Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
It's interesting watching western media, which thrives on and requires fast-paced, big events to function, losing its shit as the war grinds on. The imagination of the average journalist is very hyperactive, and they jump at their own shadows.
The reports from the front are just like "Russia reports that they took these three villages... DPR continues fighting back Ukraine in this stronghold... Kadyrov applauds the bravery of the troops... X tons of humanitarian aid is delivered to Ukraine... today, Y Ukrainian soldiers were killed... Z refugees from Ukraine were taken in..."
Whereas the western media is like "Why PUTIN the DANGEROUS INSANE WAR CRIMINAL is LOSING THE WAR and will NEVER LIVE THIS DOWN and will probably BE COUPED! The DERANGED MADMAN is being kept IN THE DARK by his own scared advisors! UKRAINE CANNOT LOSE and is EPICALLY HUMILIATING RUSSIA in their fight for FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY! 86 RUSSIAN GENERALS were UTTERLY SLAUGHTERED today due to ABSOLUTE INCOMPETENCE. Putin must be getting DESPERATE and will announce MASS MOBILIZATION OF THE ENTIRE RUSSIAN MALE POPULATION in approximately FIFTY-THREE MINUTES! Even though Ukraine is OBVIOUSLY WINNING because RUSSIAN LOGISTICS are SO LACKLUSTER and are using SMOKE SIGNALS TO COMMUNICATE and their PLANES CAN'T EVEN FLY and their TANKS ARE OLD AND RUSTY also they're all DESTROYED and they forgot to put FUEL IN THEIR GAS TANKS because they're all STUPID CONSCRIPTS, we must continue to give Ukraine our ARSENALS OF DEMOCRACY to resist and give them 33 BILLION DOLLARS. It's Ukraine's FINEST HOUR and Zelensky should be made PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD because of how EPIC AND COOL he is."
It would be exhausting if it wasn't so entertaining. They're all off in some idealistic fantasy land.
They had footage of aerial assaults with the aircrafts’ HUD showing.
I'm old enough to remember seeing this on TV during the gulf war yeah
I'm sure there's a :party-parenti: or :zizek-fuck: quote about this somewhere but I'm too lazy too look it up rn.
Former Brazilian president says Zelensky wanted war
Brazil’s former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was interested in plunging his country into a war.
"He did want war. If he didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more," da Silva, who served as president from 2003-2010, said in an interview to Time magazine that was published on Wednesday.
Da Silva said the West is encouraging Zelensky. "He thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation: "OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV," the former president said.
Da Silva said he doesn’t know the president of Ukraine but thinks he’s acting weird. "It seems like he’s part of the spectacle. He is on television morning, noon, and night. He is in the U.K. parliament, the German parliament, the French parliament, the Italian parliament, as if he were waging a political campaign. He should be at the negotiating table," the Brazilian politician said.
Da Silva said that, "People are stimulating hate against Putin. That won’t solve things! We need to reach an agreement.".
Lula Be Wrong Challenge, difficulty impossible
Obviously Lula is absolutely spot on here.
Apart from being a bit of a puppet, I wonder if Zelensky just took a good look at the situation he inherited when he got into office (a dreadful economy, population loss, a civil war in the East, massive corruption - not all of it friendly to him - and an increasingly militarised block of Nazis who would only tolerate him for so long) and realised that any kind of peacetime unity was going to be impossible. So a nationalist war, with formalising the Nazi bloodlust against the Donbas, was the only route he could see to a Ukrainian project that he could maybe survive (politically and literally).
Obviously thats a fucking ghoulish calculation on his part, I'm not defending it, but it would at least be some sort of rational beyond a naive-turned-unhinged coke-fuelled ego trip.
It’s pretty straightforward. He’s a puppet and his anglo masters told him “agitate against Russia and do not compromise in any way, make the maximum demands, we totally have your back dude. Oh, if you don’t do this you are out of the job and we will find someone else who will”
We don’t have to analyze Zelenskyy’s psychology here. It’s pretty straightforward. He’s a comprador puppet for foreign imperialists and he’s doing his job.
I mean, I agree but I don't think it's reading too deeply into his psychology to consider the material conditions in front of him and why he's so happy to have the west order his country to march into oblivion.
