ISW: Russian officials, proxies, bloggers pushing false narratives around Ukraine's southern counteroffensive

Russian sources will likely continue spreading false narratives about a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south in order "to exploit Ukrainian operational silence," according to the Institute for the Study of War. On Sept. 2, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu called Ukraine’s counteroffensive “an illusion among ’Western Curators,’” while Russian proxies in Luhansk call the counteroffensive a “collective suicide.” But the ISW noted that "counteroffensives cannot be resolved overnight or in a matter of days," and the Russian claims are "a deliberate obfuscation of reality."