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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show that's been fighting numerical disinformation

since before it was fashionable.

It's the last episode of the current Radio 4 series and we have plenty to be getting

on with.

This week our listeners have asked us to check the Prime Minister's parliamentary

boasts about NHS staffing. The Chegos Islands are reportedly 100 metres below sea level and

I don't think that's what the word island means so we'll be looking into that. How long

do you have to drive an electric car to offset the pollution from making the battery? And

do we really make 35,000 decisions a day?

But first, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been understandably dominating the news.

And listeners have been asking what to make of some of the figures they've been hearing

and reading. So on Tuesday morning I got some pointers from Henry Boyd. He's a research

fellow for defence and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic

Studies, I think Tank in London.

The war was preceded by a build up of Russian troops on the borders of Ukraine. But how many

troops? Numbers such as 100,000, 150,000 and even 190,000 have been circulating. So I

started by asking Henry Boyd about those estimates.

In parallel with intelligence estimates being produced in government, open source analysts

have been using commercial social media and satellite imagery to follow rail movements

inside Russia to the Ukrainian border and have been able to basically track these units

from their home bases to staging areas near the Ukrainian border. These reinforcements

...