> don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them
I've had a hard time with this one as for weeks it was "Russia is not advancing, yada yada" meanwhile the graphic they showed while saying this clearly showed a map with more occupied territory than the same map the day before and another city under siege which has deteriorated my trust where I was a skeptic before, I did at least think war reporting would be rather accurate. I really got the feeling they were trying to calm us down and getting those talking points from some unified source (the govt?) and worries me that this conflict does in fact have potential to get massively out of hand
The reporting on the war has been fairly consistent: that Russia initially captured a lot of territory in a rapid advance, but overextended themselves and bogged down. Now they're retreating from much of this territory and are trying to reinforce their forces in Donbas. That narrative seems to be well-supported by reporting, and it also perfectly explains what you observed. Don't think anyone is misleading you.
This is also what i have gathered, ive used mostly youtube and r/ukraine to get some views, i do realize they are highly skewed to ukranian side of the conflict, but i prefer it that way, the aggression is absolutely started by Russia so i have no sympathy for them.
Healthy skepticism is important, but I have so far been amazed at how much of the information circulated by the Ukrainian govt has ended up being independently validated. Much of what ends up on reddit is nonsense, but I have begun to trust the govt reports, as so far they seem to be less a distorted picture and more an up to date one.
For me, what makes it believable are the casualty numbers. Ukraine claims Russia lost ~750 tanks. Oryx visually confirmed about 500. The 2/3 ratio of confirmed kills, only via OSINT is insane. That makes claims about lost aircraft - which is way harder to confirm - at least decently believable.
It's amazing that someone can be better informed by purely reading Ukrainian official propaganda than by reading independent news agencies like Reuters. The first has incentives to not lie as to not lose international support while the latter for the sake of being impartial while being unable to verify what's really going on has to take Russian propaganda (which is vastly misinformation) at face value.
For the same reason it’s really easy to get a good idea of where Russia has been attacking, advancing, or retreating throughout the whole deal by simply monitoring the Ukraine propaganda telegram channel. They want to highlight any atrocities committed by Russia to the West on full blast so we get to hear about every missile in every town almost immediately after it happens.
Yes and even from Russia you can't get information if you read between the lines. TASS was quick to report that Moskva "suffered an accident" but the crew was evacuated and later that the ship sunken. It was a strong signal that the crew was NOT evacuated or at least suffered heavy casualties as it typical for this kind of thing. Though this yet to be proved.
Ukrainian propaganda for an instance is obviously not eager to report on their military losses but have to do so to counter-attack Russian propaganda. It's just that it makes sense to be truthful when you are morally justified and in overall winning.
>I've had a hard time with this one as for weeks it was "Russia is not advancing, yada yada"
Same here. I consider myself a big consumer of news from a variety of sources, and it's hard to get nearly any perspective except "Ukraine is dominating the battlefield". It's strange times, but this is the information war.
I think there is a natural instinct to not believe things that are obviously propaganda, so when confronted by a party telling an obvious fantasy it’s pretty important to get the other party’s version, even if also nonsense and hope to suss out the truth.
You don't have to look very hard for the other side's version though.
Question is whether you think "Russia made a planned withdrawal from the north of the country after completing all the objectives of this military exercise which definitely isn't a war" is a more plausible description of the short-lived invasion of the north of the country than "Russia's advances have slowed down... Russia stopped advancing... Russia is retreating...". Both narratives agree that the facts on the ground are that Russian troops made large scale incursions into the north of Ukraine but aren't there any more.
Yes, most Western media has sought to emphasize Russian casualties over Ukrainian ones and Ukrainian minor success over Russian ones, but it's not like Western media hasn't been free to predict Russia will have full control of Mariupol in a couple of days for over a month now and talk up the Russian convoy advancing on Kyiv which never made it there, or like the official Russian narrative isn't palpably absurd.
I mean, you don't fire large numbers of intelligence agents and generals in the middle of a war because you're winning.
