You can follow the bombings, for example: if Kyiv is being shelled (and reported in Russian media), it's not under Russian control. If the shelling last for days, the city is holding.
If some city was being shelled, but there are no more news about it, but the news are a nearby and further city is being shelled, the first city is probably under Russian control.
Following that kind of info, it seems the Russian invasion is crawling, and not running as intended. Russia is not doing much better (but not as bad as "reported" in Reddit, for instance).
During WW2, the siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. Ukraine has only been under attack for 13 days.
Instead you see things like the US does where you gain air superiority, take out all command and control via decapitation attacks, and then remove all the armor from the map with missiles and aircraft.
USSR in WWII was losing on average about 5000 (five thousand) soldiers per day. So no.
More seriously, think about it percentage wise. Russia is losing resources (tanks, missiles, etc) in a hurry. And the floor is not "zero XYZ remaining" otherwise they would have nothing left in the entire country to defend themselves with. They only have what they allocated for their idiotic invasion and no more. Russia may already be running low on cruise missiles based on the relatively peaceful night in Kyiv.
Ukraine shot down 4 Su-34. Russia has 134 of them. It takes years to build them.
In WW2, there were thousands of planes and tanks, but they were unsophisticated and quick to build.
The number of soldiers is also not comparable since modern armies aren't so large anymore.
I'm not in favor of Russia but it's clear they're running into much harder resistance than expected, and are really just warming up.
The Russians had to fight two brutal wars in Chechnya, lot of false starts and screw ups... but ~30 years later the Chechens sent 10000 men to fight in Ukraine for the Russians...
Snake Island Soldiers Dying Heroically
Nuclear Reactor Shelled, Radiation Rising
Doubt it had anything to do with radiation though.
Regardless of that it is incredibly stupid to do any kind of fighting around a nuclear plant.
That goes both ways.
I saw the video from the start of the fighting and that was UA forces who started to fire upon oncoming forces from the building to the right on the video.
If you mount defenses for something vital for the civilians of your country you should always question how exactly to do that to minimize the damage from the fighting.
Given they took positions in the building, started the fight first, had a prerecorded video for Twitter of how they are under attack[0]...
Sure, I'm just an arm-chair general, but for me it looks what the Ukrainian force decided to fight on the NPP territory and buildings.
[0] go find it you if you didn't saw it. I doubt the first thing what would come to my mind as an operator of a NPP is to fire up a video for a social network.
In other words, never protect critical civilian infrastructure?
Is that the defense playbook you'd propose?
Like in your playbook there were absolutely no other options there.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5026803,34.5967556,6233m/dat...
You did not “see the reactor get shelled live.”
Those gigantic streaks in the lower right are shells from tanks. They certainly aren’t tracers from rifles.
You’re right to press me for details on the “tank” part. I don’t know if the shots are from tanks. But they’re so large that it rules out foot soldiers, so it’s some kind of vehicle-mounted gun.
It’s definitely not the kind of thing you want hitting a nuclear reactor.
They're typically equipped with heavy weapons that are smaller or less powerful than tank main guns but larger than something that could readily be carried by a soldier or two.
Tank misidentification satirized here: https://twitter.com/pascalheyman/status/1088555831187128321
I only saw them on social media.
But I did see a source that radiation did rise around Chernobyl, probably due to dust getting kicked up by vehicles and foot traffic.
I saw some memes about the Snake Island Soldiers but never heard serious reporting on their deaths - I only ever heard the location had been compromised. Maybe the issue isn't so much a propaganda mill forcing false facts but the news sources you're choosing to consume. Unless you have family/loved ones in Ukraine there is no reason to try and follow up-to-the minute news - watch the daily shows, read a newspaper or just be a bit more skeptical about what you're ingesting.
Moreover, the radiation in Chernobil did rise (measurably, but trivially). That has nothing to do with the active nuclear plant where actual fights happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/ukraine-soldie...
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-snake-island-soldiers-russi...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-sold...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/24/russia-ukrai...
I could go on, but you get the point. These were definitely fake stories propagated by the western media as part of their propaganda campaign against Russia. Even if these outlets didn't know they were fake, they also didn't bother to check.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/27/ukraine-island...
Retractions always - ALWAYS - get less attention than the initial story.
They aren't in the business of spreading truth, they are a business with incentives to gain people's attention.
For all the mentioned stories it is clear that these weren't drafted up in a backoffice (such as Putin's propaganda about the genocide in eastern Ukraine).
Donbass is being shelled for 8 years. UN recognizes more than 10,000 deaths in the conflict there. The few journalists that interviewed people there got some interviews that really describes war crimes (watched recently an italian documentary that collected testimonialsthere). Which is not surprising, since neonazi groups were integrated to Ukranian army. You may dispute that this should be classified as genocide, but there are human rights violations happening there and this is not just Russia propaganda.
Nowhere in these stories do the news outlets claim that the Ukranian reports were independently verified.
So I'm not sure what you're complaining about. These news outlets are reporting what Ukranian sources say, just as they report what Russian sources say.
I read some Reddit and even there they mentioned eg. The ghost of Kiev is probably fake.
Your other points are also ridiculous. No radiation was rising and there was huge protest against Russians to take the facility. There were definitely fires nearby.
Reports of the nuclear facility ( video + sound) are pretty clear about what happened.
They did mention it is very dangerous to attack a nuclear facility.
I think that's pretty logical....
Chernobyl there were rumors about a nuclear waste depot being blown up and subsequent increase in radiation. However, it was always mentioned that this could be due to troop movement over contaminated soil and there were never worrying radiation numbers.
