When the prediction doesn't pan out, the usual response is "two more weeks." Qanon is the most notorious and successful example of this phenomenon. You don't normally see these on HN, but they are common on anonymous message boards. Perhaps this is a "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" mainstream conspiracy theory being propagated as an official narrative for war propaganda purposes?
>If you have questions, ask them. I won't be able to answer for a few days, we're in emergency mode, and the work only keeps piling up.
It would be good if you knew something about the topic before throwing around LARP-accusations.
I’m willing to bet that you are completely unfamiliar with the people publicly involved in this release, odds are that you can’t even read Russian.
Or the admin is bored.
Or the admin got this sent randomly from someone. Maybe an FSB operative, or maybe a convincing troll, or Russian or Ukrainian or frankly any intelligence service.
It’s completely unknowable. Any heuristics for determining authenticity go out the window, because they would be used by a faker too.
Hell, even concluding it’s a fake is dangerous, because what if that’s the intention? Next thing you might be wondering if this is reverse psychology and trying to conclude things from something that really has no informational content to the lay user.
Here we have a well respected journalist with a solid track record claiming that they trust their source.
Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true, but certainly lends credibility.
I wouldn’t take at face value a journalist saying “this is what an FSB operative says, trust me”. Leaks from “senior anonymous official” are dozen a penny. Journalists typically indicate how they verified the provenance of leaks they publish, and hopefully keep the unverifiable stuff off their pages.
As for the guy’s track record... this sounds like a niche source. Some fairly small slither of the population can indeed infer more by knowing this guy well, for everyone else is “trust me he’s good”. Certainly not informative to me.
In the first days of the Snowden leaks, I was very skeptical (and got a lot of heat because of it), because, although intuitively it sounded true and fairly aligned with my world view, he seemingly didn't say anything that one couldn't just come up with and at the time only one news paper has seen the actual documents, vouching for it.
Now, need to fix the shit and Z stands for Nazi, Zelensky is war hero, Chechens dont understand why they were erased even before killing one civilian and there s no way it ends with a win for Russia.
Love it cause even if completely fake, it's probably 100% true :D
As for the “reality” of working as an analyst in FSB it seems pretty accurate. Even if not true, it carries a certain truth.
The general analysis is consistent with what most people I’ve spoken with think. Russia is in a bad spot. They need to turn the narrative on Ukraine (one idea we thought of was a dirty bomb from waste)… I don’t think the content can prove it is authentic or not. Maybe when the author is found an punished we’ll hear about it.
The intelligence war has been amazing. The early game of leaking operational plans was incredible. To say “we have so much access we can burn it with abandon” is a huge flex.
The real time intelligence enabling the Ukrainians to respond precisely has also been incredible. From OSINT analysis to the OSINT crowd sourced collection using geolocation tagged videos and photos. Truly a new operational environment for an army to fight in.
Then all the perception management. Truly remarkable achievement. This will be in the textbooks as a case study, if… you know, we make to a point where we still have textbooks
But this isn't really a long piece. It's very short in actual content, only padded with prose.
And what exactly is the risk anyway? That someone will identify it as Ukrainian disinformation? That's very low stakes, which we know because it has already happened with other bits of "info".
Which, from a game theory perspective is exactly what he would want you to feel. If people don't believe he will press the red button, then the red button doesn't deter anyone and there is no nuclear deterrence.
There is absolutely no way for the lay internet user to corroborate one word of it that isn’t already public information. Whether it looks or feels plausible is also meaningless: it could “feel right” because it is, or because someone took effort to design it this way.
So best thing for me is to ignore it and forget I read it, lest something I read in it confuses me later for a reputable source.
I’m not saying it’s not genuine, it might be, just that to me it is 100% indistinguishable from a prank or psyops.