4 ms·

What id like to know is what happened to Russia retreating from Ukraine, as many sources originally said they would. They seem to have taken a good chunk of Ukr

What id like to know is what happened to Russia retreating from Ukraine, as many sources originally said they would. They seem to have taken a good chunk of Ukraine just this past week, and there’s no news of this unless I dig into shady sources. What the fuck is going on with our news?

admax88qqq 4y ago
Mainstream news is known to be shit, not sure why you're surprised, or acting surprised. There's non shady sources like understandingwar.org which have given pretty good tracking of the war.
- rnd0 4y ago
  I don't trust the whole "mainstream news" narrative. It implies that there are news sources that somehow aren't driven by some $#^holes' ideological or corporate motives. "understandingwar", for instance. Who are they, who funds them and why on earth should I trust them? I'm critical of cnn etc but personally I think they're more credible than some NGO-sponsored blog IMO
  - yucky 4y ago
    >"understandingwar", for instance. Who are they, who funds them and why on earth should I trust them? Funny you should ask! Bill Kristol is on their Board[1], and for those who don't know who Bill Kristol is, he is one of the foremost Neocons in the US, behind such hits as WMD's in Iraq and 20-years of Adventure in Afghanistan. Most of the rest of the Board appears to be like-minded neocons who beat the drums of war (and more importantly, intervention) every chance they get. [1] https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Non shady sources, huh? Let's take a look. That web site is run by "The Institute for the Study of War", ISW. Here's what Wikipedia says: "ISW generally advocates to increase American military involvement in international conflicts. Their political stances tend to align with the business interests of the ISW's funders, whose activities include producing tanks and weapon systems." There's a list of their board members at https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are. There are two former generals listed, General David H. Petraeus who was the commander of US forces in Iraq for a while, and General Jack Keane. Keane was an advisor on the US occupation of Iraq on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. Along with Frederick Kagan, Keane wrote a paper called "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq". Kagan's wife Kimberly Kagan is the president of the ISW. You've also got William Kristol listed as a member of the board, Kristol is a neoconservative who argued for the "surge" in Iraq, he is a co-founder of the "Project for the New American Century" which is a neo-conservative think tank. PNAC argued for regime change in Iraq starting in the 1990's. The other co-founder of PNAC was Robert Kagan, Frederick Kagan's brother. Another board member listed is Joe Lieberman, who was a major support of the Iraq war when he was in the Senate. There's another half dozen or so people on the board that I don't recognize, but I don't have to dig much further to know that if somebody wants to get their news from the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq war, understandingwar.org is definitely a go-to source. Then again, I don't trust CNN either.
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    Oh I don't doubt they have a US slant, but their reporting is far more nuanced than the mass market cable/internet news channels that are driven by eyeballs/clicks.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
That's public knowledge no? Russia claims to help Russians, but all they want is Crimea with the newly found gas ( that could replace Russia's). In the mean time, they are trying to take every territory from Ukraine that is resource-rich. And burning/killing everything that lives on it ( since they are not interested in the people)
- sharikous 4y ago
  > And burning/killing everything that lives on it ( since they are not interested in the people) The hostile one yes, but in those areas you have strong pro-Russian sentiments. To the point that the local population collaborates with the Russian troops. And Ukrainian shellings on the rebel strongholds and secret police arrests of potential "traitors" is amplifying the polarization
  - NicoJuicy 4y ago
    That may be true 8 years ago, but the pro Russian sentiment in Ukraine in those areas has been in decline ever since the invasion.
ayngg 4y ago
Their initial campaign was to blitz the entire country and was shown to be overly ambitious. Since then it appears they have scaled back and changed their strategy towards securing the eastern portion of Ukraine, which is what is happening now and has been fairly successful. Essentially none of the news outlets have provided good coverage on what is happening, because if they did it would reveal how poorly the western powers navigated this, and how much of a disaster this entire thing has been for Europe, irrespective of its effect on Russia.
- DSingularity 4y ago
  Reality is their initial plan was probably to force enough to commitments by Ukraine to hold Kiev to enable the campaign of slow, steady, encircle, advance, and repeat campaign in the East. It’s kind of how in chess you attack a line to pin pieces which would otherwise be used to counter attack. People who thought Russia didn’t know the probability of taking Kiev in a blitz is effectively zero are propagandized.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  By definition wars are large scale conflicts involving many actors, all interconnected. If it could easily be followed then everyone is doing things horribly wrong if they wind up so predictable and not cycling through manuevers and countermanuvers. It isn't some grand conspiracy - war is hard and only fools have believed otherwise. "Be home by Christmas" is a synonym for foolishly optimistic for a reason.
thegrim33 4y ago