Edit: I previously said the control room was on fire but can’t find a source anymore.
I never heard that the control room was on fire, only that Chechens attached explosives to the reactors.
The shelling was at the training reactor building, and the administrative building was shot at and set on fire.
https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1499799810609668106
The focus of the fighting was elsewhere but some projectiles made it very close to the reactor buildings.
Based on comparing the shot out the window with a look on Google Maps this is between units 2 and 3 of the 6 at the plant
I'm not complaining - these things have a tangible effect on morale. But it is propaganda.
I wanted to understand the situation and searched "Ukrainian troop locations" in google, bing, DDG, and Yahoo.
One of the first times I have received no results in google. Absolutely blatant censorship.
Ostensibly, google doesn't want to provide intel to Russia, who has ample satellites and combat reports.
It seems a little too convenient that the major consequence is that Americans cant get any information that doesn't support the public narrative.
no "Ukrainian troop locations"... are well positioned, spread out, in the east, overwhelmed, shouldn't be disclosed, ect
0 hits containing the string.
Ukraine - being the underdog and the invaded country - has every incentive to publish every single tank they destroy. It isn't surprising, really.
There has been coverage on the South, where Russia has had more successes.
Who - UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace makes a claim
What - Russian forces have prepared a mobile crematorium for use in any future conflict with Ukraine
Where - Ukraine
Why - to avoid the problems with bringing bodies back
When - Now
There's no claim beyond that, however they do also highlight protests from Russia about missing and dead soldiers
I haven't seen anything debunking such a claim, although I haven't seen anything backing it up either. It's a fact that Wallace made that claim, and the company involved refused to respond.
The Snake Island incident is perhaps a better example.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60522454
Which reports that
Who - Ukraine officials say
What - Russia killed their soldiers
Where - Snake Island
Why - to occupy the island
When - Recently
And they also say
Who - Russian officials say
Why - Soldiers surrendered it to them voluntarily
Where - Snake Island
Why - to occupy the island
When - recently
The BBC says the reported audio is unverified
Later events showed that at least some of the soldiers were not killed.
The outrage was that it was close enough.
Huh? War is incredibly harmful to civilian infrastructure, and propaganda is similarly harmful to our ability to communicate.
Putin's propaganda loves this trope: "we can't know for sure, it's all propaganda, you have no choice but to pick a side. We're totally the good guys though, so be a good little soldier, spread our memes and ignore all other sources".
Contrary to what some people would like you to believe, you can know things without first-hand experience and you can be certain without having 100% proof.
Listening less to known liars also helps.
And I ran a simple experiment on Google News.
I simply removed a news source (using the three dots) when an article presented by it was:
1. Easily proven inaccurate (with a Google search) 2. Pure speculation (no actually reporting of change to “facts on the ground”)
I don’t have a single major news source left in my feed.
I highly recommend curating sources by their trustworthiness.
Not only is this true from a general sense of "fog of war" and misinformation, but even in a purely statistical sense, these numbers aren't compelling. As a stats person, both 0.9 and 0.26 are probabilities that basically reflect nothing more than a vague sense how the outcome will go.
In a classical NHST this degree of confidence would not pass even the most lose definitions of "statistical significance".
And in a more Bayesian setting, being 90% and 26% sure of rain both mean you'll bing an umbrella. Having a 90% chance of survival and a 26% chance of survival means are both too risky for almost all scenarios.
But for whatever reason, when predicting things like outcomes of an election or outcomes of a war, people start applying `round` to their probabilities.
At work if I see that I'm either 90% sure or 26%, I report that we still don't have enough information to say anything particularly interesting or to justify any major risks. So even if we had reliable information about the situation, these numbers aren't interesting. Since we don't, they're useless.
These are vastly different probabilities which mean that you might be wrong 9 out 10 days, or right 3 out of 4 times.
As another example: I bet most companies would die to turn up conversion rates up even 1 or 2 percent.
When dealing in risk management where probabilities should start in 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, then I could agree that 90% risk of failure isn't to different from 26%.
When it comes to certainty about an outcome (i.e. a hypothesis), they're not really that different. Probabilities are not linear, and start at 0.5. In log-odds terms were talking about 2.19 vs -1.04... not really a shocking amount of information. Sure in terms of gambling odds this might be useful but not for making any concrete statements about the world.
To your point:
> I bet most companies would die to turn up conversion rates up even 1 or 2 percent.
This is talking about two very different things. I would also be happy if I had a known 2 percent increasing in my stock performance. We're talking about quantifying uncertainty (though these criticism hold even in a frequentist frame work). I certainly wouldn't "die for" 2% absolute increase in my confidence about something (unless I'm 98% confident already!)
We're talking about our confidence in a hypothesis. At no company I've worked at would I be anywhere near comfortable stating that a 0.9 probability that A > B is enough to call an A/B test on. I'm going to be very skeptical of any analysis I'm doing if mode coefficients have anywhere near that probability of a sign error.
If you have no other information, then sure if I am 90% confident that one choice is stronger than other I'll go with the limited information that I have. However anyone with a statistics background would view either of these numbers as being very uncertain. That's arguably why these numbers are so good for betting, you want there to be a lot of uncertainty when gambling or it's no fun.
But as far as statistics is considered both 0.9 and 0.26 are essentially uninteresting numbers, that lead to very low confidence in the conclusion being drawn.
however, I don't think the western press is missing any deep details about russian fighting. The fight for Kyiv may end up looking like a reverse Stalingrad.