Ask HN: High-quality coverage of the situation in East Europe (Ukraine/Russia)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: High-quality coverage of the situation in East Europe (Ukraine/Russia)?

1 pointLdorigo7 comments

Living in Europe, I am moderately nervous about the current situation with Russia and Ukraine.

Reuters is usually my source for decent quality journalism on world events, but I found they have a weird clickbaity thing going on for the situation - they keep changing the title of their main article on this issue and make it look new ("Updated 12 minutes ago") when in fact it's more or less the same exact article.

Where would you recommend looking to follow the situation without needing to filter through sensationalist clickbait?

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Could be worthwhile to check if knowledgeable people tweet about the situation. For example, in my country I follow for Russia and China:

https://mobile.twitter.com/martinkragh1

https://mobile.twitter.com/jojjeols

https://mobile.twitter.com/perssongudrun

I think for quality news you ideally should avoid Reuters and just try to find sources on the ground. Im my opinion Western news agencies failed in a big way in the Syrian war. I also believe Western news sources fail in a big way with reporting news around COVID (probably due to the Trusted News Initiative [0]).

You should be able to find some decent news sources on Twitter. Joanna Lillis seems like someone to follow regarding situation in Kazachstan:

https://twitter.com/joannalillis

I would suggest to also follow Herald Doornbos and hos wife Yenan Moussa for news regarding the Middle-East.

https://twitter.com/HaraldDoornbos

https://twitter.com/jenanmoussa

Sadly I don’t know good people to follow regarding news from Ukraine and Russia, but you might encounter good sources while following aforementioned profiles.

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[0]: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...

This is how I follow the news in general:

I check various news agencies (because they are the main source of information for all other newspapers, websites, and broadcasters) and compare their viewpoints on any topic that interests me, because I assume that the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle of the competing viewpoints. If you are really really interested in a topic, you could even go further and read the press releases of all actors involved in an issue. Remember, all actors (including news agencies) are acting in their respective interests (which, in the case of news agencies, is usually the interest of the country in which they are based).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency#List_of_major_news...

That's why there's Whatsapp etc.

It'd effectively be made use of by building trusted circle (group) communication community

IMHO group there not only limited to same kind/kinship of people, it can be group of an interest (even for quite short time)

Honestly, I would try to find a summary from a leftist/socialist European party in your language. Those are often said to be close to Russia and that is partially true, but they plainly have better insights, even if socialism is not a all popular in Ukraine. You also don't have to like socialism, but they can substantiate their perspectives.

Surprisingly good was aljazeera in their reporting, although I only read some articles and no article can go into any depth. You would need to start even before the orange revolution.

Sadly search engines mostly get you the usual media suspects and I cannot find a good English source. Perhaps start here, that would put you in the middle of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas

This can explain why people are fighting in the first place, but of course people are also influenced by the old friends from the cold war.

Be aware that Russia frames this as a civil war and the west as a Russian-Ukrainian war. The truth is indeed in between and Wikipedia is not a dependable source.

I usually follow BBC News and RT News, and then do some averaging.

Hadn't heard of RT news before, that was one fascinating rabbit hole. Even being aware of how much journalists can distort reality while technically reporting "facts", seeing world events through the russian (state-sponsored) perspective is really fascinating....

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