Question for the thread. Obviously I'm rooting for Ukraine. You're rooting for Ukraine. All of the citizen journalists, retired generals, think tanks, etc from Twitter are rooting for Ukraine. Mainstream Western media is rooting for Ukraine. Western intelligence services are rooting for Ukraine. So the question - are we in an echo chamber?
I ask because basically ever since the beginning of the war, the info I've personally consumed is that Ukraine is almost always awesome, disciplined, brave, effective, and winning, and that Russia is dumb, ill-equipped, incompetent, corrupt, and blundering. It's not hard to buy that in general, but it's just so....consistent? This recent Russian winter offensive is a good example. We read about that for weeks - here it comes! Then literally like 2 days into it, the NYTimes is publishing articles about how it's already a big failure and Ukraine is just mowing Russians down and it's fizzling out.
At some point I become incredulous. I'm a naturally skeptical person, you might say naturally pessimistic, too. Is there really no deeper level to this than "yes, Russia really is that bad at this and they haven't been able to score any meaningful victories against a country with 1/5 their population and 1/10th their military budget"?