Fourteen Thousand: The number everyone cites and almost no one checks

With Washington and Moscow, Part 7

TL;DR: The campist case for Russian intervention rests on a set of figures and claims that circulate without their sources. Fourteen thousand dead in the Donbas: real, but 78% were combatants and most civilians died in separatist-controlled territory. A colour revolution in 2014: Yanukovych’s own party voted 328-0 to remove him after he fled. Energy companies made 400% profits: the actual figure is 125%, and Nord Stream was already shut before the sabotage. The Forest Brothers claim against the FI: Mandel’s own texts say the opposite. NATO expansion: a real phenomenon, and verbal assurances were given in 1990, but no formal treaty commitment was made and Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 before Ukraine had any membership plan. The Fourth International calls this ‘alter-imperialism’: not opposing all imperialist powers, but opposing one while tacitly supporting another. The number is real. The argument built on it is not.

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The number arrives without a denominator. Fourteen thousand dead in the Donbas between 2014 and 2022. It circulates in WhatsApp threads, Stop the War meetings, comment sections under every article that mentions Ukraine. It is deployed not as a statistic but as a verdict: Ukrainian forces conducted a genocidal campaign against Russian speakers for eight years; Russia’s February 2022 invasion was therefore a defensive response to an ongoing atrocity; anyone who supports Ukrainian resistance is complicit in that atrocity. The number does the work of a conclusion while presenting itself as evidence.

It is a real number. That is where the argument goes wrong: not in the figure, but in everything that follows from it.

What the 14,000 Actually Shows

The figure derives from monitoring data covering the entire Donbas conflict from 2014 to the eve of the full-scale invasion. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights documented it systematically across more than thirty reports. The breakdown is not contested.

Roughly 78% of the 14,000 were combatants: approximately 4,400 Ukrainian troops and 6,500 Russian proxy fighters. Confirmed civilian deaths over eight years of conflict: 3,107. Add the 298 victims of MH17, shot down by a Russian Buk missile over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, and the civilian total reaches 3,405. Each of those deaths is a real person and a real loss. Three thousand one hundred and seven is not a small number. It is also not fourteen thousand, and it is not a genocide.

The attribution question cuts harder still. Of those confirmed civilian deaths, 78% occurred in territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists rather than by Ukrainian government forces. A further 81% of civilian infrastructure damage from shelling occurred in separatist-controlled territory. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission recorded approximately 313,000 ceasefire violations between 2017 and 2021, classifying most as ‘undetermined’ rather than attributed to either side. The OHCHR civilian casualty data does the attribution work the OSCE declined to do formally: the primary cause of civilian harm in the Donbas conflict was shelling from the separatist-held side, directed at the population living under that side’s control.

The campist argument requires fourteen thousand to mean: Ukrainian forces killed fourteen thousand Russian-speaking civilians in a genocidal campaign. The data shows: both sides killed combatants over eight years of low-intensity war; roughly three thousand civilians died, the majority of them in separatist-controlled territory, the majority of those from separatist shelling. The number is real. The argument built on it is not.

The Coup That Wasn’t

The campist account of Ukraine’s origins requires a second founding claim: that Yanukovych was a democratically elected president removed by a Western-backed colour revolution in 2014, invalidating Ukrainian democratic politics and creating the conditions Russia was entitled to respond to. This claim is easier to check than most people bother to.

Yanukovych rejected the EU Association Agreement in November 2013 under Russian economic pressure. The sequence is documented: Putin offered a $15 billion loan and a 33% gas price cut; Yanukovych, who had been moving toward signing the agreement with the broad support of his own parliament, reversed course. The Maidan protests erupted in response. Over the following weeks, approximately 100 protesters were killed by government forces. On 21 February 2014 Yanukovych signed an agreement with opposition parties brokered by European foreign ministers, and then fled Kyiv that evening.

The parliament voted on 22 February. The result was 328-0. Not a narrow constitutional majority: unanimous. Of those 328 votes, 36 came from Yanukovych’s own Party of Regions and 30 from the Communist Party. The constitutional mechanism involved reinstating the 2004 constitution, under which the parliament speaker became acting president pending elections. Yanukovych called it a coup. His own party voted for his removal.

