‘There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,’ says Valery Zaluzhny.
Russia’s war with Ukraine has become totally bogged down in the trenches, according to Ukraine’s top general.
And the prospect of a long war gives Vladimir Putin and Russia an advantage, Ukraine’s Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said in a sobering interview with the Economist published Wednesday night.
In the five months since Ukraine launched an eagerly awaited counteroffensive, its troops have advanced only 17 kilometers through heavily fortified and mined Russian defense lines.
The counteroffensive has already disappointed many Ukrainian partners, some of whom are now demanding an end to military aid with the war deadlocked. However, the West’s cautious provision of weapons to Ukraine has allowed the Russians to mobilize thousands and fortify positions in occupied Ukraine, according to Zaluzhny.
A statement way after the media sources had picked up on it? No.
You wanted to know the source, it’s Dr. Ashraf al-Qudra. Here’s one of the media sources that corroborates this. It also mentions Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah. Was it foolish to trust these sources? Probably. But I don’t see how that would be some kind of decisive blow to the free press I mentioned earlier. It’s always hard to get accurate information in a warzone.
His statement was given after a ton of news stories had already come out.
For what it’s worth, the final death toll ended up being close to what everyone was reporting anyway, but that reporting was done without sufficient evidence at the time.
I guess it’s always important to be vigilant in checking sources. I try to stay wary of falling for misinformation, but that’s not easy.
That’s the entire point of having journalistic freedoms…
I’m not seeing how this follows your original comment.
It’s impractical to check all sources yourself and US media is spreading misinformation.
Ok, fine. Forget about US media because that’s not really a concern of mine. What about media in Western Europe? Organisations like Reuters for example. I would be a lot more inclined to believe that kind of news than anything from the Russian government.
The problem in itself is that a huge chunk of journalists just grab the first newswire they get and spin it for their target demographics.
The fact that Reuters is the one sending the wires doesn’t help matters - as a newswire service, Reuters is in large part responsible for sensationalism from other parties. For example, the Indian moon landing “on the South Pole” was originally spread by Reuters (it landed on the 69th parallel, which is very far south, but not by any means on the pole itself) and was quickly used as the headline for news stories around the world.