Perun seems to know his stuff. That said, I’d be curious to know more about his research process, as well as that of other Russia-Ukraine war mappers/vloggers. Determining whether grainy drone footage is current or past alone seems difficult to me as an outsider and fan of their work, though I wish it weren’t necessary and that the war were over.
Tbh Perun often just takes a report released by RUSI, ISW, or other war think tank and does some narration over it. On top of that, he often extrapolates from very small or noisy data.
His real talent is to find a bunch of these OSINT reports on a topic, combine them, and then apply his knowledge of economics and game theory and military history and theory to explain what it all means. As a PhD economist I can clearly tell he understands economics and has a talent for teaching it I only wish I did.
did you expect him to have access too, and release, classified data? What insights do you expect him to have over multi-billion-dollar intelligence and counter-intelligence efforts?
like, nearly all commentators, everywhere, are talking about OSINT releases from RUSI or CNA or whoever. and those are based on scraps from official UKR, NATO, RUS, etc. releases.
Perun brings lots of citations and discusses his sources regularly, and always adds caveats. I wouldn't liken his weekly video to those of the daily mappers or telegram video collectors. Very different kinds of content.
I wasn’t meaning to compare them negatively and I don’t really follow other channels on that topic besides maybe Task & Purpose I think it’s called. Not dismissing anything Perun or others have done, just acknowledging that it’s hard to reason about how he goes about gathering the info. I hear him saying he does research, but not the process.
Perun took a side. A major result is that he often either downplays or outright ignores things that don't agree with his world view. Look at his deductions then see how things actually went. There's almost always a massive discrepancy vs the actual outcome.
