back in my map era, we're ukrainemaxxing right now
Declarations of the imminent doom of Ukraine are a news megathread specialty, and this is not what I am doing here - mostly because I'm convinced that whenever we do so, the war extends another three months to spite us. Ukraine has been in an essentially apocalyptic crisis for over a year now after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, unable to make any substantial progress and resigned to merely being a persistent nuisance (and arms market!) as NATO fights to the last Ukrainian. In this context, predicting a terminal point is difficult, as things seem to always be going so badly that it's hard to understand how and why they fight on. In every way, Ukraine is a truly shattered country, barely held together by the sheer combined force of Western hegemony. And that hegemony is weakening.
I therefore won't be giving any predictions of a timeframe for a Ukrainian defeat, but the coming presidency of Trump is a big question mark for the conflict. Trump has talked about how he wishes for the war to end and for a deal to be made with Putin, but Trump also tends to change his mind on an issue at least three or four times before actually making a decision, simply adopting the position of who talked to him last. And, of course, his ability to end the war might be curtailed by a military-industrial complex (and various intelligence agencies) that want to keep the money flowing.
The alignment of the US election with the accelerating rate of Russian gains is pretty interesting, with talk of both escalation and de-escalation coinciding - the former from Biden, and the latter from Trump. Russia very recently performed perhaps the single largest aerial attack of Ukraine of the entire war, striking targets across the whole country with missiles and drones from various platforms. In response, the US is talking about allowing Ukraine to hit long-range targets in Russia (but the strategic value of this, at this point, seems pretty minimal).
Additionally, Russia has made genuine progress in terms of land acquisition. We aren't talking about endless and meaningless battles over empty fields anymore. Some of the big Ukrainian strongholds that we've been spending the last couple years speculating over - Chasiv Yar, Kupiansk, Orikhiv - are now being approached and entered by Russian forces. The map is actually changing now, though it's hard to tell as Ukraine is so goddamn big.
Attrition has finally paid off for Russia. An entire generation of Ukrainians has been fed into the meat grinder. Recovery will take, at minimum, decades - more realistically, the country might be permanently ruined, until that global communist revolution comes around at least. And they could have just made a fucking deal a month into the war.
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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 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.
No modern air defence or missile defence system in the world is able to deal with modern day ballistic missiles when fired at a large enough volume, with quasi ballistic manouvers (in the case of ATACMS and Iskander-M) and Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicles (MaRVs) capable of performing skip and glide trajectories/pull up manoeuvres and pseudo random evasive maneuvers, in the case of modern Iranian missiles, such as the Kheibar Shekan series, and Fattah-1. We've seen Patriot PAC-3 systems been destroyed by Iskanders and Kinzhals, and S-300 and S-400 systems been destroyed by ROCKS (in Iran) and ATACMS.
Modern ballistic missiles (both air launched and ground launched) travel faster than ever inside the earth's atmosphere, are capable of high accuracy even in GPS denied environments (in the case of US systems with highly accurate inertial guidance, Israeli systems with anti radiation seekers, and short range Iranian systems with EO seekers), and can manouver in non ballistic ways. It's just going to get even worse for air defence once hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) enter service. India just tested an Anti Ship HGV a few days ago.
6 missiles to defeat it is still really concerning as that's easily within the payload of a single F35 firing from safely out of range of the S400.
The only F-35s with Air Launched Ballistic Missiles (ALBMs) are the Israeli F-35s with the ROCKS missile, the US F-35s have the AGM-158 JASSM and LRASM cruise missiles as standoff weapons, and cannot carry them in the internal weapons bays, and only on external pylons. Realistically, one F-35 can only carry 2 AGM-158s (it has only been pictured carrying two at a time) or ROCKs missiles at a time on external pylons, given that these are large heavy missiles with a large aerodynamic footprint. So that's 3 F-35s for six missiles. The smaller SPEAR 3 cruise missiles, designed to be carried internally, are still in development, and are much smaller weapons, more similar to 100kg glide bombs than large cruise or ballistic missiles.
Realistically, a stationary air defence system versus modern SEAD/DEAD tactics is a sitting duck, eventually it will be taken out, the aircraft always have the advantage. The key to survivability for air defence is to be mobile, as shown by the Serbs.
Good point, the future (assuming we have a future) of air defense is probably drone swarms or something like that
When looking at ground based systems, we can look at the Serbs again in this regard. They rejected the S-400 systems for highly mobile Chinese HQ-22 systems. Many, including me, were perplexed by such a decision. The HQ-22 is inferior to the S-400 in almost every area, except one: mobility and footprint. But now, given current events and the experience the Serbs had against a modern NATO SEAD/DEAD campaign, it makes sense. They prioritised mobility above everything else.
The S-400s can be dismantled and deployed within 5-10 minutes. Mobility is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot use them when they’re being transported elsewhere.
When there is an incoming strike, it has to turn on its radar in order to detect and track the enemy missiles. And when you turn on your radar, you are vulnerable to anti-radiation weaponry. The very act of defense in itself places the SAM battery at risk.
So, you have to choose to protect your SAM batteries, or your high value assets.
Also, the S-400s are object-based defense systems, which means that they are deployed to specifically defend a certain asset or location (object), for example, an airfield, so their locations are mostly fixed because airfields can’t move. There are other lighter systems like the S-300V4s that are deployed together with troop movements and these systems are much more mobile in operational terms.
(Note that the Russian integrated air defense systems (IADS) can also receive inputs from other ground-based and air-based radars, so while there is a primary radar, it doesn’t have to rely on only one sensor. Western/NATO air force has also achieved this capability in recent years with data links.)
Lol at NATO putting it's entire strategy on a stealth plane that can't stealth while carrying a meaningful payload and can't carry a meaningful payload and maintain stealth.
It sounds like they actually did shoot down all of them but one crash landed instead of exploding
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/19/europe/ukraine-russia-atacms-biden-strike-intl/index.html
Yeah I saw the MoD statement and added it to the initial post. Apparent footage shows a large explosion though, could be a secondary explosion from debris, or a direct hit.