Count their losses: Russia casualties hit 1m

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's not just the sheer magnitude of online misinformation that boggles the mind. It's the rate of increase. Yet the number of people and projects to tame it all is only shrinking. So those that are left are having to get more clever. And I have to say, I thought this one was a practical joke.

Our correspondent went to Gloucestershire to find out why throwing a giant cheese down a hill could soon be recognised as an item of protected British heritage.

First up, though. The Kerch Bridge connecting occupied Crimea to Russia. is a symbol of Vladimir Putin's expansionist ambitions. This week a Ukrainian bomb tore through its foundations. That followed another devastating raid. as Ukrainian drones hit Russian airfields and destroyed dozens of warplanes. Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the attack as brilliant and achieved solely by Ukraine. He said Russia had started the war.

and now must end it. Instead, Putin has promised to take revenge. Four years in, the war in Ukraine is still in full swing, and the losses are mounting. particularly on the Russian side. For Russia, the war in Ukraine is about to hit an incredibly grim milestone, and that is that in the next couple of weeks we expect casualties to surpass one million people. who have been killed or severely injured. Jonathan Rosenthal is The Economist's international editor.

That number is far bigger than the one that Vladimir Putin would have sold to Russia before he invaded Ukraine in February 2022, when he was predicting a special military operation lasting two to three days. One million casualties is an astonishing figure. How do we know it's right?

So I think skeptics would point to this and say the number comes from the Ukrainian general staff. So you ought to take it with a pinch of salt. What we've done is we've kicked the tires on those numbers. It turns out that they both... jibe with what western intelligence sources are saying now of course some people may dismiss those

But they also jibe with what independent media in Russia have been coming up with. There are journalists there who've been looking at things like social media, funeral notices, obituaries, various other sorts of public source information. And they also end up... And how does that compare with Ukraine losses?

coy about the numbers that they've been losing. Last year, President Zelensky said that Ukraine had lost about 43,000 killed and 370,000 wounded. I think it's fair to say that that's probably an underestimate. The Ukrainians are very good at it. trying to manage information coming out. But nonetheless, it is still considerably lower than the Russian toll. So why have Russia's losses been so huge?

I think there are a few reasons behind this that are all interrelated. The one is just the sort of nature of the conflict. Russia is on the offensive. Ukraine is on the defensive. In any war, you'd expect a disparity. The defenders are dug in there in the trenches and the attackers have to... cross open ground. But technology comes into this in really interesting ways. And that's the development of these FPV drones, the first person view or kamikaze drones.

And those are making it incredibly difficult for attackers to cross open ground. Some military analysts are talking about these as being a bit like the machine guns of World War I, where the defense just became so powerful that no offense could penetrate it. Another reason for this is the Russian way of war. You have a almost a kind of old school Soviet mentality of mass attacks and the Russians have been incredibly careless and heedless about the lives of their soldiers.

Jonathan, we know that casualties tend to go down very badly at home. How is the Russian population responding to this huge toll? Well, so this is, again, really interesting. If one makes international comparisons, these are sort of far heavier than, for instance, the US military lost in its long war in Vietnam. And that, of course, prompted massive protests at home. We're not seeing that in Russia.

a few reasons for that. One is that Vladimir Putin's been very careful not to be relying on conscript soldiers. And I think that's because he remembers his own history very well when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan in the 1980s. Again, that led to protests.

partly because members of the elite were seeing their kids being taken off unwillingly. In this case, Russia has been relying on contract soldiers. These are basically soldiers that are getting paid very large sums of money by Russian standards to voluntarily sign.

So the burden of this war is falling disproportionately on poor areas where people are earning up to five times the average wage to sign up. You're seeing middle-aged men turning up at recruitment centres with their wives and children urging them.

on because this is life-changing money for a family. And that's allowed Russia to just keep recruiting 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers every single month. For many Russians, they're able to solve their consciences saying these people volunteered, they're getting very well. paid and they're doing the fighting for the rest of us. And that is clearly damping down the fear of conscription that early in the war actually led to loads of young Russian men moving out to avoid being called up.

So will it come to a point where Russians say enough is enough, no more? I think the sense is that we're not likely to see a sort of mass outpouring of protest in the near future. And again, the numbers of people who are continuing to sign up are suggesting that there is still a sort of very ready flow of soldiers who are willing to...

risk their lives. So I don't think that that is going to be bringing the war to an end. The bigger issues are that this is now becoming a huge drain on the Russian economy. There are some estimates that Russia is now spending about one and a half percent of GDP on sort of... payments just to soldiers and the families of dead soldiers. So the economic pressures are mounting, but it's not the losses themselves.

