Ukraine Thread

[Viking]

There should be none, that is correct, but that's beside my point, which was that you cite one dead soldier as evidence for intense fighting, which it is not.

He is one example, equally important is this bit:

fighting continued around the rebel-held city of Donetsk and the village of Shyrokyne near the industrial port of Mariupol.

If one soldier dies a day, that's quite a lot and way beyond the levels of a frozen conflict.

The article says

The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding.

which is misleading. Such details become very important when the main topic is the accusation that one individual is exaggerating what is going on. The article is itself is exaggerating how peaceful the situation is with its choice of words. It should have said "the ceasefire is holding many places, but not all", which is the literal truth. If Spiegel doesn't have to choose its words carefully, why should Breedlove? If it is roughly correct, it's good enough - right?

By the look of things, the insurgents are trying to take Shyrokyne , which is another of way of saying that there is no ceasefire at that location. Controlling Shyrokyne is important when it comes to taking the strategically important city of Mariupol.

Note how different an impression the article would have given if it contained the sentence "the ceasefire does not hold in town X" instead of the "the ceasefire is largely holding".

You also ignore the possibility that maybe Putin is not 100% in control of the rebels and some try to sabotage the ceasefire. If that were the case, we would play into their hands by taking that as a reason to start WW3.

No, I haven't touched that subject or anything directly relevant.

It says calm and then specifies this as a relative calm compared to what there was before, that's not a contradiction.
Adding context or detail does not make the sentences contradictory.

It says "it was another quiet day", which isn't true. It wasn't quiet, no such sentence should have been included. It's a misleading choice of words. If "the battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped", that means battles are still going on, and where battles are still going on, it is not quiet. So the first part has gotten contradicted, not supplemented.

The article's audience is mainly people that live outside war zones. For them, it's not quiet if mortars rain down and tanks are firing shells at the enemy.

Using random guys on twitter as evidence, priceless. You forgot that your own article said the situation is calming down.

A war photographer isn't a random guy. He's one of many whose work I've been following for a while.

That article is from last Wednesday as that was the specific day the Spiegel article was talking about. Things change.

You mean that he exaggerates the figures about russian support is justified by the context?

So you know he exaggerated? Of course you don't, you only have different sources to rely on rather than counting for yourself. Is Breedlove correct, or the people who contradict him? Maybe the truth is somewhere in between? Don't forget that definitions matter when counting, as well as the possibility that some sources have less complete data to base their counting on.

It might be said that Breedlove is being careless with how he chooses to present information, but that is separate from lying or exaggerating.

Give it a rest. Different levels of violence require different level of response. A bar brawl is not the same as WW2.

Beside the point.