On May 2, Germany stopped giving Russian gas to Poland, Gazprom reported. Now Warsaw is taking Russian gas intended for Italy and France in reverse.
let them fight :very-smart:
The Polish, Finnish and Bulgarian grandstanding is hilarious. They are still gonna use Russian gas, now they have to import it backwards through a middle man. They get the same end product for higher prices and complexity, Russians benefit even further from higher energy prices from the artificial scarcity & European gas lines get clogged up with gas going back and forth for no reason
Rational and efficient system
You got a source though? That’s very interesting if they are just siphoning gas they didn’t pay for… someone at the end of the pipeline is going to end up getting no gas that they have paid for. This is a game of musical chairs, Poland volunteered to remove their chair while the music was playing and now they are trying to hog Germany’s when the music stops
Yep. Europe was offered a contracted price deal and chose market price instead because they thought they were sneaky lol
This is too hilarious, not to give any sources, because it seems I can't google any non-western news any longer...
yamal pipeline gas flow has just stopped...
EDIT: Let it begin .may it be beautiful .. the layers of Madness .. Poland victim complex .... Media framing Gas users as Amoral etc... oh man .. as reality has no chance of Dawning on libs , they will go so fucking mad...
Biden also told his audience that Ukrainian parents are naming their newborn children “Javelin or Javelina” in honor of the American-made missiles.
:agony-shivering:
Naming my kid T-34 to own the Nazis and also because he's actually a communist robot sent back in time to assassinate the billionaires.
Maybe I just suck, but "Javelina" is a weirdly decent-sounding girl's name to me ...
too damn close to being ''Jabalí'' which is just a wild hog in spanish, lmao
It's also a wild hog (AKA "skunk pig") in English:
https://www.desertmuseum.org/kids/oz/long-fact-sheets/Javelina.php
fucking lmao, naming your kid Wild Hog to own the russians. I could never imagine the amount of bullying you could go through with that name.
That's just how Ukrainian works. The language genders last names (e.g. Zelenskyy's wife is Zelenska), so of course first names are going to be gendered.
Why are so many people on :reddit-logo: minimising Nazi crimes? I know I probably sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this has to be a concerted effort, right? Surely libs aren't THAT ignorant?
Their brains have been completely broken. I don't think even the CIA hoped to achieve such levels of manufactured consent. Anyway, one lib I was discussing with is constantly trying to whitewash Azov neo-Nazis as "not really neo-Nazis", the other one says Azov war crimes are understandable, third one claims there aren't actually any evidence of Azov war crimes, the fourth one is going with "the Jewish president", the fifth one is just blaming literally every war crime on Russians while claiming he is very unbiased...it's a shit show.
I did, however, notice already, a certain decrease in a level of interest for Ukrainian war, which is surprising to me, given the absolutely incredible aggressiveness and "intensity" of lib takes during previous 2 months.
The Will Smith Slap legit snapped a lot of libs out of the Ukraine situation hypnosis.
Maybe the abortion thing will remind them to step back from the reactionary brink. 😓
This is spot on.
Obviously there's always been a lot of propaganda in media and a geo-political void in education and understanding, but it's gotten so much worse in the last 10-15 years.
Part of it is that media outlets have largely given up on the idea of journalism between the increased pressures of state intimidation and increasingly competative profit motive. Whether because it suits their new owners or just to survive, most news organisations overwhelmingly write and promote editorial opinion. On the ground reporting and legacy experts have dwindled to almost nothing, while commitariat whose only job is to rope in potential echo chamber inductees have exploded. And when they're not contributers who need big numbers from controversy or hyper-targeted advertising markets, they and their articles are usually paid or subsidised by think tanks or organisations like the Gates Foundation.
Are these people irl? If so, damn that would take a mental toll on me.
Why are so many people on minimising Nazi crimes?
Just the are we the baddies sketch but it stops before that with them admiring the skulls and black uniform and going "this is good actually!".
BBC TV news just openly doing pieces about how sad it is for the smol bean besieged Azov fighters, showing a bunch of indoctrinated school children holding up signs with "Save Azov" and a bunch of Nazi shit, very cool and normal.
It has really surprised me how pro-Azov the western media is being. You would think they would downplay it and sweep it under the rug and only show “normal” Ukrainian armed forces, but for some reason they just… aren’t. They are instead going all in on “Azov is reformed nice Nazis now”.
They were blurring the swastikas of Azov fighters in their coverage recently. Literally the opposite of journalism.
Yeah, I guess they're trying to normalise openly far right armed groups working with NATO which is super dark but I guess not unexpected given how shit the media is
Imagine if in Syria, the west didn’t try to say it was supporting “moderate rebels” and freedom fighters and democracy lovers, but instead just straight up admitted they were arming Al Qaeda and ISIS militants but it was worth it because “Assad is literally Hitler”
"My fellow Americans, we, uh, Nazified some folks..."
