You crack me up.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.