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Ackowledging I suffer from epistemic learned helplessness, have you considered that western propaganda is just that good? It’s easy to dismiss obvious propaganda in the opening weeks and months of the war. But when you have the entire western media ecosystem singing the same pro Ukraine tune for a whole year, I think most people just shrug and say “I guess Russia is a joke after all”
I’m not even saying Russia is doing well. I’m just suggesting that a year long propaganda campaign can work on even the most skeptical people.
Russia is not a joke. People kept thinking that Russian supersoldiers are 3m high supergiants. Now some think that they are stunted 1.2m high mentally-disabled midgets.
Both are wrong, Russia continues to have more soldiers and overall more weaponry. If they manage to collect themselves - then they can attrit Ukrainian army at about 1:1 ration which is highly favorable to them.
Obviously, no war at all would be even better but...
And some correction was needed, but beware of overcorrection.
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I think most of the, shall we say, war-watching types who were not out-and-out Russia Kool-Aid drinkers concluded "I guess Russia is a joke after all" (and, contrariwise, that Ukraine is not the joke it was during Crimea) quite shortly after the initial shock phase bogged down. I've personally tried to consciously adjust my reflective Russia-is-a-joke reaction to more "neutral" several times, which has led to me underpredicting Ukrainian advances in, say, Kharkiv and Herson. Generally speaking "Russia is a joke and the specific operations they are trying will probably fail or at most result to very minor victories" has been the safest prediction throughout the war.
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The flippant answer would be 'Sure, and then I watch American news media,' a more meta answer would be this is prone to non-falsifiability because 'have you ever considered that you're just wrong and being manipulated' is as much a framing question as 'have you considered not beating your wife?', and a temporal answer would be 'I'm not talking about positions after a year, but Russia-skeptic points from a year ago.' Points such as the military manning issues for occupying a country the size of Ukraine, the implications of NATO provision of weapons to those willing to resist, and the consequences of doing so for Russian positions and interests in Europe were all raised a year ago, and have stood the test of time.
I am not the entire western media ecosystem (thank god), nor have I been arguing that Russia is a joke. Doomed to failure, unable to achieve it's strategic ends, already having suffered a critical strategic defeat that it can't reverse into a meaningful triumph, yes. But not a joke.
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