MOSCOW, Aug. 22 -- The Russian defence ministry published a number on Friday evening. Between eight in the morning and eight at night, Moscow time, air defence crews on duty intercepted and destroyed 211 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. Six days earlier, the same ministry's data produced a figure of 1,478 for a single day. Both numbers were published. Neither can be independently checked, and they are not counting the same thing.

The daily interception tally has become the most widely republished and least verifiable statistic of this war, and the gap between those two figures is not a story about escalation. It is a story about how the arithmetic is assembled.

Friday's 211 belongs to what is effectively the ministry's ter...