The news are primarily propaganda outlets nowadays, their goal is no longer in any sense to tell you what's happening in the world, they're for spreading political/social ideology. The concerted, coordinated, effort to push as much anti-Russia propaganda as possible at the beginning of this should have been immediately obvious to you and if it wasn't you're still pretty blind as to what's going on. Doing everything they could to make Russia seem weak, useless, a failure, etc., was one of the main narrative pushes.
CyanBird 4y ago
> What the fuck is going on with our news? Nothing out of the ordinary, you also thought that the Cubans used to eat babies in Angola, or that the Iraqis honestly threw out babies out of incubators? Come on John Stockwell has got couple of very good book on how The Agency used to administer news outlets and black information operations back when he was team lead, forget chomsky forget the church committee and Bernays, Stockwell goes quite deep into how it all actually operates
rnd0 4y ago
In the US there's long been the meme of watching "both sides" of the news IE cnn and fox and assuming the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think by now it's been established that this is a false assumption and that you simply end up with two different sets of lies intended to distract you from thinking about whatever. Likewise, while it's obvious that whatever comes from the Russian state media is complete garbage I think it's safe to assume that most of the news we see here in the west is also distorted propaganda as well; to some degree, at least. If by omission if nothing else ...what they say may be true, but it's clear they're leaving a lot of things out. In short; treat everything like Pravda.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  What the hell is the "whatever" that everyone is convinced that the totality of human media efforts are supposed to be disstracting us from? Literal space aliens, literal demons, religion, communism, fear of death, fear of life, pollution, the coming fall of government, the apocalypse, and modern life being meaningless. Pardon the redundancies but the rhetoric is far more a rorsarch test or method of indexing than an objective truth. I have mostly seen it as a squid-in-mouth level of crazy personal assumptions projected onto everybody else by a fanatic to explain the impossibility that nobody else cares.
heretogetout 4y ago
I think it's mainly that was is messy and hard to report on in the moment. There's propaganda coming in from all angles, of course, muddying the water further. FWIW Washington Post reported on Russian success in Lysychansk just this morning.
simonblack 4y ago
If you just take Western Main Stream Media, you just get the Western slant on things. And that is not necessarily truthful. Learn to take news feeds from all over the world. Get a more balanced picture. You may be surprised that news from other countries that doesn't have a Western slant is likely to be just as accurate or even more accurate than Western News media. The West is a mere one-eighth of the world. We in the West tend to forget that. China alone is half as big again as the entire combined West. As also is India. The "Ukraine is beating Russia" and "Russia is running out of everything" rubbish that was all the go back in March, all of a sudden has to be walked back due to Russia's continuing gains. The 'other' news didn't bullshit back then and does not have 'egg on its face' now like Western News media does. Oh and by the the way, you know that "International Community' that every one talks about? This is what it looks like: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOFo3TaagAEYvUa?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOFo3TaagAEYvUa?format=jpg&name=...
Const-me 4y ago
> They seem to have taken a good chunk of Ukraine just this past week Only a minor one. Russians have taken some chunk in the East, they lost some other chunk on the South near Kherson, retreated from Snake Island in the black sea, unable to advance on the North around Kharkiv. I don’t think these advancements is newsworthy, at least not for the global audience. In Donbass, Russian army advanced by ~20 miles in one isolated place, that’s over the whole June. Not insignificant, but not dramatic enough to generate many clicks on the google’s ads.
t6jvcereio 4y ago
Did you expect the news to reliably tell you future events? Don't you think that's a little too high a bar?
Jordrok 4y ago
I just took a glance at Google News and I see multiple articles with headlines like "The last city in Luhansk has fallen to Russia. What does that mean for Ukraine?", "With latest capture, Russia edges closer to complete control over Ukraine's Donbas", "Ukrainian forces withdraw from Lysychansk, their last holdout in key region". What exactly are you complaining about? Be honest, how closely have you been paying attention to this issue and how various sources cover it? It seems that so many people are only capable of ingesting the very first headline, declaring their knowledge complete, and then ignoring any further information. How is this the fault of the media?
sorokod 4y ago
Both of the statements are (to put it mildly) inaccurate, a better informed English sources here [1] and here [2]. A higher resolution Ukranian perspective here [3]. If you have Russian, [4] is representative of "patriotic" (Russia must declare war, start mobilization, etc... ) point of view. [1] https://www.understandingwar.org/ https://www.understandingwar.org/ [2] https://twitter.com/JominiW https://twitter.com/JominiW [3] https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x [4] https://vk.com/igoristrelkov https://vk.com/igoristrelkov
rasz 4y ago
This happened https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/uj7grl/handy_image_showing_russian_progress_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/uj7grl/... this meme is still missing one arrow set going from Chernobyl and Crimea to Kyiv. Russia is not retreating, they just keep backpedaling their ambitions.

