I am angry at the Russian Federation and impressed with the Ukrainians and terribly sad at the suffering that this war has caused and will cause for the next de

I am angry at the Russian Federation and impressed with the Ukrainians and terribly sad at the suffering that this war has caused and will cause for the next decade. I also find the way in which this war is being documented on and reported quite amazing. As a very young man, my first experience with war that I can remember was my parents watching the reports on the Vietnam war. They were pretty glued to their TVs and unlike the wars before that one, there was video every day and updates every day. They felt they really "understood" what was going on because they were so very well informed. They had seen it with their own eyes after all! However later, much later, after the war was over and more and more information about the prosecution of the war came out, it became abundantly clear that what they had "seen" was carefully managed by outside forces to convey certain "truths" which were in fact simply narratives drawn from helpful facts with unhelpful facts omitted. There was of course other news coverage, in China (assumed to be all "propaganda") in Vietnam (presumed to be slanted toward their wants and needs), and so it was widely held by the adults that my parents socialized with (Air Force types) that the US coverage was "best, and most reliable." It was also impossible to get on the spot translations of the other stories so it could take days or weeks before you even got to read the "other side" and by then it was often overtaken by events. This war is very different. Different even than the recent middle eastern wars of the late 20th and early 21st century. If you were an American you could be forgiven, if you watched the news, for forgetting that the US was even in a war, much less the driving force behind it. This war has an overload of information, from Twitter, to Facebook, to Tik-tok, and of course various media outlets all around the world. It fundamentally changes how one perceives and understands what is going on. While in previous wars the crafting of a narrative was the side hustle of the folks responsible for communications, in this war it is a huge part of the offensive. This "information war" which works to frame the war in a way that is useful to the framer. Not surprisingly, it isn't nearly so easy to tell only one side of any story. I find this Reuter's story a good example of that. Who are they talking to? What experts are "stumped"? Why is the story they tell important or not important to their intended audience? The more I read the more I recognize that nobody knows what is "really" going on. Some Russians are deserting but no concept of how many or how fast, Ukraine is winning skirmishes, but again big ones? little ones? How does it inform us on where this is going next? I don't think anyone knows.