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.
