As you might guess one of my favorite TV shows from the last 20 years was “House, MD”. House was noted for saying “It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies, the only variable is about what.” When it comes to geopolitics and especially military action, this goes double, and it’s essentially impossible to get somewhat neutral information. The only way to sort of get a handle on the situation is to delve in to the various propaganda sources and try to figure out who is lying about what, and thus get a glimpse of the truth. Even photos and videos are not objective data – I’ve seen many times where reporters will do stand-ups in front of the most devastated structure after a wind storm – surrounded by areas that look like nothing happened. Likewise, especially in Ukraine where both sides are using similar military hardware, knowing who that burning ATV belonged to is difficult.
It’s fascinating to see how things are reported on each side of this conflict. Many of you have seen the video of a missile hitting an apartment building. In the Western media it is universally being called a “Russian Missile.” However, pro-Russian media and the Russian MOD says it was a Ukrainian BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile that had malfunctioned/missed its target. That’s certainly a plausible explanation based on the appearance and flight path. Recall that during the Pearl Harbor attacks, a lot of the 5″ anti-aircraft artillery rounds were improperly fuzed in the panic or malfunctioned, landing in Honolulu and caused fires and damage. Which is true? Almost doesn’t matter at this point, not to those in the middle. It seems likely the “Kindergarten attack” from a week or so before the Russian Invasion was, in fact, friendly fire – the wall was apparently facing away from the LDPR forces who were returning fire across the border. No matter who is shooting, civilians always get caught in the crossfire in these conflicts.
From space we can see heat signatures that are normally used to track wild fires. They also are useful for tracking other human activities; often the operating status of factories or refineries can be assessed from their thermal images. During COVID I’ve used this data to monitor China’s factories to see if their rhetoric about production is truthy or not. Likewise, wars generate a lot of unique signatures detectable from space. Here’s one example, the fighting northeast of Kiev yesterday in the outskirts of the town of Chernhiv, which lies on the route between Belarus and the capital …

Fighting has been intense near the airfields around Kiev. Here is Antonov International Airport …

And yesterday, after the order was given to resume the advance (which had apparently been paused by Russia to allow negotiations – or was it the delay caused by the heroic resistance of Ukrainian forces?), the fuel dumps near the military airfield at Vasylkiv were hit by missiles …

Clearly there is heavy fighting – but in the fog of war, with propaganda the only thing coming out of the “news” sources from all sides, facts and truth are in short supply. In summary, I’d suggest that you not jump to any conclusions as to how the war is going. My guess is by the middle of this week we will really know how things are really going, based on seeing if the government of Zelenskii is still in Kiev or has relocated to Livov.
I’d also urge everyone to consider that this is getting out of hand, and realize that the global leadership are taking actions that will potentially make a bad situation worse. Disconnecting Russia from the global financial system is going to have severe repercussions. Europe and the US are trying to have it both ways – hurt Russia while still keeping access to Russian energy, since without it Europe will likely plunge in to economic chaos, which will cascade across the rest of the world. What if Russia doesn’t cooperate in this and stops the flow of gas (and wheat – it’s not 1980 any more – while certain US politicians seem to be ignorant of this fact, Russia now exports more wheat than the US and Canada combined!). May be obvious, but it’s going to get uglier the longer this goes on.
One other note, I think it is very dangerous to call foreign leaders insane, crazy, compare them to Hitler, and use that kind of rhetoric in most cases, including this one. It’s “good” politics and a “good” way to manipulate public opinion, but it’s terrible policy because once you call someone “crazy” you don’t have to consider if maybe you share some responsibility for what has happened, and it paints you into a corner that shuts down the path to negotiation and compromise. To be clear, I don’t approve of the invasion, and think they had other options, but I understand why Russia has done it, and feel we didn’t take Russia’s legitimate concerns seriously. If we had I think the people of Ukraine would be better off, and this would have been avoided.
Finally, thanks for all of the kind comments and support for previous posts. These events are so emotional, and people tend to have knee-jerk reactions to things. There are over 20,000 readers of a typical post, and if even half of a percent of people misunderstand something, take it the wrong way, or even are just having a bad day and vent, that’s over a hundred angry emails or comments to deal with (not to mention the hundreds of reasonable replies of people who may disagree, but just want to have a discussion and understand). For one person that’s a bit exhausting and some times it gets to be a bit much. Again, thanks for the understanding.