Wait so people actualy believed the story about the bridge crossing? I didn’t bother looking into it because by the time I saw people commenting I just assumed it was whatever.

I'm personally in a position where I like, want to believe Ukraine's points - possibly because the grinding weight of looking at every mainstream source and seeing the perspectives allowed to be reported by, well, US state propaganda, in the form of CNN and NBC and Bloomberg and so on; the range is between "Ukraine is winning really fucking hard" and "Ukraine is in a heroic stalemate" and literally nothing else - so some part of my brain is just going "well there must be SOMETHING there, Ukraine must be doing SOME kind of strategic movement that could potentially hypothetically be perceived as moving towards a wider goal of repelling Russia." But it's slowly being turned off as fake news reports come in over time, to the point where I saw the river crossing story and just went "fool me twenty times, shame on me, I won't believe it the twenty-first time." and didn't even really bother posting the articles, I just mentioned it offhand, and lo and behold, it was exaggerated.

Like, the entire media understanding of this war is constructed based on a specific set of lies and exaggerations gathered from a carefully curated set of points that every media site is allowed to see, and all of that misinformation is built on the flimsy foundation of their incredibly poor understanding of what war actually looks like when you're not bombing innocent civilians in the desert with truly astounding amounts of airpower that is virtually uncounterable due to the technological disparity. Their brains, and the brains of almost the entire western population (and to be honest, even a fair proportion of genuine communists who probably should know better! And I'm including myself in the first month or so among that crowd!) have been utterly poisoned by America's wars and so they see a war that's gone on for less than 3 months(!) and think it's an agonizingly slow crawl. This warfare is much closer to something in the beginning of the 20th century than like, Iraq, or even Vietnam.

Like, imagine if you transported the average redditor or whatever back to WW2 and he saw the battle plans of the western allies or the USSR! "Haha, get cucked idiot incompetent Russians, le cauldron is expected to take four months to form? Just admit you're losing already! Your river crossing at this specific location just failed? Guess the Nazis are winning again!" It's not even seeing the trees rather than the forest, it's seeing the leaves rather than the tree.