For example, is it 100 soldiers refusing to fight, or 100,000? The former is noise, the latter is an actual problem.
Remember the flag burning photos they used to regularly show in the middle East?
It always looked like a huge crowd, but I remember seeing the regular photos and eventually realizing it was often a tiny crowd of people.
It might only be 20 extremists that the camera was tightly focused on. They often had the camera zoomed in and low to the ground and slightly pointed up so you couldn't clearly see how empty the area was.
And that was a natural consequence of the photographer/TV crew wanting to make money.
They wanted to make it look really packed/busy because it sells more pictures/attracts more viewers.
I’m afraid this subthread is an example of HNers being too clever by half. Sometimes the simple narrative that you find in major media outlets is the truth. It’s honestly quite interesting to see the mental gymnastics that people have to engage in to somehow convince themselves that this war is going well for Russia - and not because they support Russia, but merely because they hate the idea of agreeing with the New York Times.
There have been several major, heavily hyped stories about the war so far that just weeks later were admitted to be deliberate lies to booster Ukrainian morale. The Ghost of Kiev and his many kills: never existed. The "fuck you Russian battleship" guy who turned out to be captured, not heroically self sacrificed. Etc. These events weren't mere exaggerations, they were entirely made up.
Given this it's pretty reasonable for rational people to assume we have no idea how the war is going. After all, for every made up Russian kill that gets detected there must be many more that don't. And the same in the opposite direction with Russian state media of course.
They were also completely inconsequential stories as far as the overall progress of the war is concerned. You're cherry picking some incomplete or inaccurate stories then using these as a (poor) justification for disbelieving well-confirmed facts about Russian losses.
A sunk battleship is a sunk battleship, no doubt about that. And I certainly haven't heard any reports claiming the Russian attack is going well.
But the first time I heard a "top general" had been killed, my mind naturally went to generals I've heard of - the MacArthurs and Zhukovs of this world. If instead it was a one-star general and the Russians have 200 other generals just as capable, the loss might be far less consequential.
There are also a lot of figures floating around that are ripe for causing such confusion. Javelin missiles have a 90-95% kill rate; Ukraine has received 17,000 antitank missiles and says they need 500 per day; any yet, only 400 russian tanks have been destroyed in total?
One can still hope and wish for a free Ukraine while doing it with our eyes open. You can read the news while being aware of the bias in the media.
In future, just don't ask the question if you don't want to hear the truth. The only mental gymnastics going on is you reading far too much into people attempting to answer your question.
What I'd really like to know is what people who believe that the Russian military has acted competently believe about the situation on the ground. Do they think, for example, that Russia is actually in control of large areas of Ukraine and is making significant advances? Do they think that Zelenski is close to capitulating? Or do they somehow believe that the Russian armed forces have failed to achieve all of their strategic goals and yet not actually been incompetent?
Hell, just looking at Putin's facial expressions tells you as much, and that's just one tiny piece of information.
A little bit of selection bias doesn't mean that the signal disappears.
The British, of course, went on to trounce the Argentines.
Specific facts which are true themselves but have their significance wildly misrepresented (either through the ignorance of journalists or manipulativeness of military media personnel) to partisan media are very common forms of wartime propaganda. Ships are generally considered thought to be easy to sink with the right ordnance when parked along a coast, and it is not uncommon for a military we consider relatively incompetent to be able to sink some of those owned by a G7 power.
Also, the Russians have had plenty of time to read the board of enquiry report on the sinking of HMS Sheffield. The same mistakes shouldn’t be repeated again.
To say that the British came very close to losing marks you as a victim of that wartime propaganda. Sinking that single ship, the Sheffield, caused Argentina to lose 30% of their jets. At that rate, at most, they could have sunk two more ships if they were lucky. When you look at the basic realities of materiel exchange it becomes comical to ever suggest that the British were ever at a disadvantage, but here we are decades later and the idea that the British were ever so close to losing a water war against Argentina is still in people's heads. Quod erat demonstrandum!
If the British were prepared to lose some ships over something as economically and tactically insignificant as the Falkland Islands, what will Russia be willing to lose to not have a NATO supply line run straight up to a massive land border marching distance from Belgorod?
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are NATO members. Russia already has that massive land border on the west, marching distance from Saint Petersburg.
I don't believe what Russian officials are saying about their justifications and goals is true. Russians are simply trying to expand their empire, like they were doing for centuries.
The Ukrainian border is over 2200 with dozens.
Maybe Russia is simply doing as you say, I have no comment on that and cannot peer into the inscrutable psyche of Russian elites to know for a fact that they would have still invaded had there been no NATO expansion, but the assertion that the Baltics are strategically equivalent to Ukraine in a NATO-Russia conflict is laughable nonsense.
I love Ukraine and its people and am heavily personally invested in the future of the country. My children are Ukrainian citizens. When people say things that are basely untrue it does not help promote quick conflict resolution or prevent further bloodshed. Circulating falsehoods doesn't help anyone.
The most efficient shipping method is by sea, the fastest one is by air. The importance of that chokepoint is debatable. Flying distance to Moscow is different but not substantially so, 450 versus 600 km. There's nothing too important in Belgorod or Rostov, while Saint Petersburg is 2-nd most populated city, and has industries related to the military.
Historically, Russian governments also viewed these places as strategically important. They annexed these lands by force, twice: after the Great Northern War of 1700–1721, then once again after WW2.
