Eighteen months into the war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West. Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities. At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive”, which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. “We’re about to see what a decentralised, horizontal, innovative high-tech force can do,” Jessica Berlin, a German and American political analyst, wrote in May. “Ukraine may be underfunded, undermanned and underequipped compared to Russia. But those tactical, adaptive Ukrainian strengths deliver what money can’t buy and training can’t teach. Get ready for some stunners.” In the Daily Telegraph, the soldier-turned-civilian-military-expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was effusive as recently as June: “As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.”
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