To answer the question we pose in the headline, because what is being reported in western news on TV and in print, we truly have no clearer a picture than we did on day one. While the proaganda from Kiev is parroted by American, British and European news organisations as it it were handed down from heaven on tablets of stone, anything reporting Russia's side of the story or is in any way, no matter how slightly, critical or Ukraine or sympathetic to Russia's point of view is dismissed as Kremlin lies.
While more level headed reports (from India, Singapore and Cairo suggest that the Russians have almost complete their primary objective in taking control of Luhansk and Donbas, the two eastern, Russian speaking majority breakaway provinces which have been under attack from Kiev since declaring their desire for independence, the stories mainstream media prefers to report are based on the coments of some Ukrainian minor official in the Luhansk region who claims that Ukrainian forces are pushing back the Russians and have reclaimed twenty per cent of the occupied territory and that Russian losses have been so heavy President Putin is on the verge of begging for a ceasefire.
These claims may well be true, we don't know, but similar claims have come from the Ukrainian side on a daily basis for the entire hundred days of the war so far. Even so that once respectable and conservative UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph was happy to take them seriously. Meanwhile on alt_media site Unherd, Harald Malmgren takes a different view:
“If a ceasefire is declared, the world will sigh with relief, stock markets will rebound, worries about world food shortages will diminish, and diplomats will go back to sleep. But the war will only be in hibernation; the action will resume at a later date.” (Source: Harald Malmgren, Unherd.)
That’s why in the unlikely event of a unilateral declaration of ceasefire by Putin won’t be
accepted at face value. By now everyone thinks they know Putin’s game is the total annexation of Ukraine, so if Putin declares a ceasefire I’d guess the west will
take the time to properly prepare Ukraine for the coming onslaught.
I do wonder, though, how long the Russian army could possibly sustain its current
losses (assuming those losses are not exaggerated by the Keiv government and further massaged by sensationist reporting in mainstream news. Sadly, we
can no longer trust most news outlets on any issue).
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