Deep State Propaganda versus Truth

President Donald Trump held an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office after the Inauguration ceremonies on January 20. On a press question about Ukraine, he claimed the Ukrainians had lost 700,000 dead, and the Russians had lost over a million dead. The Ukrainian estimate may be fairly accurate, but the Russian estimate was preposterous to anyone who has followed the detail of the Ukraine War and is not a propaganda dupe of the Ukrainian government, the Biden Administration, Deep State, or the captive mainstream media. Who fed Trump this Deep State bunk and why, when he needs and the nation needs hard truth?
Here is just one paragraph on his answer from highly respected. former CIA analyst and State Department official Larry Johnson, released just hours later.
“During the impromptu press Conference, Trump’s remarks about negotiating with Russia showed that he is still in the dark about the reality of the war in Ukraine. He mistakenly believes that Russia has suffered more than a million casualties. That is total bullshit. Either the CIA is lying to him or his staff or both. Perhaps both. This means that Trump is in for a rude awakening when he has his first conversation with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s assumption that Russia is suffering significant military and economic losses from the war is wrong. He will need to get a grip on reality if he hopes to make any progress in negotiating an end to the war.”
For the last few days, Trump has seemed to double-down on misinformation about the Russian economy and has been needlessly slighting Putin. Biden, or whoever was running the puppet show, deliberately left Trump with a more difficult hand to play for peace and an outrageously false narrative about the origins and purpose of the war and its disastrous consequences on the battlefield. Trying to intimidate or bully Russians doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of bringing real peace or any prosperity to Ukraine. It is a sure toad to failure and loss of international credibility.
This preposterous "one million" casualty estimate of Russian casualties. is typical of highly exaggerated Ukrainian, British MI6, and CIA propaganda to justify more $billions for Ukraine and cover up the complete disaster, dishonest justifications, and atrocity of the Ukraine War. Casualties usually include dead, wounded and captured, but the actual claim the Ukrainian General Staff, presumably agreed to by CIA and MI6 propagandists, is that the Russians have suffered over one million dead.
This makes absolutely no sense if you consider that about 80 percent of the casualties on both sides are from artillery, and the Russians have better than a seven to one advantage in artillery pieces and closer to ten to one in artillery ammunitions. Moreover, the Russian guns may be on average more accurate, have greater range, and are better maintained and more operationally reliable. Furthermore, the Russians have almost complete air dominance and air defense dominance. In addition, the Russians have developed remarkably effective electronic countermeasures against even the newest U.S. artillery and tactical to midrange missiles. The Russians also have a very effective system for recovering battlefield casualties, whereas the Ukrainians often have to abandon wounded. The Russians are also launching massive missile, bombing, and drone attacks almost anywhere they choose in Ukraine several times per week.
I have observed over a number of years that British intelligence usually has two casualty estimates for the Ukraine War: one top secret and fairly accurate for their own use and one for propaganda to be leaked to gullible or complicit media. In the last several months, British propaganda has been as pushing an estimate of 700,000 Russian dead. They have recently escalated their propaganda.
However, the BBC published their own estimate on January 24, 2025, and the estimate of Russian military dead was only 90,019, with a possibility it could be as much as 10 percent higher. Retired Army combat veteran, military history scholar, and strategic analyst Col. Douglas Macgregor recently held that a British estimate of about 84,000 was accurate but now allows that the number could be between 90,000 and 100,000. The same can now be said of former Marine intelligence officer, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector and highly knowledgeable expert on Russian military capabilities and thinking.
I was pleasantly surprised that our new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, bluntly stated that the main problem for Ukraine is that they are running out of Ukrainian soldiers.
