Image is of China's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zhao Sheng, meeting Taliban Prime Minister Hasan Akhund in September 2023.

I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.

The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?

Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?

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 Afghanistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA 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.
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.

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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.

    • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]
      ·
      2 months ago

      Heritage Foundation are US Americans, who have existed as a right wing think tank for decades, and have pushed these exact policy trends for decades in US governance, including as a sizeable chunk of Reagan's policy advisors. There is zero reason to think "ITS DEM ROOSKIES"

      Anyone who has been training you to look for Russians under your bed and in your phone and behind any and all western-hegemony-narrative-contradicting media is brainwashing you and gaslighting you into thinking it's all "foreign agitators" instead of your own ruling class being what they've always been. The Democrats started this "RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE" nonsense trying to both bolster their 'new cold war' and also pretend that Hillary Clinton wasn't such an unlikeable ghoul of the establishment that even someone as repugnant and stupid and corrupt as Trump was preferred by enough population to flip critical swing states. POOTIN did not make the US racist and divided. They had a whole-ass civil war over slavery and then sabotaged reconstruction and never stopped oppressing their colonized minorities.

      The US is the largest most violent empire in the history of the world, with more people in prison than anyone anywhere now or ever, has the most expansive and intrusive and all-encompassing surveillance and propaganda networks in the world, and most of the worst conflicts in the last decades were directly or indirectly caused by the USA, oftentimes deliberately or otherwise knowingly.

      Russia has an economy as big as Italy. And most of the power it does have comes from its military spending (which is still not remotely close even a little to the 800+external-base-having, largest-oil-consuming and greenhouse-gas-emitting-ass military of the US and its NATO vanguard), being a major exporter of important metals and fossil fuels, and having remnants of interconnectedness of economic and cultural/linguistic legacy with some former-USSR states. Russia is also terrible at propaganda, especially foreign propaganda, as anyone who engages with Russian media could tell you. They are not making your country what it is and has always been.

      Look inward at your own ruling class, not outward at [ENEMY STATE OF THE CURRENT ERA], to find the causes of your societies' problems.

    • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      The Russians are simultaneously so incredibly adept at subtle manipulation and counterintelligence that they are a persistent threat to all elections worldwide

      Yet so inept as to not hire a single English speaker and so use "Russian Soviet naming conventions" for their public secret project to overthrow an election

      Possibly one of the most baffling takes I've ever seen, and incredibly contradictory. Give your head a shake

    • Parzivus [any]
      ·
      2 months ago

      One would think that, if it was a foreign op, they would try to make it sound as American as possible. American Eagle Burger Institute or whatever

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      do you just enjoy getting a ton of angry comments every now and then? why do you keep doing this to yourself

        • SeekTheDeletion [none/use name]
          ·
          2 months ago

          you're feeding into a 8 year running DNC narrative of "everything bad about America is because of Putin and Russia. We weren't even racist before they got involved"

          Maybe if you aren't American you don't realize that you've been scooped up into this CIA narrative? You don't realize it's weaponized nature against the left and anti-imperialism?

    • iByteABit [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      5 year plans but instead it's about how many right you can take away from minorities

        • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          The Soviet Union and Russia use numbers as designation for many of its projects under development

          Which clandestine Soviet projects used the naming convention 'Project [n]', where n is some number?
          If you are trying to imply that other states do not use numbers in the naming conventions of their projects in general, then this is silly and you can look for all your M1s, Types, etc. all across the globe.

          Here’s an example of Soviet ship project numbers that follows this convention

          Notably, not a naming convention for clandestine projects, but for military engineering ones.

          This extends beyond military projects though. In the USSR/Russia, research institutes are designated by number

          None of those names follow the naming convention of 'Project [n]'.

          Also, those are not research institutes you are linking to - those are constructor bureaus.

          as well as hospitals and schools etc. You don’t go to Libertyville High School, instead in Russia you go to “School 57” (Школа № 57)

          As an aside, this naming happens locally, and it actually doesn't quite apply to all (primary and secondary level) schools.

          Also, I don't quite see what the relation is. I'm pretty sure that I can find similar naming conventions used for schools elsewhere.

          China also largely follows the same numbering conventions for military projects, institutions, hospitals and schools

          Which makes the soft-implication that it's just the USSR+Russia that use that naming convention more silly.