:obama-spike:
Because Azov is the unit seeing the most combat and the Ukraine standing army wants nothing to do with the war. Hell they had mass defections in 2014 and their current army is mostly conscripts
Azov is the unit seeing the most combat
I wouldn't go that far, Russian telegram is absolutely flooded everyday with pictures of dead Ukrainian soldiers.
Thousands of bodies, and I see nothing analogous coming out of Ukrainian telegrams. I haven’t even seen a single captured russian soldier for weeks.
Contrast that with Russian telegram which shows tons of destroyed pixel-camo armor, large groups surrendering (sometimes 10-1000 people) and trenches filled with Ukrainian corpses…
It’s clear what side is getting the worst of “attrition” warfare in Phase 2
Yet westoid media keeps going on and on about the heavy losses suffered by Russia.
They have to, it’s a useful cope. Yeah Ukrainian forces are taking heavy losses… this can no longer be denied… but but but but Russians are doing even worse!!!
It’s a “I’m rubber you’re glue” defense out of an increasingly desperate Ukraine, which the western media quotes diligently
It's a useful lie to justify sending more money and weapons to Ukraine. If they admitted that Ukraine would inevitably lose, this would be harder to justify.
Yeah but the news told me russia is actually losing because "their advance has slowed" lol
I guess it's expanded more since the earlier days when most of the heavy fighting was in Mariupol. That honestly makes the western obsession with Azov even more perplexing. Unless you just assume that the end goal of this propaganda war is to drum up support for funding stay behind Nazis and stochastic terror in Ukraine after the war ends, which is absolutely what's happening. They're just so damn blatant about it.
Use of Cryptocurrency Is Not Allowed in Uganda, Says Bank of Uganda src
Lmao the reason they say they've banned it for is funny - people were losing it all in scams. They're banning crypto because it's so insecure that their wealthier population that can afford to get in on it are losing huge amounts of money to scamming.
:shrug-outta-hecks: accidentally correct and good is still correct and good
Don't cry because scamming of rich Ugandans is over, smile because it happened
Zelenskyyyyy only has good takes like supporting our heccin smol boi israel :soviet-huff:
For hundreds of years Ukrainian rulers have used ethnic scapegoating to defuse class conflict. Zelensky's great innovation is continuing this strategy, but being the first to do it while being Jewish. Really, he's more of a world historical figure/light itself than an antisemite.
I like to think that if Ukraine was still a socialist republic he would get beaten up by his collective farm comrades.
They got Zelensky to address the people of Denmark tonight, the very night we celebrate the end of Nazi occupation. Hell is real.
That seems to be his strategy. Go to every country and compare the Russia-Ukraine war to a significant moment in their country.
U.S. Officials Warn of New Nightmare as Putin Hits Peak Desperation
Again, the media is a broken record and it reads exactly like you expect it would, to the point where I'm not even sure why I bother skimming them anymore, but this paragraph was worth the effort.
The pomp and circumstance could include the twisted plan to present 500 Ukrainian prisoners of war during a parade to show Russia’s military might in comparison to Ukraine’s, according to a report from Russian human rights project “Gulagu.net.” Putin is also reportedly considering holding sham trials of Ukrainians that Russia has claimed have been supportive of Nazis, in an imitation of the Nuremberg trials that worked to hold German Nazi leadership accountable.
Yeah, if there's one thing that the Nuremberg trials did, it was "hold German Nazi leadership accountable". Not, like, punish or anything, but wow, they sure got a good telling-off. Anyway, I'm gonna make my own site, thinking of calling it giantspoon dot org.
Literally every article and news report for weeks is just "Putin is (might be) going to do this insane thing. No we don't have any sources". What's next, shark tanks, death rays, blowing up the moon to rain it down on Kiev?
Here’s the plan - we invade Ukraine and hold Azovstal hostage for…ONE MILLION RUBLES :putin-wink:
Its a false premise.
The Ukranian army vastly increased artillery shelling on the breakaway republics the longer Russia refused to invade.
Literally increasing exponentially day by day. Predicting invasion while doing everything to provoke it and escalating isn't anything impressive.
I would say at this point it's fairly obvious the news was clued in that Ukraine fully intended to escalate attacks on civilians until Russia felt the need to intervene.
They were also off by like 4 years, then 3 years, then 2 years, then 1 year....
Putin enters goblin mode for the fifth consecutive week in a row.
Up next Putin suspends Zelensky and his wholesome Azov bodyguard above a section of the Amazon which is teaming with the dreaded Candiru, a naughty little fish with a penchant for swimming up a man's urethra, to feed on the damaged tissue of the pitiful mass of flesh you once called your PENIS!
