Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, March 3rd. I'm Nyla Budu. Today

are one big thing. The Texas crackdown on care for trans youth. But first, the Ukrainians

killed in Putin's war.

As we enter the second week of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we're just starting to understand

the human cost of this war. Axios and Zeg Basu has been tracking civilian deaths, and

he's here with us. Zeg, what do we know so far about how many civilians have been reported

killed?

I mean, the situation is changing so fast on the ground. But what we know is that Ukraine's

state emergency service said for the first time yesterday that more than 2,000 Ukrainian

civilians have died so far. The UN has put the official number far lower at about 500

million deaths, but they've cautioned that it's likely to rise a lot more.

The people who are paying attention to this are seeing so many different sources. How do

you think people should be approaching thinking about this?

I mean, while there's one clear aggressor in the war, and that's Russia, you have to

remember that both sides have an agenda and a certain narrative that they want to paint.

For example, the Ukrainians have said that they've killed 5,000 Russian soldiers. Russia

said for the first time, the first time they've acknowledged the real death poll yesterday

that 500 Russian soldiers have died. So it's a vast gap between those two figures. So

what I would recommend is relying on figures from the United Nations, which may be a bit delayed,

but those are definitely the most reliable ones that you can get.

And unfortunately, we're just going to continue to see these numbers grow.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've seen some Russian siege tactics against cities like Kharkiv

...