Propaganda is one thing, but right now every report we have, incoming from Russian state media, points in the direction of "Russia is getting their ass kicked".
> The baseline expectation was Ukraine folding within 3-4 days
I think the West expected better but not lot better, it does seem that was about what Russia expected (possibly on bad political intelligence on how the population would respond to an invasion.)
To me, it seemed that west expected Ukraine to fold too. And the west also have circles that admire Russia quite a lot while Ukraine was not taken seriously until they started to be serious in battle field.
You still have fawning over Russian this and that, culture, shock over their army being disorganized and corrupt or looting etc, despite them being like that always. While Ukraine was mostly non-existent.
> To me, it seemed that west expected Ukraine to fold too
That was pretty explicitly stated by a number of officials, I just get the feeling that they thought the timeline would be longer than what the Russians were thinking, but probably in the 2-3 week window for the government, in any meaningful form, holding out, with the situation, at best being guerilla resistance after that.
It's funny, I don't recall seeing any pro-Russian sources stating that the goal was to capture all of Ukraine. In fact, they've publicly stated their goals since the beginning, and annexing all of Ukraine was never listed. Where did this idea in the media come from, since it didn't come from Russia..?
Because a state-run news site accidentally published a victory article.
"Ukraine has returned to Russia...It will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state as part of the Russian world...[Russia, Belarus and Ukraine will now act] in geopolitical terms as a single whole,"
Also if you take the time to notice what Putin is saying and doing you will realize that denazification = genocide. The goal was not to arrest Hitler's fans but to destroy Ukrainian nationality.
Firstly, the claim that Russia is actually doing actual "denazification" is such obvious rubbish that no sentient informed person should come close to believing it.
What they do is far more informative than what they say. What they say also includes Mr Putin's frankly unhinged speeches calling for more Russian Lebensraum.
Second, the point of such disinformation is not necessarily to make everyone believe this story, but to muddy that waters so much that people are no longer sure where the truth lies, they either fall back to the "well, there must be truth on both sides" or just give up on ever finding out the truth.
Thus, this kind of disinformation does not need to even be self-consistent or even that believable. But it does need to be relentlessly sent out.
The Ukrainian Azov Battalion is very much proudly Nazi in their ideology, and they don't hide it. Where does this defense of them and their Nazi ideology come from? Nobody disputes they are Nazi's and yet we are supposed to defend them because Russia is the aggressor? Or is there another reason?
Yes, I did and they verify the Nazi ideology of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. Nobody denies the Azov Battalion is full of Nazi's. That's why you're being coy with your responses, rather than providing a source that would dispute it.
> In fact, they've publicly stated their goals since the beginning, and annexing all of Ukraine was never listed.
Well, their publicly stated goal was "this is a training exercise how dare you accuse us of anything", and we all saw how much truth there was to that.
It makes perfect sense not to trust everything Putin says. That doesn't answer the questions though - where did our media get the idea that Russia ever intended on annexing all of Ukraine? They tell us this was a goal, but what is the source of that claim? Russia never made that claim. Only some in the media have, shouldn't we expect sources for claims like that?
..and the central city of Kyiv was the furthest east Russia ever went, which leads us back to the question of where people got the idea that Russia ever intended to annex all of Ukraine.
…you think the most likely explanation is that the Russians attacked Kyiv because that was the furthest west they wanted? They’d just leave the rest alone?
No, the most obvious answer is that they went there to destroy high value targets to weaken Ukraine militarily, making it far easier to do what they want to do in the Donbass/Crimean land bridge area. Now rather than having to deal with the Ukrainian air force, tank units, air defense etc. those obstacles are mostly gone.
> So to put it bluntly, if the 'clever plan' was to lose 10,000 KIA to set conditions to walk away with the Donbas, that's a stupid plan. That's winning the negotiation on a $15k car by cleverly offering an opening bid of $55k and throwing in your old car as a sweetener.
