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The actual fact is that it's far more important to publish something that is new and novel and true than it is to publish something that is true, but not new and not novel. If you consistently publish novel, but false things, you will get marked as a crank and chased out. Unless, of course, you work in a field which ceased to be science, but then there's no point in discussing details of it - it should be buried wholesale or embrace its true nature as entertainment and proceed accordingly.
This is Russia you're talking about. It had been like this since it detached itself from the Golden Horde and became a separate entity. The danger of Russian army is not that it is especially good at anything. It's that it is huge, sitting on a pile of ammunition that they were stockpiling since 1945, and highly resistant to losses since nobody cares if the soldiers die - that's what they are for. Linking it to some fashionable phenomena does not look very useful - it's how it always was, and if you look at the history of, say, Russia's war with Japan over 100 years ago, you'd find the eerily similar picture.
Except for the very important point about how Putin clearly started the war on a completely false premise he had been fed due to everyone being afraid to report anything other than "things are great". IOW, a perfect example of what Hlynka wrote about.
Again, if you look into Russian history, it's pretty much how it always worked. Russia is huge, and authoritarian, which means the centralized power has little idea about what actually happens on the periphery, and it routinely fed tales about how everything is peachy. If the ruler is smart, he doesn't believe a word of it, but people tend to be deluded and hear what they want to hear. It is a generic property of big authoritarian bureaucracies, and Russia always have been one.
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