Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 37.6% (440 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 4.9% (57 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 2% (23 hits)
• Framing Effect - 9.4% (110 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

Reports of Russia’s imminent defeat are greatly exaggerated

Vladimir Putin is showing a new frankness about the damage being done by Ukrainian strikes on Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.

In the past, the rule seemed to be silence or denial.

Now, Putin has admitted that Ukrainian strikes are ‘creating problems’, that there are widespread petrol shortages, and that if the problems persist, this year’s harvest could be hit.

A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea at the start of the holiday season.

The obvious reason for the new frankness is that Moscow can no longer ignore reality.

The war is indeed starting to come ‘home’ to many city-dwelling Russians for the first time, with the risk that it could ignite popular discontent.

Putin’s admissions also play into a narrative that has been running in much of the Western media, according to which, after a difficult winter, Ukraine has turned the tide and now has a good chance of forcing Russia into concessions.

This in turn reinforces the argument that not only must Ukraine push on, but that its Western backers – now mostly Europe – must also step up support for Ukraine.

So far, this narrative of Ukrainian success has been widely accepted outside Russia, with few questions asked.

But it is far from the whole picture.

In particular, it leaves a very big Donbas-shaped gap, where the story is rather different.

In recent weeks, Russia has been accelerating what had been its glacial advance towards the key ‘fortress’ cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and so to controlling the whole of the Donbas.

Ukraine has been desperate to prevent these cities falling into Russian hands, for fear that it could open the way for Russia to reach Kyiv or Odessa (if that is its aim).

Two towns on this route have been crucial: Pokrovsk, which has been in Russian hands since February (but has never been acknowledged lost by Kyiv) and Kostyantynivka, which is now reported to be mostly or entirely controlled by Russia.

The significance of this was pointed out two weeks ago in a long article that suddenly appeared on the BBC website, completely against the grain of its long-standing successful-Ukraine, failing-Russia message.

Other outlets, including Sky News and the New York Times, followed suit.

It would appear from these reports that, whatever setbacks Russia might have suffered in Crimea or from damage to refineries inside Russia, these are secondary.

Moscow is still pursuing its central aim of capturing the Donbas, undeterred.

Indeed, a Russian view is that the recent strikes by Ukraine are designed primarily to divert attention from its losses in the Donbas.

The mostly absent Donbas aspect of recent Western reporting also underlines something else: that much of the news of the war originates in Ukraine and comes complete with its own Ukrainian and Western ‘spin’.

Any view from Russia has been at best partial.

There are other angles largely missing from Western mainstream reporting, which also tend to foster a rosier picture of the situation in Ukraine than may be warranted.

Ukraine has suffered a devastating loss of population to exile and war.

That Ukraine is running short of fighters is demonstrated by the spread of ‘busification’ – essentially the press-ganging of civilians into military service by recruiters – with frequent videos on social media showing local people trying to rescue the victims.

First-hand reports also suggest broken supply lines in places, which have led to Ukrainian troops going hungry.

Corruption in Ukraine continues, with those in the frame including president Volodymyr Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

A senior Ukrainian intelligence officer – Dmytro Kozyura – has also just been convicted of spying for Russia.

An argument can be made that it reflects well on Ukraine that such inconvenient truths see the light of day at all.

But this ‘bad news’ from Ukraine receives a lot less attention than today’s dominant message that Ukraine has turned the tide and is on course to win – a message repeatedly reinforced by the ‘bad news’ from Russia.

This tends to focus on two areas: the casualty figures, which have become a big part of the propaganda war for both sides and will probably never be established until the fighting is over, and forecasts of Russia’s imminent economic collapse as a result of the war or Western economic sanctions, or both.

Yet while eyewitness reports of full supermarket shelves may be questionable, there are credible ways in which Russia has actually profited from the war – most recently, from higher oil prices and sales during the conflict in the Middle East.

None of this is to say that the tide of the war has been turning decisively in Russia’s favour, or that periodic reports of dissent in the Kremlin – between hawks and relative doves (with Putin, by the way, in the latter camp) – do not have some truth to them.

It is rather to cast doubt on the certainty that Ukraine is now in the stronger position, and that it is Putin, not Zelensky, who will be forced to negotiate.

The reality, insofar as it can be gauged, is that Russia is advancing towards its goal of capturing the whole of the Donbas.

Predictions that it is running out of troops or weapons, or the will to fight, disregard the fact that it is many times bigger and richer in resources than Ukraine.

Its war objectives have also remained remarkably consistent, and there is no sign of Putin buckling, nor is he under domestic pressure to do so.

Discussing the Ukrainian attacks and the petrol queues, Putin offered his own rationale: having largely failed on the existing battlefields, he suggested, Ukraine was now trying to destabilise Russia itself by sowing division, sapping support for the war and forcing Russia into negotiations.

‘We will not give them that chance’, he said, insisting that Ukraine’s long-range strikes would do nothing to alter Russia’s war aims.

It is just about possible – as indeed it was in the first year of the war – to imagine a scenario where Ukraine is able to isolate Crimea and use it as a bargaining chip.

But it is hard to see Russia surrendering territory that it sees as crucial to its security as it does the Donbas.

And it is even harder to see Russia being bombed into submission by Ukraine, both because of the sporadic nature of the strikes, and because of precedents – including in Ukraine itself – that suggest such attacks only stiffen national resolve.

Ukraine’s dependence on outside help also places it at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Russia.

How soon, and on what terms, the war ends could now be determined by whether, or how soon, Russia can gain control of all the Donbas – and how long Europe’s ability and will to support Ukraine will last.

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster.

She was Moscow correspondent for The Times between 1988 and 1992.

She has also been a correspondent from Paris, Washington and China.