RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – While in the first weeks and months of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, victory slogans for the Ukrainian forces could be read and heard everywhere; things now look quite different. Even the mainstream admits that the Ukrainian army is desolate and wholly demotivated.
Soon the Russian military operation in Ukraine will enter its fourth month. But the original euphoria of victory for the Ukrainian side in the Western mainstream media is increasingly giving way to disillusionment.
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The Donbas is already firmly in Russian hands, and Ukrainian frontline troops are increasingly losing the will to fight. More and more videos are spreading on Facebook and Telegram in which commanders on the ground complaining about the lack of support from Kyiv and the lack of equipment.
Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8
— Sudarsan Raghavan (@raghavanreports) May 26, 2022
Now, for the first time, the Washington Post publishes a surprisingly gloomy and pessimistic assessment of the actual situation of Ukrainian forces supported and equipped by the United States. Gone is the rosy, idealizing view through which every encounter with the Russians is usually portrayed.
The newspaper’s correspondent and author of the new report, Sudarsan Raghavan, underscores the actual situation: “The Ukrainian leadership projects an image of military invulnerability to Russia. But commanders paint a more realistic picture of the war, with defeated volunteers describing being abandoned by their military superiors and facing certain death on the front lines.”
All the media propaganda about heroic Ukrainian fighters inflicting massive damage on the Russians repeatedly vanishes into thin air. For example, the propagandistic reporting by Germany’s Bild, which as recently as March 16 claimed, citing the Ukrainian military, “Nearly half of Putin’s troops demoralized – adviser hopes for peace in two weeks.”
However, some two and a half months have passed since the report, and the plight of Ukrainian troops has become increasingly clear since then. Even the “experts in the British Ministry of Defense” cited by Bild in its report, according to which the Russian troops “in ten days” would have reached that point “where they can no longer carry out military operations,” have turned out to be pure propagandists.
(Swastikas, skulls, Nazi-symbol tattoos adorn surrendering Azov unit soldiers from Azovstal)
The “Washington Post” report shows the reality of a poorly trained, poorly commanded, and ill-equipped ragtag force of mostly volunteers in the east that finds itself increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian army, which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region.
“Ukraine, like Russia, has provided little information on deaths, injuries, or losses of military equipment. But after three months of the war, this company has shrunk from 120 men to 54 due to deaths, injuries, and desertions,” says the report, which tracks one particular battalion.
First major US media I've seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in.https://t.co/sYYwdm1p62
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 26, 2022
The harrowing report states:
“We are being sent to certain death,” said one volunteer who read from a prepared script, adding that the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion members filmed a similar video. “We are not alone; we are many”. The Ukrainian military contradicted the volunteers’ claims in its video posted on the Internet, saying the “deserters” had everything they needed to fight. “They thought they were going on vacation,” a member of the army said. “That’s why they abandoned their positions.”
It’s a brutal display of cynicism by the military leadership in Kyiv that will further erode the already severely battered morale of Ukraine’s frontline troops. And the longer the war goes on, the more units of the Ukrainian army will surrender to the superior Russian troops to avoid dying a senseless death.
But the Ukrainians themselves do not hear about it. The media, which still exist, are synchronized and do not report anything about their losses, only about alleged Russian losses.
But who knows how long this will continue to work because at some point, the day of truth will come, and the people (who probably already know that the political leadership lies to the media daily) will then vent their displeasure on these very media.