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Neat. So what? I didn't make the claim that no Russian said it.
Perhaps this is true and perhaps you did, but the person I am responding to did not and that's part of the point of my post. He writes as if this was some sort of universally agreed upon outcome and it didn't happen because of reasons X, Y, or Z, all of which he believes because he only looks at particular sources while not seeing anything else even while acknowledging those sources are comically biased and have incentives to lie.
you cannot simultaneously claim these things
I didn't write Russians only tell the truth. What has been done is what Russians are saying now and have been saying for decades is ignored and instead in its place are the rambling speculations of NATO funded "thinktanks" printed in op-eds across Western media to present a narrative to support the debacle in Ukraine.
Yes I can. Russians will say whatever serves them at the moment (or at least whatever they think does, most of them aren't geniuses). It could be the truth, or it could be lies, it could be revealing their intent or concealing it. You need to consider who said it, when, why and in what context - and then even lies can reveal some truths behind them. For example, Russian lying about Ukraine being "fake state with fake nation" reveals the truth that Russia wants to destroy Ukrainian statehood and not just secure a couple of enclaves with Russian-speaking population. You can't believe their words but you can believe the intent behind them.
Exactly the opposite. Exactly from studying what they lied for decades and what they are lying now, and identifying the rare cases they didn't lie and when these cases happened, we could deduce so much about their real thought process and their real intent. You are confusing "ignoring" and "taking at face value". One absolutely shouldn't ignore them and also absolutely should never ever take it at face value.
I'm not sure what this means. Nobody on the West supports Russian invasion into Ukraine (at least nobody that has access to op-eds, there are all kinds of people around of course). So what narrative are you talking about?
Okay, you only meant to make a comment on the intent of the speaker. Many Russians and pro-Russians sources do in fact care about how closely their statements reflect reality, i.e., the truth, and this is evidenced by them being consistently correct about statements they have made about the conflict.
No, I mean the Western media literally ignored them for the most part, i.e., didn't bother to address the statements they were making for the reasons they didn't any particular thing or disagreed with any particular thing. I agree no statements should be taken at face value when there are reasons to think they're not. However, this cuts both ways in this conflict.
The narrative of the conflict. How it began, the history of the conflict, how it's going now, which side is good, which side is bad, etc. It is true no one writing op-eds in WaPo or similar "news" orgs support Russian invasion of Ukraine and this has caused much of the problem of perceptions in places such as these compared to realities on the ground or the history of the conflict.
Instead of addressing Russian statements of concern or demands, they're simply waived away and instead convenient narratives about what really happened and what Putler really wants fill the pages of Western media. Looking at both sides of the media complexes, whether or not Russians would love to manipulate and lie or not, their capability to actually do so isn't even on the same planet as the shock-and-awe campaign carried out by Western media on their various populations in order to establish support for proxy war in Ukraine. Almost comical lies have been disseminated and are still believed by large portions of people in the West, e.g., the snake island last stand, ghost of kiev, spaghetti sauce grandma anti-air extroidinaire, casualty numbers, etc.
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