I think when one steps back and looks at this one million casualty figure, there are clearly people in Ukraine and the Ukrainian military who will say it is testament to their dogged defense against much stronger forces attacking them. And that's true. But at the same time, it is...

real warning sign to NATO and Western Europe and the democracies there. Because it raises the question of how do democracies that care about the lives of their soldiers that are going to be unwilling to tolerate losses of a thousand per day, which is what we're seeing there. How do you deter an adversary that just is so heedless of the lives of its soldiers that it's willing to just keep throwing them into these grinding mass attacks and keep going year after year?

Thank you so much, Jonathan Thank you To succeed in the future of work, forward thinkers use AI to deliver measurable results. Workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that frees you from the mundane so you can focus on more meaningful work. No business leader wakes up thinking, gee, I hope I can make some huge trade-offs today. And yet that's exactly what most security solutions ask of you.

Trade speed for safety. User experience for control. Trade keeping things simple for keeping them secure. Not so with Okta. Okta gives you a unified solution to protect identity. No friction, no frustration, no compromises. Security that's a launchpad instead of a limiter? It's possible. It's Okta.

The internet is so full of fake claims and misinformation that there just aren't enough fact checkers to verify all of the content that is circulating. Tom Wainwright is The Economist's media editor. So fact checkers are having to employ new techniques to sift through all the noise online and separate truth from fiction. So usual question of putting some numbers to it. How big is the problem? How much fakeness?

There's a lot of misinformation online. Anybody who's been online in the last few years can hardly have failed to spot that. But the sheer scale of it is just vast. YouTube, for example, last year removed over half a million channels for broadcasting misinformation. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook and Instagram between them deleted 27 million pieces of misinformation during a period of just a few months at the peak of the pandemic in 2020.

So the fact checkers really have their work cut out and figuring out which facts or which bits of misinformation to check and to debunk is a difficult job for them. But even people who were online before the last few years have noticed that there is a pile of nonsense out there. Why is this a bigger or a more unmanageable problem was it before? Is it simply a question of scale?

Well, the nonsense isn't new, although I think probably the amount of nonsense is always growing. But the thing that's changing is that the resources available for fact checking... are shrinking. So back in January, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced that it's going to replace its professional fact-checkers with a volunteer-based system. It's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.

We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. And then in the States, Donald Trump has been dismantling USAID and the cuts there are going to have a bad effect because that organisation previously gave a lot of funding to fact-checking organisations. So the amount of misinformation out there is, if anything, growing.

and the army of people checking it is shrinking. And so the ones who are left have to do it in smarter ways. You're suggesting that those smarter ways are nigh. That's exactly right. Yeah, they're doing their best now to figure out ways of triaging misinformation claims to work out which ones are the ones to prioritise and which ones are the ones perhaps to ignore.

A programme has been developed by researchers at the University of Westminster here in the UK. They worked with fact-checkers organisations. including Full Fact, Africa Check, and the AFP News Agency. And what they did was set up a triaging system to figure out whether any given...

claim was one to prioritize or one to leave alone. And the idea here really is to make the best use of the limited resources they have. They say that triaging a claim takes maybe five minutes and doing a thorough check on a claim can take five or six hours. hours. So making sure that you're spending your time on the claims that matter is really an effective way to maximize the resources that you have. But what's the measure for what matters and what doesn't?

Well, it's interesting that what they're really trying to do is forecast which misinformation claims are going to do the most damage. And so they might look at a claim and start by thinking, for example, are enough people going to believe this claim for it to have a bad effect? And there, it depends rather what the claim is, because if it's something like a piece of misinformation that's aiming to swing an election result, you need a lot of people to believe it in order for it to really...

do anything. If on the other hand, it's something like a fake medical cure, for example, you might only need one person to believe it in order to do themselves serious harm. So there's the question of will enough people believe it? Then they ask themselves, do those people who might believe this incorrect information have any capacity to actually act on it?

For example, you might be misled about the real origins of COVID-19, whether it was born in a laboratory or a market or whatever, but there's not much you can actually do about it immediately if you're wrong about this. So things where people... don't have the capacity to act could be considered lower priority than those where they do.

And then they ask themselves, are the consequences, if any, direct or cumulative? And by that, they mean a direct consequence could be that I read about a wrong... cure for an illness and I take a medicine which harms me, a cumulative effect could be something more like something that contributes to a false narrative about, say, immigrants and crime or something like that.

Using this information, they can reach a view on which misinformation claims are the ones that are likely to do most harm. And based on that, they can make a judgment about whether or not to prioritize those or bump them down the list. And how much does that separate wheat from chaff? How many of the resulting claims are the really dangerous ones that need acting on as a fraction?