The Donbas isn't really the main target for Russia, since that is already essentially ruled by separatist pro-Russian forces for years. The prize is the area west of there and to the south, connecting Crimea by land and freeing up the water resources that have been blocked.
Admittedly I'm not a historian like the Twitter guy with the bad analogies, but I suspect the furthest west that Russia seeks to control is Kherson (not Odessa), then following the water going back NE of there to Zaporizhzhia & then all the way up towards Kharkiv in some fashion. This gives Russia a ton of natural[1] and industrial resources, plus significantly weakens Ukraine, without having to try and occupy the more populated and less Russian areas west of there towards Kyiv and further. Putin will likely try to sell this as necessary to provide a buffer zone for the heavily Russian Donbas region from Ukrainian shelling.
That being said, I'm just some turd on the internet so I'm probably wrong and nobody knows for sure what Putin's long term plan is.
Well according to the Russian media the west and Lviv particularly was the hotbed of Nazism (back a month ago some distinction was made that that was the particularly bad part of Ukraine, but now it's all teeming with Nazis), so denazification would have to involve the west too. I think it's pretty clear the goal was to replace the government at least, and if they could get another Lukashenko that in itself is almost "annexing"
Well the Azov Battalion was and is in Mariupol (not Lyiv), and they are the vanguard of the Nazi element in Ukraine. As to your point about Putin wanting a more pro-Russian government in Ukraine, of that I have no doubt.
"Azov's military and political wings formally separated in 2016, when the far-right National Corps party was founded. The Azov battalion had by then been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
An effective fighting force that's very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military."
I note that they also say "Moscow has given the regiment an outsized role in the conflict" ... "Ukraine "is not a cesspit for Nazi sympathizers" ... "There are far-right actors prominent in Russia, too." ... "For its part, Russia also has a thriving ultra-nationalist scene that is tolerated by the authorities." ... " some experts say Russia's fixation on a minor player like the Azov movement serves a purpose -- allowing the Kremlin to frame the conflict as an ideological and even existential struggle. However remote from reality that may be."
> "Azov's military and political wings..."
And which one - military or political - is of interest to you?
The first, the military wing, is just another regiment (not a Battalion) under regular military command now.
There are _militant nationalists_ in a country's _national military_ ? No shit, that's literally the right place for them. Any country will be the same: people who want to fight for their country are a natural fit for ... fighting for thier country. Tell me that the USA doesn't have any gung-ho conservative patriots in the armed services ranks before you make a big deal out of this.
This is not remarkable about Ukraine outside of Russian propaganda, as the above CBS and CNN links make clear.
You say that the army is "very much involved in the current conflict"? No fooling, what else would the actual army be doing in wartime?
The second, political:
Myth: "Nazism is rampant in Ukrainian politics and society, supported by authorities in Kyiv."
Reality: "The candidate for the far-right nationalist party, Svoboda, won 1.6% of the vote in the 2019 presidential election."
That is not an indicator of widespread "neo-Nazi leanings".
So why do you continually bring this misleading scare story up? It's nothing but Russian propaganda talking points that don't have basis in current reality. The CBS link above made that clear, but you did not respond to it. Your own CNN report says the same.
Talk to us about the same in Russian military (e.g. Wagner Group) and society (Mr Putin's recent unhinged speeches calling for more Russian Lebensraum) before you say that this is a Ukrainian problem.
So first you say Azov no longer exists, and then when you get called out for spreading disinformation, you write a text wall explaining why although the Azov Nazi's are very much still prevalent in Ukraine and fighting in this conflict, that it doesn't matter.
no, I said that "the Azov Battalion" hasn't existed since 2015, when it ceased to be either independent of the military or a Battalion. This doesn't stop you using the misleading phrase.
> and then when you get called out
Cherry-picking quotes from a CNN article, without attribution, does not constitute a "call out".
> you write a text wall
I'm sorry if you didn't take the time to read it, but that is not a counter-argument in any way. First you say "you can't back up your claims with sources" then you change to "oh no, too many claims and sources, and thanks for locating my source for me, but let me fail to talk about any of them at all, but let's repeat a slur word and finish up with a 'zinger'!".
