Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast.

We are weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.

It's become something of a festive tradition on More or Less to try to explain some of

the biggest stories and trends of the year gone by in numbers, and 2022 is no exception.

Once again, we're joined by friends of the show Old and New to talk about some of the

numbers they felt helped tell the stories of the year, whether fun, profound, or tragic.

Let's start with a conflict that dominated global headlines since it broke out in February

when Russia invaded Ukraine, and some numbers would rather not have to talk about.

Olga has been studying the casualties of the war since it began.

Well, unfortunately, all those numbers are very sad numbers. Many of them have a lot of zero

that end, thousands and thousands, and for me, as soon as it gets to thousands, it becomes,

you know, sort of unrealistic is just too much to bear.

But there's one terrible detail that stuck with Olga.

The total count of the kids' scale is at least 424, that's a figure provided by the UN.

I think that just shows how brutal this conflict is, how brutal the shilling is.

The United Nations says that as of mid-December, it's been able to verify the deaths of 6,755

civilians. But that's likely to be at the very low end of estimates, because of the levels of

destruction in some places, and the lack of access to the areas of Ukraine still under Russian control.

My house was hit, and all the houses around it were hit, so it's really carpet bombing.

And yesterday, they made a first mass grave.

The three-month siege of the south-eastern city of Maripol is just one devastating example.

According to Ukraine, it's 20,000 who died in Maripol only, just in one city, so the scale of this

...