It's my weekly rest day, so no update today.
I just want to thank everybody who has engaged with these threads, from the frequent commenters, to the background lurkers, and even the people who come in thinking this is the main megathread and start telling us about their banana bread recipe or something like that.
I'm hopeful that my daily schedule will stabilise for at least the next few weeks, if not months, and I can finally get a reliable stream of updates rather than those punctuated by random breaks.
Of course, may the war end soon, and may Azov, Right Sector, and every other group get what they deserve. And, of course, these threads will continue past the end of the war - unless the end of the war coincides with a sudden and brief increase in the air temperature to several million degrees in every city on the planet.
Yesterday marked the 72nd day of me doing this. I'm gunning for 72 trillion more.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Yesterday's discussion post.
I would have thought Eastern European countries, especially those very close or bordering Russia, would be against Finland or Georgia or Ukraine joining NATO precisely because they would become targets in the event of a NATO war (assuming it stays conventional and not nuclear, which is not a comfortable assumption). Like, you wanna join for the protection, but nobody else after that because what if you have to protect somebody else?
So perhaps Turkey is the Joe Manchin of Europe - somebody for them all to point to like "Aha! It's all Turkey's fault, we totally would have let Sweden and Finland join NATO if it wasn't for them, but alas..." but in reality a solid third of them aren't really comfortable with it.
No I think that's just Erdogan legit fully jokerfied, this has been a long time coming with being rejected from the EU, US support for Gülen and Turkey having to bear most of the fallout of the syrian civil war from all NATO members. Might be interesting to see how they'll chose to react to this and what that would mean for the really big stuff like Canal Istanbul because that could be another bargaining chip he could use..
I feel like for the Anglophone libs the biggest virtue is to have power and not use it (for a lib metaphor, it’s like at the end of Terf Tome Book 7 they destroy that powerful wand rather than using it to do anything good). Which is why the libs are always appalled when someone who does have some power and leverage (Manchin, Erdogan) and actually uses it to achieve something. They don’t care about what they want to achieve, it doesn’t matter — the problem they have is HOW DARE THEY USE POWER RATHER THAN RENOUNCING IT AS A VIRTUOUS PERSON?!