Their approach has historically been to just throw whatever people and equipment they have at the front and overwhelm with numbers. I suspect they initially sought a different approach and fell back on ol' reliable.

Check out a site like Ground News if you want to look at a story across the board on perspectives. It gives pretty great insight into how stories are framed differently among competing publications.

> they undeniably continue to fight and serve Putin's wishes

Sure. Against an opponent they were widely expected to knock out in a matter of days/weeks. A year later.

Stubbornness and a willingness to send men to their deaths for no good reason should not be mistaken for competence.

All that may well be true, but sometimes I am just curious about the facts. For instance, when the US was invading Iraq, they encountered a sandstorm that delayed them for quite a bit in Mar 2003. The news around me at the time had red pictures of US troops stalled in the advance and unable to progress and whatnot https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp9mBlygryI/

Underneath you knew the US-led Coalition was a monstrous force that was ultimately going to smash Saddam Hussein's army, but the news would report on the delays. And in some parts of the world where I was traveling through, they'd talk about how the coalition was not powerful because they were delayed so long to Baghdad or whatever. It wasn't true, they were going to win for sure.

It would just have been cool to have known the truth. Not that I would have done anything with it. But just to know would have been good.

Not to make this political, but it's sort of like on Reddit when Ron Paul was running for President. The site was full of stuff of about it's going to happen. In that case, you could just go try some other site and it was okay, but on Russia's invasion of Crimea, or on this more recent invasion, you can't really find out the truth.

You have to go find some OSINT Twitter Feed and form a picture of who is sending propaganda and who not. It's a natural result of the importance of media, but still, it would be nice just to know for the sake of knowledge.

Hah. Lol. Tell us the "truth" of the Crimean invasion! Oh yes, the truth comes from Twitter.

You crack me up.

Well, what do you think it is and how did you come to believe what you do? I am admitting ignorance so obviously I can't really answer that question.

What do you feel is in dispute over the 2014 Crimea invasion and annexation?

Several things are in dispute. Some people on Twitter say it didn't happen. The Russian Federation vacilates between "we've always owned crimea" and "we didn't invade, but we helped some separatists." The current Ukrainian government asserts that the Russians invaded Crimea.

I deeply respect Vladislav Surkov and his ability to weave a dazzling narrative. But at the end of the day most of the talking points he constructed regarding Ukraine and Donbas are complete BS.

> Some people on Twitter say it didn't happen.

Come on. The existence of gravity is debatable if that's your standard.

> The current Ukrainian government asserts that the Russians invaded Crimea.

If you think this is debatable, I don't know what to tell you.

Didn't mean "he current Ukrainian government asserts that the Russians invaded Crimea" was debatable, but that the Ukrainian government asserted the Russians invaded Crimea and that the Russians for quite some time claimed they didn't (and that they didn't know who the LGMs seen in Crimea were.)

But getting back to this gravity thing... sure stuff frequently falls to the ground, but have you ever SEEN gravity itself? [Yes, this is a joke, but your point is well taken, I had a comment a bit ago about how it's hard to take some twitters comments seriously and that they often seem to just spout BS. The good news is that it's not everybody spouting BS, but it often seems like most people are.]

I think you're mistaking "someone is lying" for "there is a genuine dispute".

North Korea claimed to have found a unicorn lair (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/30/unicorn-lair-d...), but the existence of unicorns is not in dispute.

Russia claimed to have no involvement in Crimea (later admitting they had); they also claimed the day before invading Ukraine they had no plans to do so. These are just bald-faced lies, and I think it's important to differentiate between that and "it's not possible to tell what the real truth is" scenarios.

Well... I wasn't in the Crimea in 2014 so I don't have direct experience. But journalists I trust from the BBC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times were there and reported directly observing irregulars with sterile uniforms (no unit or country insignia) speaking Russian with Russian equipment and weapons.

It is widely believed Russia provided arms, equipment and personnel to aid paramilitary separatists, effectively taking over Crimea in 2014.

Despite earlier attempts to hide their involvement, Russian defense minister Sergey Shoygu admitted russian forces were involved.

While I often recommend readers take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt and try to verify citations, the "Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation" article recounts a narrative consistent with my memory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_...

I shouldn't say Twitter sources do the exact opposite, however. Twitter is a "bullshit generator" in the way Harry Frankfort used the term. While there are many accounts on Twitter that appear to support observations in consensus reality (the sky is up, water is wet, fire is hot, Russia invaded Crimea, etc.), they are often drowned out by comments by people who don't care about the factual nature of their statements. They may say something that's externally falsifiable, or maybe they won't; demonstrable falsifiablity is not germane to their narrative. They're not actively lying, because lying involves a level of self awareness (and awareness of external reality) that they do not seem to possess.

Clearly it's not everyone on Twitter behaving this way, but enough of Twitter acts as a bullshit generator that it's hard to separate people who are right, wrong, duplicitous, ill informed or just plain spouting BS.

We know that they're bringing ancient equipment out of storage, and have lost more than 10,000 vehicles, and that's only the verified losses.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

Now the small amount of modern equipment they have are being shown to be in bad condition too.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then there's really a chance that it might be a duck.

Russia has proven to be weak on the battlefield so have been forced to pivot to a war of attrition, hoping to win by sending more men into the meat grinder and using systematic war crimes, I presume in an effort to weaken the defenders' resolve.

Part of it is consuming extremes from both sides and figuring out the Venn diagram of the truth based on what both parties are acknowledging. You can also look at a variety of commenters who are reasonably middle-ground in their analysis. On YT, for me, I consume Perun (pro-Ukraine but largely factual analysis), WillyOAM, Military History Visualized, and History Legends (comes across kinda pro-Russia). I also like the ( https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/ ) subreddit, which has Russian-leaning mods, oddly making it perhaps the least-biased subreddit on the war (everywhere else is a DEEP pro-Ukraine echo chamber, including r/combatfootage). For general reasonably-non-biased news, avoid r/worldnews and visit...... r/anime_titties (note the underscore). Seriously, that's a news aggregator subreddit.

The Russian army was several times the size of the Ukrainian in troops and armored vehicles. Their air force was even larger, relatively speaking. They've been a major arms exporter for half a century, with all kinds of supposedly cutting-edge equipment (like these tanks). They were one of the largest and deadliest militaries in the world, on paper. This was supposed to be an absolute cake walk for them, and the result was considered a foregone conclusion.

More than a year later, they're struggling to hold on to a few border regions against Ukrainian counterattack--and to accomplish that required large-scale conscription and rolling out obsolete mothballed equipment.

So I wouldn't dismiss reports like these as propaganda so easily, myself...

I think of it as roughly equivalent to Texas seceding from the US, the US invading, then being pushed back and desperately trying to hold on to El Paso and Amarillo to the point that they are putting conscripts into M60s and sending them to the front lines.