It is actually interesting how this new type of propaganda works.
In the cold war, russian propaganda tried to fake things as well as they could so they are believable to everyone, even those who do not want to believe them.
Now they do not care about how believable propaganda is, they care about it sowing distrust and appealing to different groups of people. The best case for Russia is if nobody trusts anyone. Because people who do not trust anyone tend to be the easiest victims for propaganda, paradoxically, because they think they cannot be manipulated.
Every person has something they fundamentally believe in on a universal level, a political leaning or some fundamental truth. And Russia's strategy is to take that belief and form a bridge from it to a soft stance on russia. The reasoning is exchangeable, but the result matters.
If you are a leftist who is pacifist and anti war, it is not hard to convince you that appeasing Russia is the better option than taking a tougher stance on it. For that type of person, you just need to tell them things like "more people will suffer if you escalate", "russia has legitimate security concerns" and so on, because it appeals to them and if they do not trust experts, media outlets and so on, they will believe what they fundamentally want to believe.
It does not even matter if their stance is right or wrong, even a good stance (like pacifism) can be distorted towards russia friendly conclusions.
Let's say your stance is "i hate russia, they are evil". That is not a problem, then for this group, you play Putin up as a KGB Puppetmaster who is able to raise havoc and willing to nuke you if you are not careful. Since you believe that russians are evil, it is no problem to play russia up as stronger than you, or play the west as weak and cowardly so you do not have a chance. That will still result in a demoralized person that is not going to take political action.
In an ideal world, you'd need something to have a 51% chance of being true for people to assume it is true. But for things you want to be true due to your worldview, oftentimes, a 10% chance, for some people a 1% chance, is enough for you to think it is true, especially on social media. As long as you can imagine it to be true, you will believe what you find plausible in your worldview.
The only remedy to that is media that people have trust in. Because you would believe something that goes against your worldview if a trusted source tells it to you. But if you trust nobody, you will never trust anything that goes against your worldview and that can easily be exploited.
Ok, that makes sense then. It's still incredible that russia thought they could take ukraine in two days. They literally did not expect a fight... at all.
I see this more like the different parties involved are concerned with how close they can get to the mutually assured destruction thing without crossing the line. To me it sounds sensible to block many of the proposals around since they would pretty much engage russia with a nato country (like the no fly zone or poland sending airplanes to russia).
On that note, russia's invasion seems to still be somewhat stalled. While the ukranian military winning over russia still seems improbable at best it also doesn't seem very likely that russia will get their way in the long term. Setting aside the regions russia declared independent or crimea it doesn't seem likely russia will get to do whatever it is they planned to do with the rest of ukraine... A puppet government seems increasingly unlikely and breaking ukraine into pieces still requires multiple puppet governments.. This lasting longer sounds like it would worsen the situation for russia as well. Is this turning into a dumber version of iraq?
It makes sense if you read the FSB whistleblower letter (which was verified by Bellingcat and other sources). They actually thought they could take Ukraine in 2 days and many experts in the West thought so too (another kind of propaganda), because the Russian military was so hyped up that nobody could imagine it to do so badly.
The reason for that is that russian intelligence agencies did not tell their superiors the truth and the political elite left them in the dark about their plans.
As in: If you work for the FSB and someone asks you a hypothetical question (what will happen if an asteroid hits moscow) you answer with a bullshit analysis that tells them everything will go well, because elseways you get yelled at or even fired. These questions are for beaurocrats to do checkboxes and look good towards their superiors because their department is ready for everything.
The FSB only gives you proper analysis if they know a question actually matters. But Putin was so secretive that he asked them questions about ukraine that they thought were one of these bullshit scenarios (widespread invasion with puppet government and so on). So they gave him bullshit analysis.
Likewise many generals or soldeirs just sold stuff without telling their superiors (obviously) because they didnt think they would actually go to war, which is why many tanks have no fuel.
So Putin was surrounded by people telling him russia is insanely powerful and can take ukraine in 2 days, while the people who would have to invade ukraine didnt know they were supposed to do that and just slacked off. And that led to the current clusterfuck.
I can link the letter if you want to read
FSB document pourteaux - Pastebin.com
As i said, this letter was verified as likely being from an FSB agent by several sources including Bellingcat, so I do believe it to be real.
