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.
No current struggle session discussion here in the news megathread please, you will be banned from the comm and your comment will be removed.
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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.
I think one of the big reasons things are so slow is that Russia is more than happy to kill Ukrainians on the battlefield. They are slaughtering Ukrainians in war, why speed things up when they could easily wipe out any resistance before it even forms?
That reeks of the same body-count fetishism American brass applied in Vietnam, "If we kill enough of them, eventually they'll run out" except it ignores the fact it takes bullets, shells, and oil to actualize the million plus body-counts they imagine
Vietnam in 1969 had a smaller population than Ukraine, lost three million and still won, the 18-24 demographic of Ukrainian will get older and it doesn't matter how many 30-year-old Ukrainian soldiers die, an insurgency is coming regardless
This is a ridiculous and flawed analogy.
Vietnam did not have a massive population bottleneck and aging population, there is basically nobody in the 18-25 age range in Ukraine. Lowering the draft age would be more symbolic than anything, and wouldn’t impact much of anything in recruitment numbers.
In addition, Vietnam lost 3 million people total, mostly civilians. Ukraine has lost 1 million soldiers.
The US strategy in Vietnam was “kill anything that moves” and their numbers were padded by obscene civilian massacres. Russia is doing no such thing and has kept civilian casualties to a minimum.
Aging population and the bottleneck are irrelevant in the face of pitiless conscription and NATO support and I don't buy the 1 million dead soldiers statistic, 1 million soldiers may have been rotated out, wounded, died and deserted, but 1 million KIA is bullshit same as the 1 million dead Russians theory
Assuming the 28 million worst case scenario of Ukraine's current population, that still leaves at least 4 million able-bodied men who can be rounded up and pushed onto the frontline
The whole demographic collapse theory should have been scraped the second after the Kursk Offensive, the math never added up and for good reason
Pitiless conscription isn't the Orc pits of Saruman from LOTR, they can't spawn new people out of the mud. NATO support doesn't mean more bodies able to hold trenches unless they are willing to directly involve themselves in the war.
There were about 150,000 18-year old men in Ukraine in 2023, and that includes young men who have already volunteered and are part of the UAF. Then it decreases every year up to 22-year olds, with as few as 80,000. Many of these people will also be rich, draft dodgers hiding, working in essential industries already or otherwise unable to be conscripted.
There aren't "millions" more teenagers for Ukraine to draw upon, and children dragged kicking and screaming into trenches do not make for good soldiers anyway.
No, there are millions of teenagers AND MEN as the graph clearly shows, yes Ukraine is fucked demographically, if that mattered politically or socially than the war would be over by now, except it's not over and Russian units like the 90th Tank Division are still getting inexplicably mauled by these units of "dead men" and more men are still pouring into the Kursk salient 4 months later, Siversk is still garrisoned, and men are still dying at Chasiv Yar, apparently Ukraine does have "orc pits", that or the population flight wasn't as severe as once thought
Your type of argument was convincing a year ago, now it's suffering from a noticeable lack of confirmation data
And as far the "essential workers" for Ukraine's nonexistent civilian economy, obviously women are filling that role
Wars of attrition take time and you lack patience. That's not my fault, or a failure in analysis. It's a lack of patience from you.
Your analysis suggests the imminence of Ukrainian demographic and military collapse, that Ukraine is now an empty country devoid of new conscripts, in that case of what use is patience, are the Russians incapable of storming empty trenches?
My whole point is YES, this is a war of attrition and that's precisely the problem, the cost in material, men, and shells is slowly but surely starting to tick up, those bullshit phantom numbers of Russian losses dreamt up by OSINT in the first year of the war, are now years later steadily materializing piece by piece, day by day; 100 tanks lost in a day is a catastrophe (which is why the Ukrainians made up stories about it happening), but 100 tanks lost in a year is a statistic lost in the scuffle, this shit adds up and I don't believe the Russians are capable of recouping the losses
Where did I say “imminence”? I merely said that at the current trajectory Russia eventually wins. It’s you that have the time sensitive demands and a short attention span. Maybe you are conflating me with YouTube clickbait channels with all caps headlines about imminent Ukrainian collapse but I have never claimed that.
Russia has greater weapons production and Ukraine has higher losses. Ukraine is having acute manpower shortages and lowering the conscription age does nothing to change this. Russia wins eventually, nothing has changed your patience has just worn thin.
I mean I agree they'll be some kind of insurgency (which, if we go by the Chechen example, the Russians know how to quell), but the Vietnamese were fighting a broadly popular war of national liberation. Ukraine is kidnapping conscripts off the street and impressing them to serve on the frontlines. There's no widespread anti-war movement in Russia, nobody's burning draft cards and things like that. Very different circumstances.
Logistically it’s quite easy to stretch Americans thin when they are fighting on the other side of the planet and have other conflicts they are also involved in.
Russia is fighting a war mere kilometers away from their logistical hubs and population centers, on territory the USSR controlled and built. They know the land just as good as the ukros. They have heavy rail lines going to the front.
Russia also has a much higher ability to absorb losses than the US does. Russia has history of losing millions of its people to war, whereas Americans have never once experienced this. Americans will balk a whole hell of a lot sooner, they aren’t made of the same stuff and don’t have the national ability to take a million losses without widespread revolt and despair.
Quite true. America prefers to slaughter millions of its own people by bungling pandemic responses.
Chechnya is a small city with a couple villages surrounding it, and they didn't have overwhelming NATO support or a logistical train into the heart of anti-Russia Europe
Russia has no interest in military occupation of any regions outside of the ones they have annexed, which all have overwhelmingly pro-Russian populations at this point.
The only "insurgencies" will exist in the western rump state, which will be the EU's problems as they will probably accept them into the EU and allow open migration.
No fucking way that's happening
I think Ukraine will get into the EU as consolation prize for not getting into NATO. Trump also wants to dump everything on Europe. I think it's quite likely that what's left of Lviv-Kievkraine will join the EU and assets will continue to monopolize and be sold off to foreign investors.
I don't see the EU doing it. there's too much skepticism around the money being pumped into Ukraine as the frontline, Europe is war weary, which has weakened the pan europa idea including Ukraine. the economic situation would be bad for the Europeans, and I do not see the Dutch or Germans, who hold a tight purse over European economics, wanting half a failed state dragging down Eurozone numbers. that's before the potentiality of an Orban veto
I think Hungary and Slovokia would allow it if it was part of the final peace deal, and was approved by Russia and America. First and foremost those countries want peace, and they want gas to begin flowing again to them. If they get cut in on good gas deals, they will vote as needed.
At the end of the day, the German cucks will do as daddy America tells them and they will like it.
Join the EU as the 17th province of Poland
before 2030, there will be the territories incorporated into Russia, which might go over the Dniper in the south and won’t near Kiev, a western-backed rump state based in Lvov, and a depopulated zone in the central area. the western fringe of Maine (USamerican state, lots of trees) has no electricity and a population density of 1 person per 267 square miles (around 700 square kilometers). i think the Russian strikes at power infrastructure are trying to cause the same thing. de-electrifying (and by extension de-populating) the center of Ukraine will maintain the watershed for Crimea and Zaporozhia and have fairly obvious counter-insurgency benefits. the details probably hinge on whether there’s more money to be made from keeping the current debts denominated in hryvnia or from some kind of ECB wizardry. the IMF, Chevron, and Shell are already committed to a few billion dollars in debt, and i think that will be an eternal stone on the neck of the Lvov rump state