I seem to recall Russia lying about it's border exercises, and then invading Ukraine. I saw the Ukrainian movie theater with nothing else around except the word "children" written in the parking lot.. directly hit by Russia, who then lied about it being intentional. The train station missile didn't fully detonate, so Russian writing with "for the children" was still visible on it. All of this is context for me when Russia makes any kind of claim.
I've seen multiple news reports where Russia and Ukraine are treated as equally trustworthy, where statements on both sides are simply repeated. And they probably get their information from somewhere else! They don't add context about Russia's prior lying, or even assign an 80-95% chance Russia is lying. They just quote Russia, a known source for fake news.
And then, later, these same media stations are going to warn me of the dangers of fake news. They won't mean to be ironic, and they won't reflect on how they report everything Russia says word for word. Are there any news websites that provide context? Do I need to search for Ukrainian news stations?
Honestly, one of the best ways I've found is to leverage social media. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but all it really takes is one person to comment with the missing context to tell me what to search for (assuming I have time, so I generally mentally assign "unconfirmed" to anything until I've checked). wikipedia is helpful.
I use twitter and reddit for this. Reddit - mostly the UkrainianConflict sub, but other things that end up on All. On twitter, there's a handful of users I've followed - they're all referenced somewhere in this thread. I do mentally assign "reliable" areas for each of them. Trent for example is reliable on logistics, crapshoot on the rest. Kamil is reliable on culture/history/demographics, but not the military. OISNT (I got that wrong probably) is good with hard numbers, they do video confirmation of destroyed units.
Anything that is a Russian source I assume they're not telling the truth, or not telling the whole truth. If they say the ship got hit then yes it got hit, but it's probably way worse than they admitted. Denial of a hit? Probably happened. Claimed a hit? Probably not what happened.
The Ukrainian sources, from what I can tell, absolutely are shading things and introducing propaganda. But they're closer to the truth than Russia, so I'll go with a soft-unconfirmed. Interestingly, I've seen multiple sources saying that the Ukrainian's numbers on Russian losses (which were much higher than anyone else's) were probably the most accurate, and even so they were conservative.
Reuters keeps things so short that the facts are there (generally), but they don't have the context to place the facts into the bigger picture. The rest of the media outlets are their usual spectrum of good to bad, or just behind the times. Washington Post is annoying the crap out of me with their format, I'm going to dump them and switch to NY Times eventually.
If you want assessment of the actual military stuff - The Institute of War, on twitter and they have a website. I've seen some good articles from various sources - Atlantic, etc, but I rely on social media to float them to me.
There are two Pravda (spelling?) websites. One is Russian, and is very much not believable. The other is Ukrainian, and much better.
Note that there are whole categories of things I am not seeking out and do not want to see, so I don't have good sources. Details on the innumerable atrocities for example.
In short: I don't have one source. I have a constellation of sources which I use to get a broad picture and then I look at specific things in more detail, and I am NOT trying to have an in depth knowledge of what's going on. I like my sanity.
Topic: Ukraine (Read 559884 times)