Well his take is a very polite and admirable way of calling Russia's arguments blatant lies without calling them blatant lies, and calling their perpetrators liars without calling them liars.
What you replied to said nothing about annexing all of Ukraine. Almost all evidence suggests Russia expected they would capture Kyiv and Ukraine would capitulate quickly.
Except Putin has publicly stated his goals since before the invasion and during, and they've not publicly changed. And at no point was annexing all of Ukraine a stated goal. I only bring it up because I'm curious where it came from.
> Except Putin has publicly stated his goals since before the invasion and during, and they've not publicly changed.
Sometimes what a person says and a person does don’t agree. In situations like that—you don’t need to believe what they say! You can just accept they lied and move on.
Maps of territory are a terrible way to show the state of the war. This article provides some color and might help underscore why the narrative could be correct even if the maps look otherwise: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/07/russia-war-ukraine-maps...
Maps of territory are a terrible way of showing ANY political conflict.
It's the same as the maps of county-by-county US election results that show a sea of red that equate to a population smaller than LA county.
People are the important unit in political conflicts and Russia is very much struggling to take any meaningfully populated area (See: Chernobyl, a place where sane humans refuse to go, being one of the first trophies)
I fully agree but it's my go to when my level of time investment is very low. First few weeks I was checking in maybe 5 minutes a day for the headlines, saw no real ground footage and only the maps and cities under siege. The next couple weeks I checked in less frequently but began seeing more imagery of the destruction/human toll. As of now, I haven't looked at any news on the topic this week at all.
The article you linked to disagrees: "Maps, after all, remain crucial for our understanding of conflicts. Even if they are abstractions, they remain immensely useful."
Maps should not be treated as simple visualizations. They can (and should) contain plenty of information, and interpreting them properly often takes a lot of skill and effort.
I can't remember a time in my life when war reporting was accurate.
I do find it interesting, though, that the media is willing to show the civilian casualties of this war, when there was a practical media blackout on the same type of reporting of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
That's not surprising at all. American forces had a very bad experience with reporters that reported damning stories about them in Vietnam. In Iraq and Afghanistan they took actions to make that kind of reporting hard, and the reporting they wanted easy. It wasn't even that secret and I'm fairly sure I at least saw some reporting on that they where doing this in Norwegian, and possibly British media.
There is a lot of OSINT now, given that the war theatre is located in a developed country with network coverage and a dozen million smartphones. From this point of view, accuracy is probably better than in previous wars. We didn't have much OSINT from Hindu Kush.
> I did at least think war reporting would be rather accurate.
I can't imagine why. There are massive disinformation campaigns and only a psychopath could be an impartial observer while watching two sides kill each other.
The "fog of war" is hard to penetrate for anyone, from reporters to combatants.
Maybe accurate is the wrong word, but consistent based on the information available even if disinformation. I didn't expect the new to be the source of the disinformation in regards to war. It also seemed to me to take a very long time to get any real footage of what was going on, war correspondents and so on.
I recall with the early days of Iraq and the Baghdad invasion that I felt like I was getting the full picture. Perhaps because it was US forces with journalists in tow. The reason we were there was highly questionable and suspicious but I felt like I was getting a rather accurate picture of what happened on the ground.
I say all this but should also mention that my perception could also be significantly off. I am not a regular consumer of news and this just happens to be what I'd see when I decided to get a quick update on the situation.
I've had a hard time with this one as for weeks it was "Russia is not advancing, yada yada" meanwhile the graphic they showed while saying this clearly showed a map with more occupied territory than the same map the day before and another city under siege which has deteriorated my trust where I was a skeptic before, I did at least think war reporting would be rather accurate. I really got the feeling they were trying to calm us down and getting those talking points from some unified source (the govt?) and worries me that this conflict does in fact have potential to get massively out of hand