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The ukraine war and godawful sources a problem
Samo Burja (sadly can't find the tweet) once said that we rely on defense ministries of the individual nations for information but at the same time lying about the state of affairs is considered respectable propaganda in a time of war.
Onto the sources
The Bad
Ukranian ministry of defense: These guy's obviously can't be trusted, they would totally lie about things if it means more american aid, lying about success in offensive operations, lying about goals and motives, or lying about defensive strategy, especially due to operational security concerns.
Russian ministry of defense: Exactly as untrustworhy as the UKR MoD but we hear less from them. What the UKR MoD and RU MoD agree on is likely "true".
Basically propaganda
The new york times: Something I wasn't expecting was how god awful the NYT's actual coverage of the ukraine war actually has been. reading their reports has been surprisingly low value. very little description of what is happening at any reasonable level. Maybe this shouldn't surprise me, the actual events of the war don't really improve how something looks narratively so you end up with little information about the facts on the ground
(this applies to most of the western print press and I won't mention any further, though Matthew chance of CNN was pretty good)
Better than most
Wikipedia: Wikipedia continues to keep winning. While it both does a good job explaining the history (talking about the invasion and conflict really starting in 2014) it also has some great parts that go unnoticed. Casualties? Reports vary widely what a great line to just throw out. Wikipedia's reporting is way above average and has better timelines than any reporting I've seen in the mainstream western press. They still have issues but sadly little actually can beat them. (I definitely find their UKR coverage worse because it's less contentious on english language groups than say their isreal gaza coverage but thankfully i'm not forecasting isreal gaza so i don't have to worry about it)
The institute for the study of war This is probably the most accurate source that you can call "respectable". Unlike other sources they do a good job of citing their sources and their citations stem from far more credible sources than the UKR MoD. The main problem with them is Bias, General David Petreus is a pretty solid general overall and while I tend to like the reports, I find the reports are slightly more anti-russian than the facts on the ground typically indicate. But unlike other reporters they actually accurately report the facts on the ground to a degree that nobody else except 1 group does. I may dislike sentences like "We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting." because they really should have just deleted the word Russian in that sentence. overall I like these guys and think they are the best reporting I can get regularly
The best (but so infrequent)
The AUSTRIAN ARMY Youtube channel The austrian army's reporting on the battlefield situation is top notch, I think that since they only post updates every 6 months or so their reporting tends to be a lot better at not missing the larger scale operations. Of course it's harder to cite the austrian army youtube channel and call it "respectable" but many probably would accept it.
Analysis and speculation
William spaniel While mostly a channel about strategic implications he actually does a pretty good job talking about how leaders can actually think. The Naval war college regularly cites him so I consider him much more credible than average. (though the naval war college also plays Polis to discuss the Peloponnesian war so they're definitely more willing to be a little less hinged than you'd expect)
Perun IDK how this guy got so big but /r/credibledefense loves him and I like his powerpoints.
So onto the actual conflict.
Right now the big story is that the russian army is making a move from the north while Ukraine is slowly losing territory on the southeast, not much to be sure, if this were mar 2022 you'd call the approach a massive slowdown. However the long slow push of russia into ukr territory is happening after a failed UKR 2023 counteroffensive. The war continues with what I would call world war 1 tactics with 2024 weapons. Trenches, Artillery, and spotters dominate the war, while in WW1 it was biplanes, in the Ukraine russian war it's the drone. The drone is creating this weird war where visibility is at an all time high, if you look at the survivability onion you'll notice that stealth comprimises most of the survival tactics Evasive manuvers are almost a last resort. This means it's much harder to conduct certain operations without getting troops killed. I wonder how much the conflict will change in the coming months, the 1 prediction which tends to hold true is that almost nothing happens because this is the second coming of world war 1
Recently, I found that for raw facts, the Youtuber going by "Military Summary Channel" is quite good. The flaws with it are that he has a very obvious pro-Russian bias that he tries to mask but that usually manifests itself in the form of calling absolutely every Russian advance very important and every problem experienced by Ukraine catastrophic, and picking video captions that exaggerate Russian gains that disagree with what he actually winds up saying in the video. This, along with the extremely formulaic script that may be due to bad command of English but still wanting to sound "professional", makes him useless as a source of opinion and prognosis. However, I found him unusually well-calibrated when it comes to integrating the various sources to determine who actually controls what piece of land at a given time and colouring the map, with many instances of him being correctly skeptical against both all the pro-Russian mappers and the doomer contingent of pro-Ukrainian ones, while not just being unidirectionally slow to accept changes in control that are eventually confirmed.
The next best pro-Russian "daily updates and maps" sort of source is still the Telegram user @rybar (you'll need to autotranslate for most of it), whose emotional calibration on importance of developments and future prospects actually seems more on point than the above - however, the crackdown on independent milbloggers a few months into a war coupled with his high profile really did a number on him, making him cease giving candid long-form assessments so you need to read between the lines a bit to get his actual opinion. He does jump the gun on map colouring sometimes. Also, being very pro-Russian and having been partnered into the semi-official propaganda apparatus, the ethically rather than militarily relevant parts of the assessment (which civilian deaths are evil vs. which ones are justified etc.) will still have a directionality that a pro-Western reader is likely to find grating.
Military Summary Channel will always make me smile when I remember him, just because of his "Mongolian Tactics" cope when talking about the loss of Kherson by the Russians, and similar setbacks in that period. I stopped following him as he became both less balanced and less amusing.
I've only started watching him about a month ago, what was the story there? My sense is, as I said, that right now his representation of the situation on the ground is better than most other sources, but it's possible that he does much worse when Russia is on the retreat.
Mongolian tactics is the argument that a withdrawal is not a defeat, but a lure to pull an enemy into a position for a much greater counterattack than can envelop them, i.e. getting the fortifiers to leave their fortifications and come into the fields where the mongol cavalry destroy them.
In Kherson, it was one of the cope arguments that the Russians weren't in an untenable position, but that the Ukrainians were over-extending their offensive and the Russian counterattack would evicerate them.
(The Russians claimed to have stopped the Kherson offensive multiple times in the months leading up to its completion. It wasn't hard to find plenty of arguments that the Ukrainians were making a obvious and debilitating error by pursuing the offensive.)
Every russian retreat is a glorious trap about to be sprung on the unsuspecting ukrops, every Ukrainian failure is proof of their impending failure cascade, every Russian long range strike onto civilians is magically hitting a hidden HIMARs located behind a baby crib, every Russian asset lost is just proof of how resilient the Russian manufacturing machine is, every Russian field 'improvisation' is proof of superior Russian ingenuity. Bias exists in all parties/observers within this conflict, but pro Russian cope is the finest fermented diarrhea to be injected into every vatniks urethrae.
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