This is not a description of a Western-engineered putsch. It is a description of a president who fled after killing protesters, whose removal was processed through parliamentary mechanisms, whose own party recognised that he had lost all legitimacy. The colour revolution framing requires erasing the 100 dead, the flight, the unanimous vote, and the 36 members of his own party who had had enough.

The Energy Argument

The claim that the war was engineered to allow US and UK energy companies to displace Russian gas from European markets, and that those companies made 400% profits as a result, has the appeal of a coherent structural explanation. US LNG exports did benefit from the European pivot away from Russian gas. That is a real geopolitical interest worth naming. The figures, however, do not cooperate.

Profits rose approximately 125% across the major oil majors in 2022, not 400%. Nord Stream 1 was shut indefinitely by Gazprom on 2 September 2022, before the sabotage. European gas prices peaked in August 2022, before the sabotage. The energy price spike was a consequence of Russia cutting supplies; the sabotage was a consequence of the energy crisis, not its cause. The invasion preceded the sabotage by seven months and the supply cuts by six.

The 400% figure is not a rounding error. It is more than three times the documented figure. The energy argument, in the form it actually circulates, does not survive contact with the data.

Who Dies for Russia

The campist argument that Russia is defending its people requires specifying which people.

Zona.media, the independent Russian human rights monitoring project, published its four-year assessment in February 2026. Confirmed Russian military deaths had exceeded 200,000. Residents of Tuva and Chukotka are 25 times more likely to be killed than residents of Moscow. Male death rates in Buryatia and Tuva are 27 to 33 times higher than in the capital. 67% of Russian soldiers killed came from rural areas and small towns, which account for only 48% of the population. Ethnicity is the strongest predictor of death rate, stronger than poverty or religion: in Buryatia and Tuva, which are predominantly Buryat and Tuvan rather than ethnically Russian, the differential against Moscow is at its most extreme.

This is not a new pattern. The Soviet republics’ death rates in the Second World War show the same imperial logic: Belarus at 25.3% of its 1940 population, Ukraine at 16.3%, Russia proper at 12.7%. The periphery bears the cost of the centre’s decisions. Combined and uneven development, as the campist deploys the term to explain why Russia deserves socialist defence, names this pattern without condemning it. The Buryat and Tuvan dead are the human content of that abstraction.

The Russian oligarchs’ war is being paid for in lives from regions that have no institutional leverage over the decision to fight and no political representation in the rooms where that decision was made. That is not a defence of any people. It is the expenditure of some people to secure the interests of others.

The Forest Brothers and the Principle

The campist claim that the FI or Mandel praised Nazi-collaborating partisans as part of their support for Baltic independence deserves a direct answer, because it attempts to delegitimise the entire FI tradition on the national question by attributing to it a position it never held.

Mandel’s 1976 speech ‘Trotskyists and World War Two’, available at Marxists.org, states the principle directly. He uses the IRA’s contacts with Nazi Germany during the Second World War as his example: Seán Russell, the IRA’s Chief of Staff, travelled to Berlin in 1940, underwent explosives training with the Abwehr, and died aboard a German U-boat returning to Ireland in Operation Dove. This is not disputed; it is documented in mainstream historical sources including Mark M. Hull’s academic study Irish Secrets (2003). Mandel’s response is not to condemn Irish resistance to British imperialism. His formulation: a movement by an oppressed nationality against an imperialist occupier is just; leadership collaboration with another imperialist power is grounds to denounce the leadership, not to condemn the movement.

Beyond Perestroika, Mandel’s 1989 Verso book on Gorbachev’s USSR, is available to read. He explicitly condemns the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its implications. He frames the Baltic mobilisations sympathetically as a justified response to what he calls Stalin’s ‘ultra-bureaucratic, repressive and brutal policy with regard to the non-Russian nationalities’. His transitional programme includes ‘the full implementation, within the framework of the Union, of the rights of nationalities to self-administration and self-determination’ as a formal demand. He does not mention the Forest Brothers. He does not endorse wartime partisan formations. The claim conflates support for Baltic independence with endorsement of specific formations that fought under the banner of that independence.

The FI applied the same principle three times in the twentieth century: Finnish resistance to Soviet invasion in 1939-40, despite Finland’s bourgeois government and recent history of white terror against its own working class; Afghan resistance to Soviet intervention in 1979-80, despite the mujaheddin’s reactionary Islamist politics; Baltic independence in 1988-89, despite some formations’ wartime collaboration histories. In each case, Trotsky’s formulation from his 1939 letter: march separately, strike together. Support the people’s right to self-determination without dissolving your organisation into every formation that fights under that banner.

