"The first casualty of war, is the truth"

According to Foreign Affairs: "Other countries behave similarly. When a Chinese balloon drifted across the United States in 2023, Beijing said it was a weather monitor that had drifted off course, even as experts asserted that its design was consistent with a spy balloon. Pakistan has routinely hidden the involvement of its armed forces in conflicts with India over Kashmir. Israel has a long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying assassinations. And the United States refused for years to acknowledge the thousands of drone strikes it carried out in northwestern Pakistan targeting al-Qaeda members, despite widespread media reporting on the campaign."

As they say, the first casualty of war, is the truth. And history is written by those, who have defeated rebels. So when countries are in conflict, not just kinetic conflict, but political or economic conflict, their is a lot of propaganda coming from both sides, making it near impossible to determine what is the truth, by non insiders. And propaganda can be defined as the method of repeating a lie, until people come to believe it is true.

Reference: Foreign Affairs