlin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

Medvedev is unusual in that he not only lived to tell the tale but somehow escaped to Norway. Most others in his situation aren’t so lucky. As the war approaches its first anniversary, increasing numbers of Russians in Ukraine — both regular soldiers and Wagner mercenaries — are being treated by their superiors as “cannon fodder.” Barely trained and often badly armed, they’re ordered to throw themselves at the more hardened Ukrainian defenders, in a cynical tactic based on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers.

Another name for this approach is “human-wave attacks.”

The idea that the Russians have been very cautious about the expenditure of life doesn’t add up but it fits with what MacGregor claims next.

Carlson: What do you think the casualty numbers are in Russia?

MacGregor: You know that’s a hard one to estimate. I think probably 50,000—40 to 50,000 killed maybe another 40 to 50,000 wounded.

Carlson: Total?

MacGregor: Yes.

Carlson: As compared to the Ukrainian…

MacGregor: 400,000 dead. The ratio is 1 to 5…

Carlson: And you believe those numbers are roughly accurate?

MacGregor: Yes. Absolutely.

Where is MacGregor getting this? He doesn’t say but these figures are odds with every multiple estimates published in the past year. Just last week (Aug 18) the NY Times reported updated casualty numbers coming from US officials which were very different from what MacGregor is telling Carlson (to be clear I don’t know when this interview was recorded, it could have been prior to this report):

The total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began 18 months ago is nearing 500,000, U.S. officials said, a staggering toll as Russia assaults its next-door neighbor and tries to seize more territory.

The officials cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. But they said the slaughter intensified this year in eastern Ukraine and has continued at a steady clip as a nearly three-month-old counteroffensive drags on.

Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

This report says Russian deaths are higher than MacGregor’s figures for all Russian casualties, including the wounded. That’s a pretty big difference. But the key point is that Russia’s dead and injured are significantly higher than comparable Ukrainian losses (300,000 vs. 190,000). That’s a long way from the 1:5 ratio MacGregor is claiming.

Looking back, the figures reported by the Times last week appear to be an update on figures which leaked in April:

 As many as 354,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the Ukraine war which is grinding towards a protracted conflict that may last well beyond 2023, according to a trove of purported U.S. intelligence documents posted online…

According to an assessment collated by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency, Russia has suffered 189,500-223,000 total casualties, including 35,500-43,000 killed in action and 154,000-180,000 wounded.

Ukraine has suffered 124,500-131,000 total casualties, including 15,500-17,500 killed in action and 109,000-113,500 wounded in action, according to the document entitled “Russia/Ukraine – Assessed Combat Sustainability and Attrition.”

To be clear, this leak of information was not favorable to Ukraine. The same documents also predicted that the battle for the Donbas was heading for a stalemate which would not be broken anytime in 2023. Nevertheless, the casualties figures were 223,000 Russians dead or wounded vs. 131,000 Ukrainians dead or wounded. That’s nowhere near the figures MacGregor is giving to Carlson.

In July of this year, so in between the two reports cited above, a joint investigation by two newspapers put the number of Russian dead close to what MacGregor claimed at 40-55,000. Total casualties were at least 125,000, not including missing or captured soldiers. Even that total is 45,000 casualties higher than the low end figure MacGregor is citing (80,000) and that would have been through May of this year, leaving out a summer of heavy fighting.

Even last November, Gen. Milley estimated each side has suffered over 100,000 casualties.

The most senior US general estimates that around 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine…

“You’re looking at well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” Gen Milley said. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side.”

I’m including all of this detail just to point out that there is a range of estimates for casualties but MacGregor’s numbers seem quite a bit lower for Russian casualties than even the lowest of these estimates and his numbers for Ukrainian casualties seem dramatically higher. Does he have some source of information that no one else has? If so, he doesn’t say what it is and Carlson doesn’t ask.

The numbers matter obviously, not just in terms of the loss of life on both sides of the conflict but in terms of the story they tell about whether one side is suffering far greater losses or is being very careful about the “expenditure of life.” MacGregor’s figures seem to match up nicely with the story he is trying to tell, of a Ukrainian army that is suffering five times as many casualties and can’t possibly win, but they don’t match up with most of what we’ve seen in public reports.

At this point, I suppose you could conclude MacGregor has inside information while the reports all over the media for the past year are just propaganda. But at that point you’re sliding into conspiracy theory territory. It would be nice to see someone challenge MacGregor on his numbers but he’s not going to get that from Tucker Carlson. Here’s the full interview:

Update: I wasn’t that familiar with MacGregor but I think he’s said some pretty kooky crap. For instance, he said he’d be surprised if Biden was still in office in 90 days. This was back in March.

He also predicted a month or so ago that we wouldn’t make it to the 2024 election.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get to the 2024 election. Things will implode in Washington before that.”

— Colonel Douglas Macgregor pic.twitter.com/zWQOKesCI5

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 2, 2023

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict he’ll be wrong about that too.

Update: One more clip of MacGregor. Here he is last March predicting the war would probably be over in another 10 days.