I think you are completely delusional for believing there is anything you can know about the situation in Ukraine, unless you have a web of trust connecting all the way to the front with some kind of heavy penalty for any link in that web not to lie to you. Let's say the Ukrainian military told people living near the front to only spread false information, even to their own family for operational security, how would you as presumably someone sitting behind their computer in some slightly more comfortable place ever know?

Really, if people don't want you to know, they won't. I'd expect that video footage faking is at the point that some propaganda commander can just type in a web-application "start the video with the logo of some division looking like a special ops team, then show a shot of a drone dropping a bomb on a tank, and have the tank explode with body parts flying around". It might be that Ukraine didn't have that at the begin of the war, but there is no chance the Special Activities Center doesn't have something operational like that, just in case the war doesn't go according to plan.

When there are journalists actually near the front lines, it becomes harder to fake what's going on, but basically whenever anything interesting is happening journalists are kept far away, from what I understand.

So, given all this, what's the point of even trying to know the truth, since there is no way to construct the truth? I mean, perhaps if you had a few thousand people working together to analyze every photo, every video with a large social network of experts carefully cataloging and structuring everything, perhaps you can make sense of it, but otherwise? Who the fuck knows whether the statistics Ukraine presents make any sense? The Americans would know, but otherwise?

People want to know what's happening, but such information is compartimentalized to the point that the people in the trenches also don't know. All they can do is count bodies on their side vs the other, but that also says little.

I have been hearing for months how the Ukrainians have been making some progress, but recently the Russians created a large offensive and they want to complete taking a full province (lots of people (or bots) on Reddit claim that they too would like a pony in response).

I think it's just odd that creating sufficient shells is such a problem. Any fucking moron should be able to increase 155 mm shell production, right? It might be that this too has just been propaganda. Either countries are fucking retarded (shells are not exactly new technology) or they are lying. You can tell me what it is, but you would have no way of showing it either way. If it's really the case that increasing production is such a problem our Western leaders should ideally be executed for incompetence, but we all know that's not going to happen.