Image is from Futurama.
Happy holidays, fellow godless communists. We are in year three of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate all Christmas cheer and create a world free of the joys and festivity of Christmas. Nobody should have to be reminded that in our concrete brutalist communist strongholds, NO ornaments are allowed in December. Please report any Christmas trees, snowflakes, baubles, and presents to the evil secret police, and anybody caught violating their Volcel Pledge by having a tentative kiss under a mistletoe will be shot on sight.
Developments lately have been grim. Our Supreme Communist Dictator Brandon is being removed from office by Christmas-loving patriots, and soon, Christmas will adorn the White House for another four years. This is obviously very disappointing, but while Christmas joy is strictly prohibited, good vibes are still strongly encouraged. Revolutionary optimism (a term we only bring out when things are going very badly and we need to be delusional) shall triumph over defeatist rhetoric by stooges of the Christmas regime.
We must have hope. Our foreign allies aiding us in destroying Christmas now possess hypersonic weaponry, allowing us to compete with and overcome the engine technology powering Santa's sleigh. Abroad, they have destroyed factories and hit cities with missiles travelling at unimaginable speeds into precise targets, while the Christmas regime struggles to produce their own such missiles, as they are still reliant on aircraft bombing campaigns. Precision has a quality all its own, or something along those lines. We just have to hold out another two years or so, and I swear to you: we will live in a world without this accursed holiday.
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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.
Looking at the currently available evidence, I'd say that it's highly likely that Russian forces, either air defences, or fighter patrols or escorts, mistakenly shot down Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243. GPS jamming is not the cause of this. There are entry and exit holes in the fuselage even visible from inside of the aircraft, part of the left wing was missing, and the vertical stabiliser was shredded like a piece of Swiss cheese. It was likely hit by a missile (not an oxygen canister or internal bomb, those are very unlikely to end up inside the vertical stabiliser), and only Russia has the capabilities in that location. They were either aiming at a Ukrainian drone close to the civilian airliner and the missile unintentionally tracked the civilian airliner or exploded in close proximity to it, or there was a case of mistaken identity and the civilian airliner was shot at directly. The detour could just be the pilots trying to regain control after the aircraft was hit, with damaged control surfaces and relying on the engine power to keep the aircraft stable and controllable.
The Azerbaijan Airlines flight was operating near the Caspian Sea, and Russian bombers often perform cruise missile launch maneuveres over the Caspian Sea, and will be accompanied by fighter escorts and patrols. A Russian cruise missile attack on Ukraine took place shortly beforehand.
Then there's the fact that Grozny was under attack by Ukrainian UAVs at the time, including remotely piloted Cessna aircraft filled with explosives, potentially giving out civilian IFF codes, and Russian air defences were active.
This incident, combined with the US Navy shooting down their own F/A-18F aircraft, and narrowly missing another, with the use of SM-2 surface to air missiles equipped with a terminal infrared (IR) heat seeker according to sources in the US Navy that gave information to US news outlets, should show that IFF is not some magic forcefield that prevents the shoot down of friendly or civilian aircraft, and that missiles can easily track unintended targets with improper fire control. I would do a write up on how the different types of missiles work and their guidance with regards to that, but that would take a lot of time, so I'll just link this write-up on the subject here. It's a good summary regardless of the source.
The IFF is just a transponder, that when turned on and used properly according to established protocol, allows you to designate a tracked target on the computer (or shared across the network, usually by AWACS or Ground Control Interception) as friendly or hostile (or neutral).
The missile itself cannot tell which target is which, and user error does happen in a chaotic situation when there are hundreds of air assets that they have to keep track of.
This is also why there have been debates about the proper air-to-air rules of engagement (ROE) where it has been argued beyond visual range (BVR) combat should not be encouraged and pilots have to visually identify their targets at a much closer range before releasing their weapons. Often times, you need to clear with the AWACS for BVR weapon launch (that’s for NATO air force though, I don’t know about the Russian protocol).
Reminder that Iran shot down its own civilian airliner in January 2020 during that heightened period that followed Trump’s assassination of Soleimani, and for a brief moment, some Iranian Twitter claimed they shot down an American F-35 fighter before deleting the tweet.
The telegraph article and some commentators are claiming, without any source, that the aircraft deviated from its planned route “hundreds of miles”. I still cannot figure out what they actually mean by this, considering that said attack was at their intended destination. Anyway, as I have said before, accidentally flying off-course over land is just not something that happens anymore.
Because of GPS jamming near the Caspian Sea the ADSB data is junk and so we have no information whatsoever as to the actual flight path of the plane until after it was stricken.
I would say that the deviation could be explained be the pilots trying to regain some control over the aircraft after being hit, or simply turning away from their intended destination of Grozny after being fired upon. I don't know if it would be possible for the pilots to make any kind of controlled turn given their situation (damaged/inoperable control surfaces and relying on the engines to control the aircraft) without losing a significant amount of altitude, potentially over the Caspian Sea. So they could just be focusing on keeping it straight and level for as long as possible, until they were over land again or lost too much altitude to continue flying and were forced into a crash landing. Either way the pilots are heroes for managing to crash land in such a way that some people could survive. Landing this and coming out with the end result of 20+ survivors is incredible.
The telegraph describes the deviation as being hundreds of miles off course, which would involve flying off course long before there would be any indication of anything going wrong, which is why I find the claim suspect.
If they actually meant after being hit, then the author did not do a good job of clarifying that.
Yeah the telegraph article is trash, I'm just trying to figure out what could have happened and speculating on that.