The how and why of Tucker Carlson’s misleading Ukraine war math

It is unusual for a newly announced Democratic candidate to make Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on one of his first stops on his media tour. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-shot bid to wrench the party’s nomination from President Biden is more usefully seen as a conduit for undermining Biden’s political strength than as a viable pathway for Kennedy himself. And if you are engaged in undermining Biden even unwittingly, Carlson is happy to give you some airtime.

Given each man’s track record, it was inevitable that the resulting interview would include some misinformation. Carlson’s history of false claims about the Biden administration and Kennedy’s about vaccination gave them a lot of possible jumping off points. But the most interesting baseless claim to emerge during the conversation instead centered on Russia.

“Nobody talks about this. There’s 14,000 Ukrainian civilians who have died but 300,000 troops. Russians are killing Ukrainians at a 7-to-1 to 8-to-1 ratio,” Kennedy claimed. “They cannot sustain this. What we’re being told about this war is just not true.”

Where did Kennedy get those astonishing figures? Well, the source for the ratios was likely the person to whom Kennedy was talking: Tucker Carlson.

Last week, Carlson made almost exactly the same point on his show.

“The second thing we learned from these slides is that … Ukraine is, in fact, losing the war,” Carlson said on April 13. “Seven Ukrainians are being killed for every Russian.” The Biden administration, he asserted, is “panicked” about this state of affairs.

But the leaked documents don’t actually assert what Carlson said they did.

As it turns out, there was more than one version of the documents floating around before they gained international attention. Aric Toler of the open-source investigation group Bellingcat was among the first to notice and analyze the documents and, on April 6, he posted a side-by-side comparison of documents made public at different times.

The earlier document included an assessment that up to 43,500 Russians had been killed in action compared to up to 17,500 Ukrainians. The later document flipped that: 17,500 Russians and up to 71,500 Ukrainians.

How can we be confident the second document was altered? The timeline for one thing; the former document appeared earlier. But there are also indicators on the second document that illustrate how it was changed.

First, notice that the new figures for Russia appear in exactly the same orientation as the original document, suggesting that they were cut and pasted over the original values. Second, notice that the “6” in “61k” and the “7” in “71.5k” appear to be lower than the baseline for the other values. It appears that whoever doctored the image simply swapped the “6” and the “1” and the “7” and the “1.” (That’s also likely why the kerning — the space between — the “1” and the “. 5” in “71.5” is too wide. Compare it to other similar figures.)

Toler confirmed to The Washington Post that the altered document appeared in a Telegram channel moderated by an American woman now reportedly under investigation by the FBI. That makes sense, given that the channel was a center for pro-Russian propaganda: The alterations to the original figures do in fact make it look like Ukraine is faring far worse than Russia.

Notice, though, that even the ratios in the altered document don’t line up with Carlson’s presentation. Using just the most extreme (forged) values, it pits 71,500 deaths against 16,000 deaths, a 4.5 to 1 ratio. So where do you get 7 to 1 from? Well, imagine that you were either not particularly good at math or not particularly interested in accuracy and you wanted to, for some reason, simply round both values down to the nearest 10,000. Now you have 70,000 (invented) Ukrainian deaths compared to 10,000 Russian ones — and, voilà, 7 to 1.

How Kennedy then jumps to 8 to 1 isn’t clear. We can identify a likely source for his “300,000 killed” claim, something that wildly surpasses even the invented figures above. That appears to come from a former government official named Scott Ritter — who himself has a checkered past — who made the claim in a podcast. The claim soon made it to Tass, Russia’s state news agency.

Carlson’s own championing of pro-Russian rhetoric has made him a staple on Russian state television. Beyond his past endorsement of Russia’s geopolitical position, Carlson sees Russia as an ally in his efforts to cast doubt on the U.S. government, efforts that Carlson centers regularly on his program. Kennedy is playing the same game: Increase doubt about the government and other institutions and you bolster your ability to build an audience with overblown concerns about vaccines.

It’s not clear who first altered the document that appears to have been the basis of the “7-to-1 ratio” claim. It’s likely that it was not someone working directly with the Russian government but, instead, a sympathizer. But the situation reinforces the very real danger of misinformation, a danger that Carlson and others on the right have downplayed as they (again) seek to disparage efforts to combat online falsehoods. Increase doubt about the spread of misinformation and you can more easily wave away criticisms you yourself face on the subject.

All of this is a case study in the modern media environment. Documents leaked by a guy apparently motivated by building online clout. Those documents being altered (however sloppily) to change their meaning and win political points. A right-wing media host happy to take the bogus document at face value. A challenger to the president eager to reiterate the host’s claims back to him.

All followed by an explanation of the error that most of the host’s audience will never see.