Since January of this year, the New York Times has published dozens of articles claiming that Ukraine’s “spring offensive” would be a decisive turning point in the war with Russia. But this offensive, now six weeks old, has turned into a debacle. While Ukrainian forces have nowhere breached Russia’s main defensive line, tens of thousands of troops have died.
This is the context in which the New York Times published and quickly edited an article presenting a realistic, and therefore nightmarish, depiction of the Ukrainian troops as little more than cannon fodder, “forced into action” to face almost certain death.
Buried on page A9 and not referenced on the front page of the print edition, the extensive and detailed report on Ukraine’s offensive was titled, “Depleted Troops, Unreliable Munitions: Kyiv’s Obstacles in the East.” It included a sub-headline describing the offensive as a “grisly stalemate.”
With equally little notice, that article had been published online the day before under the title, “Weary Soldiers, Unreliable Munitions: Ukraine’s Many Challenges.”
The article presented Ukraine’s offensive as a bloody debacle, in which Ukrainian forces have suffered massive casualties, who are then replaced with older recruits who are “forced” to fight.
The article documented three new, previously undisclosed revelations:
- There exists a unit in Ukraine with a “200 percent” casualty rate, meaning that all of its members were killed or injured, then replaced with recruits, all of whom were killed or injured.
- The munitions provided to Ukraine are often so old that they regularly misfire or accidentally detonate, injuring soldiers.
- After young troops are killed in combat, they are typically replaced with much older people, a sign that Ukraine is running out of fighting-age troops.
Typically, a journalist who uncovered these facts based on firsthand reporting would proclaim each of them a “scoop” and take to Twitter to publicize them.
But the method of the New York Times is that of the buried lede, to take these potentially explosive revelations and stick them in an article on the inside pages, which is quickly removed from the newspaper’s online front page.
In this case, however, merely burying these revelations was insufficient. It was necessary to erase them.
Hellbound and Down 