admax88qqq 4y ago

Mainstream news is known to be shit, not sure why you're surprised, or acting surprised. There's non shady sources like understandingwar.org which have given pretty good tracking of the war.

rnd0 4y ago
I don't trust the whole "mainstream news" narrative. It implies that there are news sources that somehow aren't driven by some $#^holes' ideological or corporate motives. "understandingwar", for instance. Who are they, who funds them and why on earth should I trust them? I'm critical of cnn etc but personally I think they're more credible than some NGO-sponsored blog IMO
- yucky 4y ago
  >"understandingwar", for instance. Who are they, who funds them and why on earth should I trust them? Funny you should ask! Bill Kristol is on their Board[1], and for those who don't know who Bill Kristol is, he is one of the foremost Neocons in the US, behind such hits as WMD's in Iraq and 20-years of Adventure in Afghanistan. Most of the rest of the Board appears to be like-minded neocons who beat the drums of war (and more importantly, intervention) every chance they get. [1] https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are
rufus_foreman 4y ago
Non shady sources, huh? Let's take a look. That web site is run by "The Institute for the Study of War", ISW. Here's what Wikipedia says: "ISW generally advocates to increase American military involvement in international conflicts. Their political stances tend to align with the business interests of the ISW's funders, whose activities include producing tanks and weapon systems." There's a list of their board members at https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are. There are two former generals listed, General David H. Petraeus who was the commander of US forces in Iraq for a while, and General Jack Keane. Keane was an advisor on the US occupation of Iraq on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. Along with Frederick Kagan, Keane wrote a paper called "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq". Kagan's wife Kimberly Kagan is the president of the ISW. You've also got William Kristol listed as a member of the board, Kristol is a neoconservative who argued for the "surge" in Iraq, he is a co-founder of the "Project for the New American Century" which is a neo-conservative think tank. PNAC argued for regime change in Iraq starting in the 1990's. The other co-founder of PNAC was Robert Kagan, Frederick Kagan's brother. Another board member listed is Joe Lieberman, who was a major support of the Iraq war when he was in the Senate. There's another half dozen or so people on the board that I don't recognize, but I don't have to dig much further to know that if somebody wants to get their news from the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq war, understandingwar.org is definitely a go-to source. Then again, I don't trust CNN either.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  Oh I don't doubt they have a US slant, but their reporting is far more nuanced than the mass market cable/internet news channels that are driven by eyeballs/clicks.

NicoJuicy 4y ago

That's public knowledge no? Russia claims to help Russians, but all they want is Crimea with the newly found gas ( that could replace Russia's). In the mean time, they are trying to take every territory from Ukraine that is resource-rich. And burning/killing everything that lives on it ( since they are not interested in the people)

sharikous 4y ago
> And burning/killing everything that lives on it ( since they are not interested in the people) The hostile one yes, but in those areas you have strong pro-Russian sentiments. To the point that the local population collaborates with the Russian troops. And Ukrainian shellings on the rebel strongholds and secret police arrests of potential "traitors" is amplifying the polarization
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  That may be true 8 years ago, but the pro Russian sentiment in Ukraine in those areas has been in decline ever since the invasion.

ayngg 4y ago

Their initial campaign was to blitz the entire country and was shown to be overly ambitious. Since then it appears they have scaled back and changed their strategy towards securing the eastern portion of Ukraine, which is what is happening now and has been fairly successful. Essentially none of the news outlets have provided good coverage on what is happening, because if they did it would reveal how poorly the western powers navigated this, and how much of a disaster this entire thing has been for Europe, irrespective of its effect on Russia.

DSingularity 4y ago
Reality is their initial plan was probably to force enough to commitments by Ukraine to hold Kiev to enable the campaign of slow, steady, encircle, advance, and repeat campaign in the East. It’s kind of how in chess you attack a line to pin pieces which would otherwise be used to counter attack. People who thought Russia didn’t know the probability of taking Kiev in a blitz is effectively zero are propagandized.
Nasrudith 4y ago
By definition wars are large scale conflicts involving many actors, all interconnected. If it could easily be followed then everyone is doing things horribly wrong if they wind up so predictable and not cycling through manuevers and countermanuvers. It isn't some grand conspiracy - war is hard and only fools have believed otherwise. "Be home by Christmas" is a synonym for foolishly optimistic for a reason.

thegrim33 4y ago

The news are primarily propaganda outlets nowadays, their goal is no longer in any sense to tell you what's happening in the world, they're for spreading political/social ideology. The concerted, coordinated, effort to push as much anti-Russia propaganda as possible at the beginning of this should have been immediately obvious to you and if it wasn't you're still pretty blind as to what's going on. Doing everything they could to make Russia seem weak, useless, a failure, etc., was one of the main narrative pushes.

