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Am I wrong and maybe sort of paranoid, or is there a concentrated and obvious effort in the Western public discourse by Zelensky's foreign supporters to retcon (if that's the correct expression) their own past narrative about the Russian military and Ukraine's prospects? My memory isn't that great and I can't be arsed to start digging up social media rubbish from months ago, but I distinctly remember the narrative of Atlanticist culture warriors, which was practically flooding both legacy media and social media for months, especially after the much-publicised counteroffensives in the Kharkov and Kherson regions. It was basically all the same: the orcs are looting local stores because they have no food, they have no vests and other basic infantry equipment, they have no ammunition nor warm uniforms for the winter, abandoning their vehicles and fleeing en masse, freezing to death, Putler has run out of guided missiles, tanks, artillery shells, aircraft etc., the Moskal never had an effective military antd their shitty state was always a paper tiger etc. To reiterate, I distinctly remember countless Twitter/Facebook/Substack posts, YT videos etc. pushing this.
And then, in the last few months, when, according to this narrative, the glorious great counteroffensive should have already brought about a decisive victory, these same people are stating, as if they were all seasoned military historians, with a straight face that duh, of course it's terribly difficult to break through prepared defensive lines and fortifications (even those put together by the fucking orcs, it seems), of course it'd be vitally important to have air superiority (even agains dumbass orcs, I guess, that are even capable of losing a cruiser against people without a navy), of course combat drones have, like, completely revolutionised modern warfare (as if that weren't clear as day to anyone involvind in planning the counteroffensive), of course it's just all so damn hard!
As a dissident rightist, my view is that all this gaslighting has the obvious purpose of preparing the masses for the next narrative down the line, namely that it all could have actually worked out well, if not for the evil appeasers, wreckers, saboteurs, demagogues, opportunists, deplorables and toxic shitheads who've sadly infiltrated important positions in the political affairs of NATO member nations, and prevented all efforts to give all the resources and equipment necessary for the final and total Ukrainian victory. And this is just a variant of the narrative pushed by the Kiev government to their people, namely that, in a nutshell, "NATO promised to help/intervene, but betrayed us, especially in the end".
So I think I understand why this narrative is being pushed, and how it makes sense, from their own point of view. But still, the brazenness of it all is still a bit surprising. Is my observation correct, or should I not believe my own eyes and ears?
I don't think that's the most likely explanation. The easier one is more factual: no matter how incompetent a military starts out, after about six months or more of war, certainly a year, even bad militaries get better at war. In terms of the troops doing the actual front line fighting. There's no inherent contradiction of a "Russia has a shit military" type narrative and "it's very hard to retake ground" one. As an aside, I watch the news very carefully and I don't agree at all that the prevailing current narrative is one of "it's NATO's fault Ukraine isn't doing better". There are ammo shortages on both sides of the war, a lot of Western reserves are pretty strained for certain types of ammo and equipment (at least, they want to keep some in reserve for themselves and not totally empty out the shed), and Ukraine has of course found that acting like a petulant child who wants more more more, kinda sorta works? They have always danced a fine line between expressing a desire for more stuff and greater quality stuff, and avoiding acting too ungrateful, and I don't think that's changed very much other than they've finally gotten most of their (realistic) high quality wish list.
In short, I disagree that there is any substantive or coordinated gaslighting going on, in fact (Occam's Razor style) there is a much simpler explanation that requires very little intentional and complex deceit.
There's also, I should add, the element of how surprises are more newsworthy than boring updates. We were almost all certainly surprised that Russia was that awful at a lot of things especially early in the war. Then there was basically a repeat of the original stories but with the Wagner Group as the main character. The need for surprise also twists what kind of news stories are produced especially as the conflict becomes more, might I even say, boring.
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