Esperto di difesa estone: l’esercito russo è sovrastimato dai media tedeschi

He’s right. The *”Russia as a world superpower can’t be beaten, so Ukraine must give up fighting, enter peace talks and cede territories to russia”* narrative has never really gone away in Germany.

It’s general problem created by misinterpretation of data by so called experts.

E.g. some time ago Breugel institute, which generally provides good analysis for many fields stated that russian tanks production is hugher than NATOs. Which media reported, because why wouldn’t they? It was overall from credible source. With this numbers it was estimated that in 5 years russia will be capable of attacking Europe…

So where’s the catch? Analysis compared production in NATO with… production AND refurbishment for russia. So, what it really did show is that russia is running out of it’s stocks of old equipment in absurdally high pace. But a) original author was blindsided to this when presenting the news; b) only few outlets actually took it into consideration. And why is it important? Well Economist calculated, that taking rate of losses and pace of refurbishment into account by the second half of the 2025 russia will start running out of tanks, as their old stocks will become tottaly depleted and actual production isn’t that big.

And why would russian data be misrepresented? One: fearmongering sells, so media had more motivations to present misinterpretated data rather than correct ones. Two: military industry propagands. E.g. Breugel article wasn’t of the type “russia stronk surrender” but “russia stronk buy more guns, plox”.

So yeah, combination of military industry complex propaganda, with poor understanding of data and click-based news economy makes it so that russia doesn’t even have to push it propaganda. Paradoxically ones that are kind of against it do it for them.