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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

While I'm all in awe for Ukraine resistance, I wouldn't dismiss so quickly the Russian army. The loss of morale and teeth, is mostly social media stuff. I do hope it's true, but I wouldn't bet on it.

They did encounter much stiffer resistance than they expected, but there are still hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of troops around Kyiv. Now that the West is sending arms to Ukraine, there is an increasing probability that they will manage to defend themselves. But unfortunately it's far from certain, or even probable at this point.

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While I am mildly skeptical as well... There sure are a lot of videos of tanks blown up and of wreckages and of immobile vehicles. And recently Putin removed the head of the armed forces. I doubt things are going as planned for the Russians.

Can you distinguish burned or blown up Ukrainian tank from Russian tank?

Not to mention that Spanish media even used footage from video game to "illustrate" the fake news about the war.

I can't but a lot of other people can. There was exactly this going on in some subreddits where some APC's were presented as russian but it turned out to be Ukrainean. Camo is also different between the countries and they have the russian speciffic markings on their armor. Not to mention the kind of funny videos of abandoned Russian vehicles. That exposes deep problems in the way Russia is conducting the invasion.

Most shocking for me was the videos of the TB2's incinerating some BUK systems I think. I was... astonished, it means Ukraine can still operate in the airspace and that does not bode well for the Russians.

You cannot base opinion on online media, it's heavily biased! Even though I agree with the sentiment that Ukraine is doing better then I expected. I would not say things are going well.

The bombings and shelling looks really, really bad.. Kharkov will be nothing but rubble.

I honestly take most of my info from Reddit. There are a couple of subs where the discussion is quite nice. Twitter has a steady stream of data coming in and OSINT channels seem to make a honest effort to present genuine data (even if one-sided).

There is also the confirmation from the British Ministry of Defence: https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcam...

They are Ukraine aligned but are IMO more trustwordy.

Overall, I admit the fog of war is thick. But even maintaining my skepticism, the info seems coherent enough to convince me.

Just saying "You cannot base opinion on online media" is useless because what are YOU basing your opinion on? Online media, written media, whatever.. it's all information, one way or another we're all basing our view on external sources. The trick is filtering it and I think it's possible to at least glimpse reflections of the actual status. If you don't take into account any information you know nothing and just go off on projections in your head. Much worse state of afairs.

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