Ukraine Is Winning The Propaganda War

One of the big things that strikes me about the current Ukraine war is how legacy media, especially in the US, has failed to cover it. There is neither an Edward R Murrow nor a Bernard Shaw in Kyiv. UK media has been somewhat better, but the best reports are from a combinationi of third-world outlets, independent YouTubers, and even the Ukraine government news agency. Ukraine in particular is running material without contradiction from the Russians:

Ukraine has paraded captured Russian soldiers in dozens of online videos as Moscow finally admitted its forces have sustained heavy losses after pictures showing bodies of Kremlin fighters emerged.

Footage posted online show tied up 'demoralised and exhausted' Russian prisoners of war captured after they failed to break through Ukrainian defences in Kyiv and Kharkiv over the weekend.

Several of the videos were posted on a Telegram channel set up on Saturday by Ukraine's Interior Ministry called 'Find Your Own'.

. . . Other footage purported to show Russian soldiers calling their families to tell them they had been captured but were safe and being 'treated fairly' by Ukrainian forces.

In one video the soldier, wearing military fatigues and a black hat, can be heard telling his mother that commanders had told troops they were 'going as peacekeepers to the territory of the (self-proclaimed) Donetsk People's Republic.'

'In fact, a war has broken out and we are here bombing cities,' he says, before telling his mother not to panic.

Another video posted on the Ukrainian Security Service's Facebook page shows a 21-year-old soldier from the snipers telling his captors he was part of military exercises along the border before the invasion.

'About two weeks later we were told to line up on the border, and then suddenly we crossed it in the night. There was no choice. If we had refused to go to war we would have been accused of treason.'

The first thing that strikes me is that this was a strategy used by the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War, to show public confessions by demoralized US prisoners. But while the US prisoners were "confessing" to improbable war crimes, the Russian prisoners in Ukraine are entirely credible and sympathetic. And there are enough of them to support Ukrainian claims of battlefield success.

The Ukrainian propaganda victory starts at the top:

Comedian Jon Stewart said that watching comedian-turned-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky face down the Russian invasion of his country was a bit like “watching Shecky Greene” — a Las Vegas nightclub comedian in the 1950s and 1960s — “transform into Winston Churchill.”

Stewart, speaking with writers Robby Slowik and Rob Christensen during Friday’s episode of his podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” made the comparison after joking that comedians were often noted for their bravado — but not necessarily their actual bravery.

In a matter of a few days, Zelensky managed to turn the narrative around, effectively forcing the West to abandon its prior defeatism and support Ukraine. The situation is fluid, but there's cause for optimism.