The Russian Federation Ministry of Defense recently released an estimate that the total of dead and permanently disabled Ukrainian soldiers was over one million. That would make the Trump figure of 700,000 Ukrainian war dead plausible. More than a year ago, the number of amputees was well over 50,000. Until recently, Ukraine was giving ridiculously low figures for military deaths, but it is now obvious that they cannot recruit enough volunteers to replace casualties. At least 1.5 million Ukrainian men have fled Ukraine for Western Europe. Desertions are now common, and by the end of 2024, total Ukrainian desertions were estimated at over 100,000. Both Macgregor and Ritter believe the Ukrainian Army is near collapse, just as Secretary Rubio suggested. That estimate is held by many military and foreign policy experts. If we assume that Ukrainian military dead are 700,000, and Russian military deaths are 100,000, that is a ratio of seven Ukrainians killed for every one Russian. That makes perfect sense given the imbalance of artillery, missile, drone, and air power. The Russians also outnumber the Ukrainians three to one in the field, and the Russians are much better supplied.
My own estimate is that Ukrainian dead may be over 750,000 and Russian dead not more than 75,000, making the ratio better than ten to one. But it is getting worse, maybe 12 or more to one. Casualties generally increase substantially for the loser near the end of a war. Macgregor and others estimate that more than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers a day are dying. Polls indicate most of the Ukrainian people now want peace with Russia. There is not much difference between Russians and Ukrainians. The difference have been exaggerated by unscrupulous Ukrainian and Western propaganda teaching Ukrainians to hate Russians and encouraging cultural cleansing of everything Russian even to the point of genocidal Ukrainian bombardment of Russian-speaking civilian areas. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church was banned because of their traditional connection to the Russian Orthodox Church. The whole thing smacks of the hate rallies of George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
Ukraine has a well-deserved reputation for corruption, which according to Macgregor, Clayton Morris, and many others extends not only to the handling of U.S. military aid but also to collecting the pay of unreported dead and missing Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian corruption is now under investigation by the Trump Administration, which has at least temporarily suspended military aid.
A December 31 article by James Durso, writing for The Hill, gave a scathing summary:
“The American shame is that the U.S. heedlessly expanded NATO to the borders of Russia, and then, after Russia pushed back, enabled and funded the cynical maladministration by the Zelensky government, which will go down in history as one of the greatest examples of waste and theft of Western aid.”
Should we press Ukraine to “fight to the last Ukrainian” so American and European politicians can claim a “win” or have effective control of Ukraine’s valuable natural resources? God forbid that we should be so callous. We should seek to understand the truth and causes of the conflict and have the moral compass and courage to tell the truth and do the right thing for the Ukrainian people and the large Russian minority in Ukraine. In 2010, nine of about 40 Ukrainian oblasts (states) in Ukraine were predominantly Russian with 60 to 90 percent Russian majorities. These are concentrated in in eastern and southern Ukraine and include Crimea (over 79 percent Russian) Only 60 percent of Ukrainians consider Ukrainian their native language. Most of the rest consider themselves either Russian or of mixed Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity and culture.
This recent misinformation passed on by Trump about Russian casualties sets Trump up for a foreign policy failure and facilitates the Deep State military-industrial-media complex in continuing its reckless foreign policies. Moreover, it is likely to setup Trump rather than Biden as responsible for the Ukraine disaster, which is already more considerable than the public knows and has the potential for expanding exponentially.
The two most frequent causes of military disaster are underestimating a potential enemy and overestimating your own capabilities and readiness. Hubris is often the underlying origin of both.
We are in desperate need of people of impeccable truth and competence governing, managing, and overseeing our intelligence agencies. We need to turn our intelligence agencies upside down if necessary to start producing truthful understanding and evaluation of national security risks and issues. Special interest politics and misinformed prejudices are poison to good judgment, national security, and everything America is and hopes to be.
I have voted for Trump in every presidential primary and general election since 2015, when he boldly took a stand to fix our immigration problems, which I had been writing about since 2000. He is already doing amazing, good for our country. I believe he is 97 percent right on the issues. I believe a strong America is absolutely necessary for peace and prosperity, but a misinformed, miscalculated, or bull-headed foreign policy mistake, dealing in this case with Russia, could unravel all the good he has done and is doing.
Although I strongly agree with Trump on the overwhelming majority of issues and his agenda, I believe I and others would be morally remiss, if we did not warn of the dangers of sliding off course. Trump’s’ heart is right—we need to stop this senseless and blighted killing. But I am concerned that he is being influenced by disinformation unwittingly, foolishly or deliberately capable of ruining him and overturning his agenda and the hopes of the vast majority of the American people.