It makes quite a big difference. I mean, the researchers did this triaging on quite a big sample of claims, and they found that of the false claims that they analyzed, 57% were unlikely to contribute to any specific real-world effect. In other words, more than half of the claims can be safely left on one side without needing to worry too much about any immediate harm being done. And I suppose of that, some of it is not only not very harmful, but...

genuinely harmless. Well, yeah, and there's an interesting question there about what... Harm is really from being misled about something. There was a good example from the AFP where they said that one of their most read, most popular fact checks online is about a photograph of an elephant carrying a lion cub in its trunk.

it's fake it's just been photoshopped but lots of people believe this other people weren't sure they checked it out and it's false and a piece of misinformation like that is clearly very very unlikely to lead to any direct harm unless somebody's tricked into going up to an elephant, believing it to be more friendly than it really is. But there is arguably a problem with the public being misled in general. You could say it's bad for digital literacy if people are...

overly credulous about believing images that they see online, particularly now with AI. I think we're all familiar now with seeing all kinds of fantastical images online that at first look believable but on closer examination aren't. So correcting things like that. arguably has its own value even if it's not something that's likely to do immediate harm.

But in a world where these fact-checkers really have fewer resources than ever, you can see why they're focused on trying to prioritise the ones that are likely to do most damage. And so I think focusing on those that will do most immediate harm is probably the best way for them to use their... time. Tom, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you.

Okay, so on the recent public holiday, I found myself in the middle of Gloucestershire in southwest England. Georgia Banjo is a Britain correspondent. Just cleared the way for the paramedics. In a field surrounded by thousands of people, some of them families with picnics, some of them teenagers hanging out, some of them drunk men. But I was there because I wanted to see a very special event. Would you do this? I know my words. And the crowd started to chant after a while.

Cheese, cheese, cheese. And then they started the action. And essentially what happens is one person throws a cheese, normally a double Gloucester. down a very steep hill. And this cheese, I'm not talking about your average supermarket cheese, I'm talking about a cheese. The size of a cake, you know, as heavy as a free weight, gets lobbed on this hill. And then about two dozen people.

start trying to run down the hill but this is a serious gradient and it's just it's the most ridiculous thing so you know you people often just end up somersaulting sliding tumbling down a hill They literally bounce off the ground. So it's like watching pinballs go down the hill. There's no chance of catching the cheese because it goes up to 70 miles an hour.

Essentially you win by getting to the bottom of the hill first and then at the bottom they have the local rugby team who are there to stop people flying into the crowd and that's basically how the race ends. This year, the winner was a YouTuber. I think more controversially, he was a German called Tom Kopka. And it's the second time in a row that he's won this race, much to the dismay of the Brits.

And after his victory, he spoke to local news outlets and he said that this year was different to the last one. Last year the hill was muddy and safe and this year, as you can see, it was dry and dangerous and people got injured. I just shut up my brain and then went for it. I can tell you, all the people there... Obviously, to some people, this is always a fixture in their calendar. But I was actually there because...

cheese rolling could soon be officially recognised by the British government. This summer, the government is inviting the public to submit nominations for a national inventory of living culture. And this is essentially a requirement for joining a UN convention on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. So this is a UNESCO convention.

created in 2003 but Britain only ratified it last year and essentially every country has to submit a list of intangible cultural heritage and the government seems to think that cheese rolling will be on the list along with lots of other great things like morris dancing pantomime and you know even sea shanties

So far, around 150 countries have some entries on this UNESCO list. Britain has zero. And so when you compare this to France, which is known for its winemaking, its perfume, its know-how of the baguette... Or you compare it to China, which has 44 entries, or even Afghanistan with the Taliban, which has got four. So some might say that's quite embarrassing for the UK.

But others would say it isn't, because when you actually think about national traditions, often they're not quite the events that we think they are. So, for example... One myth about cheese rolling is that it's a pagan ritual or that it's linked to Phoenician sun worship. And there's not actually any evidence for that. And I think the other concern that people have is that once something gets officially recognized by something like UNESCO...

it can all get a bit Disney-fied. But I think a positive reason to do this would be to try and preserve traditions. We know that by classifying traditions, they're often easier to preserve. But what's interesting about cheese rolling is that if they do preserve it, it will be a tradition that local authorities have constantly tried to ban.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence We'll see you back here tomorrow To succeed in the future of work, forward thinkers use AI to deliver measurable results. Workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that frees you from the mundane so you can focus on more meaningful work. Workday. Moving business forever forward. Innovation has always kept the world moving forward. But it also comes with risk. In a world that is as complex and unpredictable as it is exciting.

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