Timeline to war - how much to reveal?

[raketenjagdpanzer]

By the time the PCs are where they are in T2k (v.1 ruleset), even if they're Russian/Soviet or WarPac and have their own spin on things, there's still a question of asking the players to read four or five pages of pure text to get the timeline down.

I was thinking of re-writing the 1995-to-you're-on-your-own moment as vignettes from popular media - a small NYT column noting "heightened tensions" along the Soviet/Chinese border, a BBC piece about reports of active fighting on a brigade level (but unable to confirm), an ABC News piece explaining the ongoing conflict, etc.

How do you guys introduce the timeline? T2k starts on the cusp of an internet era, so everything we have now isn't readily available (for example, there was no "CNN.COM" until 1999: it was "CNN Interactive" which was a one-headline/one-article front page that began in 1996)...