CyanBird 4y ago

> What the fuck is going on with our news? Nothing out of the ordinary, you also thought that the Cubans used to eat babies in Angola, or that the Iraqis honestly threw out babies out of incubators? Come on John Stockwell has got couple of very good book on how The Agency used to administer news outlets and black information operations back when he was team lead, forget chomsky forget the church committee and Bernays, Stockwell goes quite deep into how it all actually operates

rnd0 4y ago

In the US there's long been the meme of watching "both sides" of the news IE cnn and fox and assuming the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think by now it's been established that this is a false assumption and that you simply end up with two different sets of lies intended to distract you from thinking about whatever. Likewise, while it's obvious that whatever comes from the Russian state media is complete garbage I think it's safe to assume that most of the news we see here in the west is also distorted propaganda as well; to some degree, at least. If by omission if nothing else ...what they say may be true, but it's clear they're leaving a lot of things out. In short; treat everything like Pravda.

Nasrudith 4y ago
What the hell is the "whatever" that everyone is convinced that the totality of human media efforts are supposed to be disstracting us from? Literal space aliens, literal demons, religion, communism, fear of death, fear of life, pollution, the coming fall of government, the apocalypse, and modern life being meaningless. Pardon the redundancies but the rhetoric is far more a rorsarch test or method of indexing than an objective truth. I have mostly seen it as a squid-in-mouth level of crazy personal assumptions projected onto everybody else by a fanatic to explain the impossibility that nobody else cares.

heretogetout 4y ago

I think it's mainly that was is messy and hard to report on in the moment. There's propaganda coming in from all angles, of course, muddying the water further. FWIW Washington Post reported on Russian success in Lysychansk just this morning.

simonblack 4y ago

If you just take Western Main Stream Media, you just get the Western slant on things. And that is not necessarily truthful. Learn to take news feeds from all over the world. Get a more balanced picture. You may be surprised that news from other countries that doesn't have a Western slant is likely to be just as accurate or even more accurate than Western News media. The West is a mere one-eighth of the world. We in the West tend to forget that. China alone is half as big again as the entire combined West. As also is India. The "Ukraine is beating Russia" and "Russia is running out of everything" rubbish that was all the go back in March, all of a sudden has to be walked back due to Russia's continuing gains. The 'other' news didn't bullshit back then and does not have 'egg on its face' now like Western News media does. Oh and by the the way, you know that "International Community' that every one talks about? This is what it looks like: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOFo3TaagAEYvUa?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOFo3TaagAEYvUa?format=jpg&name=...

Const-me 4y ago

> They seem to have taken a good chunk of Ukraine just this past week Only a minor one. Russians have taken some chunk in the East, they lost some other chunk on the South near Kherson, retreated from Snake Island in the black sea, unable to advance on the North around Kharkiv. I don’t think these advancements is newsworthy, at least not for the global audience. In Donbass, Russian army advanced by ~20 miles in one isolated place, that’s over the whole June. Not insignificant, but not dramatic enough to generate many clicks on the google’s ads.

t6jvcereio 4y ago

Did you expect the news to reliably tell you future events? Don't you think that's a little too high a bar?

Jordrok 4y ago

I just took a glance at Google News and I see multiple articles with headlines like "The last city in Luhansk has fallen to Russia. What does that mean for Ukraine?", "With latest capture, Russia edges closer to complete control over Ukraine's Donbas", "Ukrainian forces withdraw from Lysychansk, their last holdout in key region". What exactly are you complaining about? Be honest, how closely have you been paying attention to this issue and how various sources cover it? It seems that so many people are only capable of ingesting the very first headline, declaring their knowledge complete, and then ignoring any further information. How is this the fault of the media?

sorokod 4y ago

Both of the statements are (to put it mildly) inaccurate, a better informed English sources here [1] and here [2]. A higher resolution Ukranian perspective here [3]. If you have Russian, [4] is representative of "patriotic" (Russia must declare war, start mobilization, etc... ) point of view. [1] https://www.understandingwar.org/ https://www.understandingwar.org/ [2] https://twitter.com/JominiW https://twitter.com/JominiW [3] https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x [4] https://vk.com/igoristrelkov https://vk.com/igoristrelkov

rasz 4y ago

This happened https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/uj7grl/handy_image_showing_russian_progress_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/uj7grl/... this meme is still missing one arrow set going from Chernobyl and Crimea to Kyiv. Russia is not retreating, they just keep backpedaling their ambitions.