I don’t believe a word Zelensky says. I don’t believe a word Putin says. I don’t believe a word Biden says. It’s not that they always lie, it’s that they lie about 80 percent of the time. But let’s give the ex-comedian the benefit of the doubt and assume this number of 1,300 is correct.

So this brutal, barbaric, reckless, ghastly, ruthless, indiscriminate, savage war the media has enthusiastically chosen to replace its much more boring and eye rollingly bland covid headlines with has led to 1,300 Ukrainian fatalities on the battlefield. Something doesn’t add up. If this war is so brutal then how could more soldiers die in one day with rather crude technologies on the 17th of September 1862 than in Ukraine in several weeks? This is not to say that I am disappointed or that I wish more would have fallen. I don’t have some perverse appetite for more carnage and more prolific bloodshed. 1,300 is 1,300 too many. The grief and outrage their families are feeling now is something no family should ever have to experience.

But let’s put emotions aside for just a minute. Ukraine has a population of over 40 million. It must be fielding one of the largest armies in Europe right about now. We are non-stop being told that the Russian onslaught is most savage in nature. The Russians are bombing, bombarding, shelling, sniping, launching rockets. And they have killed 1,300 enemy soldiers. That must be the worst expenditure of ammo EVER. Or are they missing on purpose? Have the Ukrainians a Vietnamese division that has built a Vietcong like tunnel network for them all over Ukraine? Is their body armour made by Skynet and sent from the future? Are they all hiding and eating borsh? Are they terminators? Do they have invisibility cloaks? Are they even there? Are only near sighted Russians being recruited?

But ok… Let’s say advances in medicine have made sure that most of the soldiers that get wounded do not actually die. In Vietnam there were 5 wounded American soldiers for every one killed. That ratio went up thanks to better field hospitals and even faster transportation of the wounded and radical advances in surgery. In Iraq the ratio was 8 : 1. Let’s assume doctors in Ukraine are as good as the American ones. That means that 10,400 Ukrainian soldiers were wounded. This still leaves us with about the same total of dead and wounded as what the Union side lost in ONE day at Antietam. Most soldiers were using single shot muzzle loading rifles that day. Fire rate in the hands of only a very seasoned veteran: three a minute. Effective firing range: maybe 400 metres…

Something is telling me that the war in Ukraine is pretty tame compared to other wars in human history even one as far back as more than 150 years. Oh, and the US had about the same number of inhabitants in 1862 as Ukraine does today.

This is not to say that this war is somehow ok or that it’s a good thing.

I think Europe has no idea of what war actually is. It’s been ignoring ongoing wars for so long that this conflict looks as intense now as a World War Two battle.

Comparisons to Stalingrad for example are actually ridiculous. Close to two million men died – both sides combined – in that battle. Zelensky says 1,300 of his soldiers have died…

It’s bad, it’s damn bad, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the media is saying.

Well, you know… If it bleeds, it reads… War is good for business. Also true for newspapers and TV networks.