Image is of Stepanakert, essentially the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is now a ghost city, and Azerbaijan has recently torn down the parliament building and various other important places. Sourced from this article.
Despite the predictions and assertions of various NATO-aligned commentators that Russia's influence is waning, the opposite generally appears to be occurring. ASEAN has become more strongly aligned with Russia despite claims to the contrary. In Central Asia, there has been a propaganda push to declare that countries there are "emerging from Russia's shadow", while in reality, as Bhadrakumar analyzes, Russia's significant economic growth and ongoing march towards victory in Ukraine is creating opportunities for further integration, not separation, and there are no major political shifts there in terms of Russian ties. And in Niger, Russian soldiers have now entered an airbase which once hosted American soldiers, now kicked out, and generally Russia's diplomacy and economic deals (nuclear power plant construction, military equipment, grain shipments, etc) have accelerated in Africa.
Where Russia's influence has actually seemed to decrease (outside of the West, of course) is in Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh's remarkably rapid collapse in late 2023 demonstrated that Russia was not willing to escalate things in defense of Armenia to fend off Azerbaijan. One hundred thousand Armenians - most but not all of them in the region - fled in advance to avoid mass persecution, which received remarkably little attention by a West which calls itself overwhelmingly concerned with borders changing due to military action as in Ukraine. Since then, Armenia seems to be on some kind of self-annihilating bender, allured by the potential of Western military and economic deals. Armenia froze its membership in the CSTO due to its failure to protect them, and the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, visited the region in March. The West has offered up hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to Armenia and is helping them "modernize their military"; given the poor track record of Western military equipment in Ukraine, one wonders why they're even bothering. RAND has advocated for a balancing act; America should, in their eyes, realize that they can't entirely remove Russia's influence but nonetheless should make inroads to protect Armenia from Azerbaijan (which is an interesting position given that Israel provided arms to Azerbaijan to help them take Nagorno-Karabakh).
A quick look at Armenia's geographical position reveals the folly of trying to create some kind of Western outpost. With a hostile Azerbaijan to their east, a very unfriendly (albeit NATO member) Turkiye to their west, an ascendant Iran to their south, and Russia not far from the action, there is little hope of doing much more than causing a little chaos in the hopes it'll momentarily distract Russia while it makes inroads most everywhere else on the planet. The political situation appears miserable for Pashinyan, but there isn't really a popular alternative to take the reins. A truly cursed situation.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Armenia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
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. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
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Every single time that you see news stating that the US and Israel are talking about X, or negotiating about Y, or trying to make a deal about Z, it's always been bullshit. At no point in this entire war/genocide have a US and Israeli politician sat down across a table with conflicting views. Instead, I think it's best to think about what the US and Israel want people to imagine is happening. For example:
"Biden urges Israel to do a limited operation in Rafah" = Biden would not lose a second of sleep if Israel dropped nukes directly onto every refugee camp in Gaza ten minutes from now; what Biden wants is to avoid losing further popularity in the Middle East and globally as the decay of those institutions will have dire impacts later on
"US and Israel come to a deal to delay war against Lebanon" = Netanyahu is scared shitless about what a war with Hezbollah would mean (thousands of soldiers killed, military equipment lost in giant numbers; millions of Israel settlers forced to evacuate in the north, and possibly even the annihilation of their settler state), but is unable to be seen backing down, and so asks Biden to ask him to back down and then pretends to grudgingly accept. A stabbed-in-the-back myth is more palatable because it shifts blame to a different person or country, and it's not as if any Israeli anti-American sentiment would ever actually account to anything because Israel could not exist for a month without American help.
"Israel talked down by the US to limit response to failed Iranian strike" = The Iranian strike was successful; too successful, in fact. That is why Israel knew that it could not respond to it without, again, risking their entire country to massive Iranian strikes. The initial reaction of "WE WILL RESPOND WITH MASSIVE FORCE" was necessary to temporarily placate settlers and reassure them that a response was forthcoming. Then, they had to disseminate propaganda that the strikes were unsuccessful in order to make the lack of a response easier to accept.
It's really the same in Ukraine. Not a single time in the last couple years have I been even slightly convinced by the narrative of "The government/CIA/NATO/whatever didn't know that Ukraine was about to do X to Russia. We need Ukraine to tell us these things, and we're very disappointed in them!" The CIA and MI6 and various other Western organizations have known perfectly well what Ukraine is about to do every time they did something stupid. They are so utterly embedded in Ukraine that I doubt much of anything happens without them knowing about it, in fact.
At this point I think it's genuinely unproductive to listen to what the US/Israel is saying. Like, I understand the point-and-laugh nature of it, I understand why you might want to indignantly post about what level of genocidal Naziism that they've climbed to today. But it's all just pretend and make-believe at this point. It's completely disconnected from reality to a point where it's not even entertaining to watch, it's just sorta boring and depressing. Claims about wiping about Hamas and Hezbollah are indistinguishable in my brain from the QAnon claims every three months that the rapture is about to happen or that Trump is about to succeed in his extremely elaborate behind-the-scenes coup that has definitely been happening for the last four years if you've been reading the signs. It was kinda entertaining back in 2019 and 2020 and 2021, but now it's just so devoid of any value that I cannot make my brain even care, let alone take them seriously. It's like going to a monarchist website in the year of our lord 2024 and watching a couple hundred deluded people convince themselves that the Habsburgs are about to rise again. Posting about their claims here isn't even that funny or interesting, it's just "Yeah, I guess some weird people exist in the world with strange views about reality. I'm not sure why you're paying attention to them when there's more important things going on." The only thing separating wilhelminafan556, dakotansfortrump2024, and Genocide Joe is that one happens to be President of the United States; they all have about equal grasp of reality.
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At this point the media in the West is just writing "fan fiction" for their leaders. None of it is real. Terminal cases of Hollywood movie "logic" are being experienced by these Western journalists.