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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?
The narrative uniformness and changes might seem like there is a complotist illuminati-like scheme that would dictate covertly what can medias says. This is obviously not a thing actually. I mean some investigative journalists have been killed or jailed either by Ukraine or by the West because they were too contra-narrative (e.g. covering IRL the referendum in occupied ukraine or the ukraine war crimes on dombas civilians). Despite this fact, those are annecdotal in the greater POV) Medias are also mostly controlled by a very limited oligarchy, however there exist outliers to this rule. But the main explanation is that those narrative uniformness and changes, are simply due to the extreme and universal mediocrity of journalists as human beings. They are expert in nothing and haven't even been trained for cognivive debiasing/rationality. Add to this, that very few people on earth (so few we don't see them online, if they exist at all (aside me) understand modern warfare. And no, historians are non-credible. But for the most things you report, e.g. the orc dehumanization or turning russia capabilities in ridicule, were not, I believe mostly reported by "serious" media (wapo, forbes, etc). Of course /r/worldnews is not an accurate representation of the world news and is a cringey echo chamber. The "serious" medias such as forbes have although built a narrative of western superiority and wunderwaffe which stem from many biases but most importantly come from a failure of understanding what matters in modern warfare. Currently Ukraine is inflicting 2 times the equipment losses on russia and still has large amounts of ex-soviet equipment, however the balance will quickly shift as lancet production scales up and it is a fact that ukraine will have lost 100% of its artillery in less than 8 months
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