TL;DR: This is a tiny incident from which we can learn a lot, including: (1) How many Ukrainians are being slaughtered in the war, (2) Donald Trump is a closet truther, (3) History is changed right under our noses, and (4) The world almost everyone lives in is far from the real one.

I’ve tried to keep track of the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed in the war since the beginning. It’s quite shocking. The last estimate I heard was from Col. Douglas Macgregor a couple of weeks ago: 1.2 million dead. That tracks with the mounting numbers I’ve followed all along.

The Ukrainian government lies their asses off about it—when they mention it at all. What may be surprising at first is that the Russian government lies about it as well. Not like the Ukrainians, of course, and for entirely different reasons. Ukraine doesn’t want everyone to know how badly they’re losing. Russia knows they have to live next door to this country into the future, a country full of fellow Slavs, and they don’t need the resentment that would come if the truth were widely known about the bloodbath they were forced into conducting.

The going rate is about 5,000 Ukrainian dead per week. Guess who said that publicly? Donald Trump. I have long thought he was a closet truther—on this and many other issues—and that he knows far more than he ever says. Before you go to verify that he said it, there is a lot more to the story and that’s what we’re here to discuss.

First, is that number accurate? As I said, you’ll have great difficulty finding a source for it. Just a couple of weeks ago, Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Alexander Syrsky said he needed 30k new recruits every month. God knows where it is in my notes, but right after that I read an article commenting that even that number was all Ukraine would admit to publicly because their casualty rate was 50k per month.

In conventional war, about 1 out of 3 casualties dies and the other two are only wounded. Due to a number of reasons, such as the lethality of Russia’s weaponry and extreme difficulty evacuating wounded from the battlefield, Ukraine has experienced a 1 in 2 KIA ratio. Even that figure was as of a couple of years ago and it’s only gotten worse since then. You can consider that a minimum. So 50k per month… 1 out of 2… and 5000 a week seems about right.

We need to put that in perspective, though. During the Vietnam War, the US population was about 200M. Over the course of a long war, there were about 60k KIA. Here we are half a century later and many people still remember well how terrible that war was.

Ukraine is—or was at the start of the war—about 1/5 the population that the US was in 1970, so we can magnify that KIA number by a factor of 5 to 25k a week. Thus, Ukraine has about two “Vietnam Wars” a month. I find it staggering. I wish everyone realized this.

While most people, including—alarmingly—almost all European leaders, want only war and more war, one of the few people trying to end this incredible horror is Trump. He doesn’t say it outright, which isn’t surprising if you read the first part of that last sentence again. When I saw that he was trying to get out the word about the appalling level of slaughter taking place, I took that to be consistent with the goal of alerting the public and generating popular sentiment for ending it. He said it today quite publicly in one his “Truths”.

Or did he?

I happened to notice his “Truth” when it was mentioned in a video on the Military Summary Channel on YouTube. I was quite surprised, and later went to save the link to his original post. I found that within only hours, an attempt seems to have been made to wipe it from popular media.

For example, when I searched for it, the first link that came up included this search snippet:

5 hours ago ... "Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5,000 soldiers a week are dying. Let's get the Peace Deal DONE!" he said in a post on Truth ...

Yep, that’s the text I saw. The link is to this BBC article:

Trump says he is 'not happy' with deadly Russian strikes on Kyiv (BBC 4/24/2025)

That alarming number of 5000 a week and the surrounding text is not in the article. Stranger, archived versions on the Wayback Machine are to a related but different article titled, “Zelensky cuts short South Africa visit after Russian attack on Kyiv”. Don’t ask me what the Beeb is doing, but I’m just saying that what your idea of an “article” is and what it means to “archive” probably needs some updating to match their “flexibility”.

This article preserves the original wording (for now) but it too will probably undergo some “flexibility”:

Trump says he's "not happy" with Russian strikes on Kyiv, tells Putin: "Vladimir, STOP!" (CBS News 4/24/2025)

"I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing," Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social. "Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!"

The “Mr. Trump wrote” text is a hotlink to the original Truth. Go ahead and check it: that 5000 figure isn’t there.

A couple of things: One is that the Wayback does not have an archived version of that CBS story as of this writing. I wanted to see what it said originally, because it turns out that is the wrong hyperlink. The correct one with that wording is here. A mere clerical error on the part of CBS? Who knew they were so slipshod.

Everyone may make of this what they wish, but in this late age I find the historical record is even more plastic than I thought.