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.

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.

  • Eldungeon2 [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Always appreciate the critical effort posts even if I don't agree all the time. You say that the liberal faction of the CCP has won out and is thus throttling the dollar. Has there been a political shift in policy or change in personal to indicate this change towards redollarization as a strategy? Assuming and you are correct, can it really be ascertained if this is a change in strategic policy or a temporary tactical move anticipating some type of hemorrhage. Thus the shoring up of actual productive assets in Yuan while unloading its liabilities in speculative markets (US dollar debt) onto the global south (which is wrong, but could be leverage in a real moment of cleavage from the dollar)...? Perhaps a bit multi dimensional chess but China seems to be taking a very measured approach to dedollarization and I certainly wouldn't see them temporarily slowing that down as being out of their ballywick, if that's what they deem necessary in their estimation to achieve their ultimate goal. Of course none of us really know what that is

    • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
      ·
      5 days ago

      Of course we can only guess, but let’s look at the trend and make some educated guesses.

      Back in 2018 when Trump attempted his foray into a trade war with China, the Chinese Marxist/MMT economist Jia Genliang already warned of an impending shift in the US strategy (reissued article in February 2024, in Chinese):

      笔者在2018年就指出，美国战略家将利用中国对美贸易顺差这种“核心关切”的错误认识，以不继续增加关税作为诱饵，诱使中国金融无底线开放。美国正在从通过贸易逆差输出美元为主的战略转变为通过贸易逆差和金融直接投资输出美元并重的战略，并有可能在未来转变为以后者为主，这是美国对华经济战略的重大变革，这就必然要求中国对美国实施金融开放。——2018年9月5日

      I have pointed out back in 2018, that the American strategists will take the “core concerns” of Chinese trade surplus as an excuse, through the threat of increasing tariffs as baits, to entice China into opening up its financial sector in an unrestrained fashion. America is currently transitioning from its “exporting US dollar through trade deficit” strategy into a new strategy of “exporting US dollar through both trade deficit and financial direct investment with equal measures”, with the possibility of the latter becoming the dominant form of US dollar export in the future. This marks a fundamental shift in the US economic strategy against China, which demands that China implements financial opening up to the US. — September 5th, 2018.

      美国谈判代表背后的战略家清楚他们的目的是“明修栈道暗度陈仓”，将关税作为幌子，通过跨国公司彻底控制中国经济，通过中国的对美金融开放，彻底摧毁中国的金融体系。——2019年12月18日

      The strategists behind the American delegates clearly understood that their goal is to create a diversion (Chinese proverb: “repairing the plank road by day and secretly crossing the river at night”), using tariffs as “cover”, to allow multinational corporations to control the Chinese economy, to allow China to open up financially to the US, and to completely destroy the Chinese financial institutions. — December 18th, 2019

      The whole article is well worth a read (I am told that machine translation works quite well but I never tried it myself), and while Trump wasn’t able to do much back then, the Biden administration had resumed and doubled down on imposing tariffs against China, which, when complemented by the high interest rates since 2022, led the Chinese libs to fall hook, line and sinker for their deception.

      Looking back, these words appear prescient. The tariffs are just covers, the real meat is to enter the Chinese capital market. As much as I don’t want this to happen, recent events have me concerned.

      Immediately following the interest rate cut in September, China announced its monetary easing policies to entice foreign investments. Chinese stock market even jumped for a short period then. This was then followed by various policy changes to make it easier for foreign direct investments to come into China by removing previous restrictions to ease the concerns of foreign investors.

      More concerning is what the CSRC president, Wu Qing, announced on Monday (article from Global Times):

      China's top securities regulator said on Monday that the authority is launching a new round of reform and opening-up of the capital market, as more measures will be rolled out to create a better environment for global investors to participate in the Chinese market.

      …

      China has realized notable achievements in boosting the high-quality opening-up of the capital market in recent years, represented by the establishment of more convenient investment channels, the continuous lowering of thresholds for foreign investors, and the growing scale of listed mainland firms overseas, said Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.

      Wang told the Global Times on Monday that the achievements have elevated the international competitiveness of the country's capital market while injecting vitality into China's economic development.

      Chinese authorities have been ramping up efforts to attract foreign investment. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Commerce and five other departments released revised regulations for foreign investment in listed companies, making it much easier for overseas investors to invest in Chinese listed firms.

      The trend is clear. China is now committed to its export sector and financial opening up, apparently believing that this will be their path towards saving the dampened domestic consumption amidst property market crisis and local government debt crisis (which can be traced back to the 2009 GFC and I’ve written this elsewhere so I won’t be elaborating for now). In this interpretation, the dollarization of the world economy will be good for China, a strong US economy is good for China. Other countries might get squeezed in the process, and de-dollarization won’t be on the table any time soon, but China will register growth in the short-medium term.

      What remains to be seen is the long term consequence - was Jia’s prediction that the US finance capital will exploit the opportunity to infiltrate the Chinese financial market correct? What will China do in response to this? What will happen to the Global South exporter countries who will now become ever more dependent on a dollarized economy? What will happen to these countries when the US runs into a 2009 GFC style recession and consumption slumps? These are the key questions that need to be thought out further.