The campist argument requires this principle not to apply to Estonia. No reason is given. The asymmetry is the method.

Pilger, Stone, and Popular Campism

Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire (2016) and John Pilger’s Ukraine journalism are the primary vehicles through which the campist argument reaches audiences beyond the organised left. Both deserve more than dismissal; both exemplify the asymmetric evidentiary standard this series has been documenting.

Pilger’s record as an investigative journalist was serious and should be acknowledged as such. His work on East Timor, on the Iraq sanctions regime, on Western media complicity in imperial violence, stands. His Ukraine writing is a different matter. His 2014 Guardian article describes Putin as ‘the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe’. It repeats the claim, later confirmed as false, that the Obama administration spent $5 billion in 2014 to fund a coup against an elected government. His September 2022 piece on propaganda does not mention Bucha. His Ukraine writing does not engage with the OHCHR civilian casualty data. The rigorous scepticism about Western claims that made his best work essential was suspended entirely when evaluating Russian state claims. This is not anti-imperialism. It is its mirror image.

Ukraine on Fire was directed by Igor Lopatonok, a US-Russian dual citizen who has since appeared regularly on Sputnik, was involved in a 2023 project funded by a Putin-established foundation, and is listed as a ‘Kremlin Mouthpiece’ by Ukraine’s war sanctions programme. An OCCRP investigation published by the Hollywood Reporter documented Lopatonok’s broader pattern: leveraging Stone’s reputation to propose flattering documentaries funded by the autocrats themselves, as with the $5 million received from Nazarbayev’s foundation for a Kazakhstan film. The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent described Ukraine on Fire as part of ‘a series of documentary projects featuring Stone about Russia and Ukraine that reflect a strongly pro-Kremlin worldview‘. The film was broadcast on Russian national television in November 2016, before it received any significant Western distribution. It is now available on Rumble.

None of this makes the NATO expansion critique wrong. It makes these particular sources unreliable guides to the full picture.

The Method, Again

Fourteen thousand dead. Real. Bearing no resemblance to what the argument requires it to bear.

The popular campism assembled in WhatsApp threads and Stop the War meetings is not a different argument from the theorised campism addressed in the previous piece. It is the same method operating at a lower altitude: the same asymmetric evidentiary standard, the same trophy cabinet of real grievances, the same refusal to apply to Russia the analytical rigour applied to Ukraine. The 14,000 figure, the colour revolution framing, the energy profits claim, the Forest Brothers accusation: each is built from something real. The construction built from those materials is not.

The NATO expansion critique deserves a direct answer rather than dismissal. NATO expansion is a real geopolitical phenomenon and Western imperialism’s record in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq is not invented. Those are legitimate anxieties. But no written treaty contained a commitment against eastward expansion: Baker’s ‘not one inch east’ remark was made during German reunification negotiations and concerned NATO military structures in former East Germany, though broader assurances about Eastern Europe were also discussed. What was actually codified in the Treaty on Final Settlement was narrower: no nuclear weapons or non-German NATO forces in former East Germany. Gorbachev himself clarified in 2014 that the topic of NATO expansion as such ‘was not discussed at all’ in formal terms. The assurances given were real; the formal commitment was not. More fundamentally, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 before Ukraine had any NATO membership plan, and Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 precisely because Russia’s invasion demonstrated that non-membership offered no security guarantee. More fundamentally, the critique treats Eastern European countries as naturally subordinate to Russian interests rather than as sovereign states with their own historical experience of Russian military occupation. The Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine did not join or seek to join NATO because Washington told them to. They did so because they had specific and well-founded reasons to fear Russian military power.

The Fourth International’s own analysis names the campist method precisely: the risk of sliding from anti-imperialism to ‘alter-imperialism’, not opposing all imperialist powers and projects but rather opposing one or some while explicitly or tacitly supporting another. That is what the trophy cabinet method produces when applied consistently. Western imperialism’s crimes are real. They are not a reason to support Russian imperialism. As the April 2022 International Viewpoint statement put it: what moral standing does the Russian capitalist oligarchy have to speak about democracy?

Residents of Tuva and Chukotka are 25 times more likely to die in this war than residents of Moscow. That is the war being defended. Those are the people paying for it.

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