Most people have heard the most famous truisms about armed conflict. No plan, we are told, survives contact with the enemy. In any war, truth is the first casualty. Of course, there is "the fog of war."
Those truisms are playing out in real time in Russia's war against Ukraine. Much of the American and Western media is focused on sensational stories and images of human struggle and loss, rather than on the larger picture of what is really happening on the ground in this grinding, brutal conflict. Coverage is dominated by dueling propaganda narratives in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a saint and his besieged nation is a "brave little Belgium" (a First World War reference) while Vladimir Putin is an "irrational" bully, driven solely by a desire for mayhem and evil.
