This website:
http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news080.htm
claims to be an accurate report of the conflict in Iraq, translated from the original Russian military intelligence info.
With all the spin and propaganda flying around the media these days (both sides IMHO, although we seem to be a lot better than the Iraqi media) the site is certainly interesting.
I’m wondering if it’s legitimate, and I’d like the various military minds and linguists of the SDMB to come to a conclusion.
Can I tack similar queries to yours about this one:
Which is rumoured to have Mossad links. And seems to be uncannily right a lot of the time.
Both are “legitimate” in that neither is likely to invent an entire battle out of whole cloth just to make a point. Each “suffers” from the same problems that CNN, BBC, al-Jazeera, or any other outfit does, in that the publishers/producers have their own spin that they want to impart to the news–further clouded by the usual fog of war. (It is not as though either outfit has some sort of access to a sattelite that hovers over Iraq recording every visual and aural event backed by a supercomputer to sort the text and images to present all of the most relevant, most accurate information.) They probably have at least as much of their own spin as Fox does, perhaps more, but I doubt that they invent much. I would guess that they simply report the stuff stumbling out of the “fog of war” in ways that support their own editorial biases.
The Russian outfit, for example, on the first day of the land war had listed that multiple Abrams and Bradleys had been knocked out. (al-Jazeera made no such claim.) Several days later, the BBC and U.S. announced that the first two Abrams had been disabled, and claimed that it was the first ever combat loss of an Abrams. Are they hyping Iraqi defense or are we hiding our losses. Who knows? (In this case I suspect the hype rather than the hiding. If you followed the Russian site during the Kosovo campaign, you’d have had to conclude that we needed to replace several squadrons of aircraft. They seemed to report a casualty every time the Serbian radar found a U.S. plane rather than being blown up by one.) On the other hand, they have sources on the Iraqi side (as they had with the Serbians) who will talk to them, but not to us.
I would look on the Israeli site with the same caution. They can get many facts startlingly correct–but they also have a goal to influence opinion by which and how some facts are presented.
(I am not one of the “various military minds and linguists of the SDMB,” just a guy who has visited the sites, periodically and drawn my own conclusions.)