There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update is here.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
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.
Last week's discussion post.
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Not even that. I think they're better than CAS has been in the past. A unit that can bring a drone operator with them to perform a precision strike like this while overseeing squad operations is incredibly valuable.
Imagine this drone operator with a POV headset on, travelling with the squad itself, able to accurately and in realtime relay enemy personnel positions and in this case drop a bomb on them.
That information and communication vs an enemy that does not have a drone in the air is an absolutely massive force multiplier. You need to be in a dug in and completely sheltered position to be outside of view of drone operators to secure a static position against this. If I was considering base design in modern warfare it would be 100% covered over. No open air at all. Digging underground like the Russian and Ukrainian trench positions is preferable.
If you also consider that a control room might also have the POV cameras of soldiers in the squad. You could accurately communicate in realtime the locations of enemy personnel to the EXACT squad member that needs that information "Around the corner to your right, directly in front of you." is huge information to have over the other side on a split second basis.
Large bases like this are going to have a massive problem with drones like these. As soon as the perimeter is breached the attackers have an overwhelming advantage even if the garrison is much larger if they have a drone overhead.
I've done this in ARMA for years. Obviously not real life, it's a video game, but as a game it's as close to a military infantry simulator as you can get. My group would routinely have one person carrying a quadcopter with thermal optics to use to locate enemy troops, direct fire from indirect fire weapons, and generally keep an eye on things. It was, as you said, a massive advantage. One of the worst parts of close range infantry combat is not knowing where the fuck the enemy is - In camo everyone looks like a bush, and it's very difficult to locate gunfire in a firefight. A drone with thermal optics cut right through a lot of that.
From what I understand the last 10 years have seen a lot of development in uniforms and equipment that are less visible in IR and thermal for precisely this reason, as with the advent of cheap, reliable thermal optics conventional camo is much less useful.
Apparently there's a lot of development of anti-drone weapons going on right now. Basically robot turrets with a radar and machine gun, often mounted on a small truck or robot vehicle. It hasn't happened yet, but we're very close to cheap, networked swarm drones that will be able to fly a foot off the ground at 30-40mph, select targets semi-autonomously, and be on ground troops far too fast for them to have any chance of shooting the drones down. They'll be carrying a small fragmenting explosive and will be devastating. Without some kind of robot weapon system that can rapidly and automatically locate and kill drones infantry will be mostly helpless to defeat them.
There are also apparently loitering drone vehicles that act as a cutting edge modern land-mine. The vehicle can lie dormant, with minimal systems running powered by a solar cell, until it receives an activation command of some kind. At that point it pops up, finds a target (presumably a tank of some kind) and fires it's weapon. You can place them weeks or months in advance of usage and have them ready to go when you send the command, or when an on-board sensor detects a certain programmed condition.
Frankly it's horrifying. A flying, semi-autonomous grenade is a huge escalation in anti-personnel weaponry; You get most of the advantage of air-strikes with far less collateral, far less cost, and you can presumably issue them to individual infantrymen, or mount a bunch of htem on a truck or APC, and deploy them as needed without waiting for a fire-support mission to come on-station.
Yeah, one guy with a quadcopter with bombs to drop is basically a mortar crew with better aim and a whole lot extra situational awareness.