Ukraine, on the other hand, doesn’t belong to Russia. If Russia invade Ukraine to prevent NATO at their border, they now have a much longer of that border to protect. They also have to spread their force to fight the insurgency within Ukraine. Finally, Finland now decide to join NATO because of the invasion, exposing Russia to a much bigger threat.
I doubt Russia didn’t see any of those scenarios before they decided to invade Ukraine, so no, it doesn’t make sense to do it because of NATO expansion. Rather, Russia consider Ukraine part of their influence sphere and can’t accept the fact that Ukraine’s people don’t want to be under their manipulation. Russia want to go back to their glory past. Not to mention the resource Ukraine would bring to the empire. NATO is just an excuse.
>At that rate, at most, they could have sunk two more ships if they were lucky
And how many aircraft carriers did the UK deploy to the Falklands? Two :) Just sinking one carrier would have required the withdrawal of the task force. As Admiral Woodward put it, "the Argentinian commanders failed inexplicably to realize that if they had hit either of our aircraft carriers, the British would have been finished."
At the start of the war, Russia knew that Ukraine had an anti-ship missile in development but not ready for deployment, so they didn't take precautions. Clearly, the Ukrainian missile developers put in some overtime. After the Moskva strike, Russia bombed the missile factory and moved their ships farther out.
Argentina was the aggressor, and thought (as did most of the world) that the British would not be able to do anything about the invasion.
No one was surprised that Argentina sunk the Sheffield - what surprised the world was how badly Argentina ran the war. Argentina had more and better air power (I recall it was on the order of 50 or so Harriers vs. 122 Argentine aircraft), but failed to use it to achieve anything that resembled air superiority.
> Ships are generally considered thought to be easy to sink with the right ordnance when parked along a coast, and it is not uncommon for a military we consider relatively incompetent to be able to sink some of those owned by a G7 power.
I think it is pretty uncommon to read about a warship being sunk. Modern navies tend to fight at stand-off distances and use layered defenses, where a large ship isn't unescorted, especially when in range of shore based defenses.
If you are interested in some backstory on the Moskva, Michael Kofman covers some in an interview[1]. It seems to be true that two Ukrainian missiles struck it and it sank sometime later, but the rest of the story is uncertain. Kofman describes the Moskva as an antiquated rust bucket, with its defensive systems likely not even functional.
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/ukraines-military-advantag...
Fire sinks ships. In WWII most ships that went to the bottom didn't blow up. They caught on fire, and eventually, sank or were scuttled. If Moskva wasn't ready to fight, was defenseless, or even sea-worthy, what does it say about leadership to put it in range of anti-ship missiles? Finally, the story on Moskva is that it was sunk by a country that barely has a Navy.
You know, that is the kind of truth that actually adds to the story of how bad Russia is doing rather than mitigating that story. Unless that wasn't their flagship (in that fleet), but I never saw that part of the narrative disputed.
Propaganda works by selecting some facts and amplifying them, all the while hiding others. Note how Ukrainian military losses are never reported, for example. Photos of destroyed Russian tanks are all over the place, but not a single photo of destroyed Ukrainian equipment. The coverage is very selective to paint a specific picture.
That was because after the soldiers said that the feed got cut off and Ukraine didn't hear back from the soldiers until Russia said they were captured. So up until as it was revealed they were captured, the worst was assumed.
>but not a single photo of destroyed Ukrainian equipment
There are many photos like this, did you even bother to look?
Oryx's blog for example has 1,040 photos of destroyed/captured Ukrainian equipment
Tolerating propaganda from friendly sources who are at war is hardly asking to be deceived.
Not in the mainstream press.
The mere fact that Ukraine still is not occupied by Russia tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
Brotherly, but not in equal sense. More like stupid little brother that can't take care of himself.
It is widely known that Russians, for some reason, consider themselves superior out of all Eastern Europe Slavs.
The stupid (or rather gullible/inane) angle is a fairly recent government spin to justify the aggression.
> The stupid (or rather gullible/inane) angle is a fairly recent government spin to justify the aggression.
By "recent" you mean since imperial time?
LOL? It's not like 18 y.o. are significantly older, but claiming they are 16?
>> which is mandatory for all male citizens ages 18–27, with a number of exceptions
You can just copy-paste that comment for virtually every army out there. Ukraine is holding up because it is massively supplied with modern weapons that they never had in the first place by foreign powers: this is clearly a proxy war, not a bunch of peasants pushing back well-armed Russians.
Western intelligence was expecting Russians to capture Kyiv within several days of the war [1]
Therefore, western countries refused to supply heavy weapons. They remember the 7 billion of military equipment they supplied to Afghanistan [2]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/us-expects-kyiv-fall-days-ukraine-s...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-l...
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the rest of your comment. Yes, Ukraine has Western aid. That doesn’t negate Russian incompetence or mean that Russia is somehow actually winning. For example, it doesn’t explain how the Moskva was unable to defend itself against a small number of current-generation sea-skimming missiles (a threat that’s been around for at least a couple of decades).
Remember, the Russian invasion already happened when they marched into the Crimea. This is just a continuation.
that is very likely the case, because the Ukrainians have lied before and afterwards about similar ships
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_patrol_boat_Vasily_Byk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_frigate_Admiral_Makaro...
check out the talk pages. each ship was confirmed to have been sunk by some authorities and had a highly detailed account of the event published by some media