A plea for outcome-focused discussions about the war in Ukraine
On Friday, Brian Gerrish of UK Column joined Jesse Zurawell on his TNT radio program to discuss how Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine is reported (both in mainstream and alternative media), and in what ways this coverage might affect our perceptions of this conflict.
You can listen to their chat here.
First, I want to say that I think they both did a great service to the “alternative media ecosystem”. They hold very different views about this war, and their conversation, on the whole, was civil and respectful. I hope similar dialogues will be organized in the future, in an attempt to bounce ideas off each other, and find common ground on this very contentious and divisive topic.
This blog post, which is extremely long (sorry, but there was no other way), is my response to their discussion. Actually, it is an attempt to answer a question that they touched on, but didn’t expand upon, possibly due to time constraints.
Most of their talk focused on casualty figures, and what they may (or may not) tell us about the progression of this war, and who is “winning”. The reason for this is that Jesse, in a Telegram post, criticized UK Column’s coverage of the conflict (which places a lot of emphasis on casualty numbers), and Brian requested an opportunity to respond to this criticism.
To summarize their discussion: Brian believes these figures (which, we must point out, are difficult to independently verify, but can certainly be estimated using various techniques) are of the highest importance, and conclusively show that Ukrainians are being slaughtered for no good reason, constituting a horrific crime perpetrated by Kiev and its Washington/NATO sponsors.
Jesse, on the other hand, questions the relevance of these figures (partly due to how difficult they are to verify), but also because they may not be the best way to gauge who is really “winning”—an argument we will return to shortly.
I would like to briefly address Brian’s perspective about the importance of casualty numbers.
UK Column’s reporting on these figures largely relies on data released by Russia’s Ministry of Defense, which Jesse didn’t like very much. Jesse argued that, just like the “official” figures from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, these numbers can’t be considered objective or impartial.
As someone who follows Russian-language media very closely—especially commentary coming from patriotic voices inside Russia—I would like to point out that many Russians view the “official” casualty figures from Russia’s MOD (Ukrainian casualties, of course—Russia’s MOD rarely speaks of Russian dead/wounded) with extreme skepticism. Actually, these figures are often openly mocked.
