No update today, but your regularly scheduled programming will continue tomorrow.
Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Something I hadn't thought about - Violent right-wing nationalism was growing in Ukraine since the Euromaidan coup. If Ukraine joined NATO that would be right wing nationalism would have a secure base on the Russian border, and Ukraine had already shown it was more than willing to cooperate with Nazis. That could lead to all kinds of future problems, like hard-line nationalists interfering with gas transportation or engaging in other economic chicanery. And Russia would have no means to directly retaliate with NATO stepping in. You'd have a hostile government on your border and relatively few means of dealing with them.
yeah...but really you hadn't thought about that yet?
Not in terms of Ukrainian Nationalists themselves, rather than the rest of NATO, being the problem. I had been thinking in terms of NATO airbases with 5 minute scramble times or tanks parked a few hours away from Kursk. I've been finding out a lot about the history of Ukraine during and after the USSR this last week. For some reason all the news articles I read when this started acted like Ukraine and Russia came in to existence a day before the invasion.