One can examine each image and see if the object displayed in it is unique. I saw one news report which had multiple photos of the same object but taken from different angles and it must be said, from different people. Authentic very much so, however the number of images needs to be normalised with the number of objects.
There is a whole "OSINT" (open source intelligence) community doing just that and publishing counts. They also try to geolocate the images via terrain and buildings using maps, satellite images, etc to disambiguate.
Pretty odd way to pass the time ... but they seem to be confident in substantial Russian losses.
I am pretty sure Russian losses are very large, no one should doubt that, after all, they entered another country and are taking on their full military power headfirst... however, we cannot expect the Russians will simply go back home on the face of any resistance: we should expect them to fight harder and harder until they get their way, or finally give up, but at a very high cost... I mean, I admire Ukrainians putting up a resistance to a much larger enemy like they're doing, but in my view, if Ukrainians fight til' the end, this will only end with one of two scenarios:
* Russians leave humiliated and broken.
* Ukrainians finally capitulate.
In the first case, Russians are likely to first destroy everything in their path before leaving, because they will want to show they did not go home without inflicting more pain than they suffered.
In the second, the outcome is actually similar, but Russians don't leave for a while at least (Putin seems to intend to install a puppet government, then leave).
In both cases, there's almost nothing left standing in the whole of Ukraine. Unless they stop the fighting and negotiate, this seems to be the inevitable outcome.
