Russia, Ukraine, and the First Casualty

There’s an old line that truth is the first casualty of war. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’d say truth was shot well before the first tank crossed a border — and it’s been getting shot, daily, by everyone with a flag to wave, ever since.

Let me be careful, because this is exactly the kind of topic where people want you to pick a team and start shouting. I’m not going to. I don’t think a bloke writing honestly from Queensland has any business pretending he’s got the definitive secret history of a war on the other side of the planet. What I do have is a way of thinking about it — the same one I bring to everything here.

What’s clear, and what isn’t

Some things aren’t really in dispute. A full-scale invasion began in 2022. A war has ground on since, and it has killed and displaced an enormous number of ordinary people — Ukrainian and Russian both. The suffering is real and it is vast. That part isn’t a “both sides” question, and I won’t insult anyone by pretending it is.

But the deeper story — the decades of history behind it, the causes, the motives, and especially the daily blizzard of claims and counter-claims about who did what to whom this week — that’s where truth gets buried, and every side shows up with a shovel. Governments lie in wartime. All of them. Media outlets pick a lane and stay in it. The version you’re handed depends almost entirely on which feed you happen to be standing in front of.

Be most suspicious of the story you like

Here’s the discipline I keep coming back to: be most suspicious of the version that flatters what you already believe.

If a narrative casts your “side” as pure and the other as cartoon evil, that’s not analysis — that’s a war film, and you’re being cast in it. Real history is older, messier, and far less satisfying than any slogan on either side. There are usually grievances and crimes and self-interest in every direction, and a tidy story that puts all of it on one party is almost always a story someone powerful wants you repeating.

Questioning the official narrative doesn’t mean swallowing the opposite one whole. That’s the trap a lot of “free thinkers” fall straight into — so desperate not to be fooled by one set of liars that they hand themselves to another. Question everything. But prove something. Hold your conclusions loosely, read across sources that hate each other, and stay honest about how much you genuinely can’t know from here.

The part that isn’t propaganda

Strip away every narrative and one thing is left standing, solid and undeniable: the people.

Ukrainian grandmothers in cold basements. Russian conscripts who are barely more than kids, fed into a war most of them didn’t choose. Families on both sides burying their own for decisions made by men in palaces who will never feel a single consequence. That’s the constant. Whatever the truth of the history turns out to be, that part is not in question, and it’s the part the flag-wavers on every side would rather you looked past while you argue about everything else.

Do better

So what does doing better look like on something this big and this far away, where certainty is mostly for sale?

It looks like humility — admitting the limits of what you can know through a screen and a war’s worth of propaganda. It looks like refusing the cartoon, on either side. It looks like keeping the dead in view instead of treating a war as a team sport with a scoreboard. And it looks like saving your loudest certainty for the one thing that actually deserves it: that the ordinary people dying in it are exactly as human as you are.

The full truth of this war will come out, the way it always does — slowly, partially, years late, long after the people selling today’s version have moved on. Until then, the honest position isn’t a confident take. It’s open eyes, a closed wallet to the propagandists, and a heart that hasn’t gone numb.