MI6’s BBC outlet is at it again. This time, in a disgusting effort to boost Ukraine’s flagging morale, they featured a story by their crack Russian unit explaining how Russian graveyards are full to the brim of soldiers who fell in Ukraine. As always with the MI6’s B team, it is the sort of misinformed guff that belongs in a badly edited student newspaper rather than in such a globally prominent propaganda outlet.
Or indeed in the website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Misinformation. If we first go to Ukraine’s site, we see that the Russkies are getting a right mauling, with some 442,880 soldiers dead up to April Fool’s Day, 2024. Although Wikipedia parrots those numbers by using the same tainted NATO sources, to put them in context, Wikipedia claim that the United States lost a relatively modest 58,281 dead during its genocide campaign in Vietnam, and the Watson Intstitute claims that the United States lost 7,057 troops in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, with a much higher number, 30,177, committing suicide.
Other things being equal then, the Russkies should be up in arms against their government over these deaths in Ukraine. But other things are not, of course, equal. First off, as a quick Google search shows us these numbers of Russian dead are part of a vociferous NATO echo chamber, we can see no need as to why this should be a major NATO news story today unless Russia is experiencing the turbulence the United States did during its Vietnamese cull or if the BBC has brought additional information to light, thus making it a story worthy of coverage today. Or, of course, as we suspect, that the BBC has once again been leaned on to put its shoulder to the NATO wheel.
That is certainly the impression we get from this Politico article, which claims that the morale of Ukraine’s Armed Forces is crumbling as their casualties exponentially mount. The pleas of Clown Prince Zelensky and the rest of Kiev’s circus for more arms, more sanctions and more Swiss bank accounts certainly seems to help counter BBC’s flagging line that Russia is on its knees. As do all the tiktok and Twitter videos of Ukrainian grandfathers and pregnant women being frog marched off to the front.
This is not to negate the BBC argument but to say that the Ukrainian war has got less hands on media coverage than perhaps any other since the Korean war. And, though much of that lack of direct coverage has been due to the use of long range drones and artillery rather than the preponderance of close hand to hand fighting, much more of it has been due to the way both High Commands are conducting their affairs.
Hellbound and Down 