Russian tanks were idling their engines on Ukraine’s borders, occasionally belching plumes of sooty, black exhaust.

It was the winter before last and it looked like Vladimir Putin was setting out his forces for a full-scale invasion.

That, at least, was the warning from US and UK agencies as they watched what they described as “unusual” troop movements.

A year and a half later - in what feels like a different historic age - I think it is worth remembering that there were those, not least Scots, who dismissed such reports.

Even in the middle of February 2022 George Galloway was mocking those saying Putin was going to war. “Y’all said Russia was about to invade Ukraine,” the Unionist firebrand tweeted. “I told you it wasn’t. You were wrong. I was right. Show some bloody humility.”

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Craig Murray channeled perhaps - given the lies on Iraq - justifiable scepticism about intel briefings. “‘Putin is going to invade Ukraine’,” the pro-independence former diplomat tweeted, “is the new ‘Saddam can deploy WMD in 45mins’”.

We all know what happened. Those Russian tanks rolled in to Ukraine. More than a year later commentators like Mr Galloway and Mr Murray are still being dunked on social media for their spectacularly bad predictions.

These men make easy targets.

Mr Galloway, a former RT or Russian Today host, is routinely branded a “Putin propagandist”, a label he rejects.

Mr Murray, who has since condemned the invasion, was described as somebody who seemed “to find it difficult to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact” by Scotland’s most senior judge.

But I am going to offer Mr Galloway and Mr Murray and their ilk something of a defence: they were wrong, sure, but they were not alone.

There are still a fair few red-faced “area specialists” on Russia and Ukraine who did not think Putin would order his men over the border. They thought the strongman was just flexing his muscles. That, at the time, was not a crazy hypothesis.

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I remember hoping that the invasion skeptics were right and dreading that they were wrong. I guess that is how many of us felt. Because - let us be honest - we did not have a clue what was going on.

How could we? It is not like the Kremlin is a model of transparency, or that we punters had access to secret Russian plans intercepted by Western spooks.

This week I have found myself scrolling through old tweets, comments, blogs and quick-turnaround analysis pieces in newspapers from the first two or three months of 2022.

Why? Because we are again in the midst of events in Russia that are unfolding so quickly pundits, politicians, experts and journalists can barely catch their breath. And it is worth, I think, remembering how bad - how monumentally wrong - a lot of hot takes on Russia can be.

I am not just talking about the nonsensical quick hits about how Nato somehow forced Russian irredentists to try grab back chunks of their old empire.

There are still people pontificating on Russia whose entire knowledge of the place stems from pub lore on the revolution and Tolstoy costume dramas on the BBC.

But, if we are honest, bad insight can come from proper specialists as well as from all the contrarians with the country knowledge of a half-eaten Happy Meal shoved in to a hedge.

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Why is this? Well, it is what happens when we demand answers before reporters and experts have even figured out what the questions should be.

It is a week since an ex-con named Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the private military company Wagner, staged what was - depending on who you ask - a mutiny of mercenaries, a warlord revolt, or even an attempted coup.

There is understandably huge demand for both news and views about these developments. We all want to know what happened and what it means. Just how shoogly is the Russian dictatorship? And we want this insight “pronto”, in an instant 47-tweet thread, a 700-word live analysis that goes straight to web or a segment on CNN.

Now specialists can - obviously - disagree on how they interpret events. But even since I started typing out this wee piece for The Herald I have seen several entirely different accounts of what is happening in Russia. By the time you read this the “facts” may have changed again.

This is where I am going to make an evergreen but strikingly unoriginal observation about our age of rolling TV news, digital-first newspaper publishing and endless Tweeting. We have a media and social media eco-system that has relentless demand for expert insight.

But it is also a digital market place which rewards and amplifies those who are highly confident, those who have what we journalists might call the clearest line, or those who can please the most partisans.

Analysts who offer caveated or tentative observations can find themselves marginalised, ignored, relegated from the headlines.

This is not a new problem and it does not affect all commentary, expert or otherwise. I don’t want this column to fall in to the trap of being as categorical as those I am - gently, I hope - criticising.

But we should be aware that there is a risk we are incentivising the hottest of hot takes, and forcing analysts and commentators, especially those trying to build a profile, to take robust positions to which they become wedded.

This is especially problematic amid the fog of war and the genuinely horrendous difficulties obtaining any kind of insight from within Russia.

At the risk of repeating the obvious, we are talking about an authoritarian state. Normal news-gathering is unbelievably challenging. And therefore analysis is too.

Some of the early insights on Prigozhin’s whatever-it-was will prove rock-solid. Others, as we saw before the big invasion, will not.

But, please, do not despair, stick with the story, because it is not over yet. And it is going to take a lot of telling.