Things every living room needs:
- Couch
- TV
- Cool wall decor
- 50 ton granite statue of Lenin
- Large windows
I'm taking a work trip to Seattle next month and I'm super stoked to see the Lenin statute. I'll have time to do some other site seeing but the statue will be the highlight of the trip.
Just doing normal human-shield things.
Oh shit, they stormed that warren of tunnels beneath the steel plant?
It's funny how it's been really easy to talk to just a local guy who isn't really that online about all this stuff. I'm mean he's still pro-US by default but even he was admitting that it's our fault if we sent all out industry to China and how the situation in Ukraine started at least as early as 2014. Can't talk to Twitter-brained libs about this stuff even though on the whole we probably agree on more things.
I’ve noticed since 2016 there’s been a growing void between the left and the libs that now seems irreconcilable. Normies and apolitical people you can talk to about leftist or socialist ideas if you use the right language, Liberals have their defenses up on their left flank
When the propaganda is so dense and constant people who don't follow the news are actually better informed a lot of the time.
Uncritical support to Bungie twitter guy in his protracted posting war against the gamers https://twitter.com/munkimatt/status/1521762136535543808?s=21
This reply right is the saddest funniest shit I've ever seen
What about the probably future Bungie employees who get discarded without a say in the matter, who advocate for them. It should NEVER be easy to discard life, and every abortion should be ruled on a case by case basis
How dare you discard a life, especially one that I, with no particular relation to or knowledge of, have already bequeathed to your corporate overlords for a lifetime of toil making more exploitative microtransactions.
Whether we wanted it or not, we've stepped into a war with the Pro-lifers online. So let's get to taking out their command, one by one.
M3NofMAYHEM. From what I can gather, he commands the Gamers from a Twitter account outside Bungie tweet replies. He's well protected, but with the right team, we can punch through those defenses, take this chud out, and break their grip on Twitter.
The Kiev regime is preparing to officially withdraw from negotiations with Russia
What has made Kiev so unwilling to negotiate? A while back there were some flickers of hope where they made sensible statements but now they seem hellbent on fighting to the last Ukrainian.
Why?
- Is westoid propaganda true, do they actually have a realistic path to victory?
- Is it some Führer-bunker situation where a mentally unstable Zelensky is ordering make-believe armies to fight back?
- Is the Zelensky government being threatened by Nazis in the Ukrainian deep state to continue the war regardless of the death and destruction this decision means?
- Is the Zelensky government cynical American puppets who have been ordered by Washington to fight to the last Ukrainian?
- Is westoid propaganda true, do they actually have a realistic path to victory?
Russia would launch a tactical nuke on Kiev before Ukraine gets anywhere near actualy besieging one of their cities. The political downfall of this for Putin and the military would be unthinkable that if there is one thing western copium may be right about is that Russia will spare nothing and nobody to achieve their modest goals which at this point is just consolidating the south and eastern territories imo.
Russia is still not fully mobilized in a state of war. If they realy need to they can put 1 million soldiers in Ukraine by the end of the year?
- Is it some Führer-bunker situation where a mentally unstable Zelensky is ordering make-believe armies to fight back?
I believe the army has complete control and he is clueless and incompetent anyway. The only thing Zelensky is capable of doing is begging for more foreign aid.
- Is the Zelensky government being threatened by Nazis in the Ukrainian deep state to continue the war regardless of the death and destruction this decision means?
- Is the Zelensky government cynical American puppets who have been ordered by Washington to fight to the last Ukrainian?
Both of these are pretty much confirmed true. The 6 or 8 helicopters plus the spy movie style rescue attempt using a disguised freighter is more than enough evidence that the nazis in Mariupol have more than enough political power to order a rescue mission.
The second bit of evidence is the last round of negotiations in Turkey where US/NATO told him to walk back all the compromises Ukraine was starting to make. There was a clear immediate and inexplicable shift where Ukraine was starting to make progress and then suddenly they reverted to this insane hard line suicidal stance of making impossible demands. Perhaps Zelensky is completely delusional and truly believes the shitty western equipment will allow them to not only resist but defeat Russia, either way he is not deciding anything in good faith.
So yes Zelensky is a mere puppet of both NATO and the national nazis. Both do not want peace and are willing to kill their own civilians for it. Obviously the joke is on the nazis they are just western pawns as well.
I believe the army has complete control and he is clueless and incompetent anyway.
How can this be? The Ukrainians must have at least some people in the army leadership who knows what they're doing and at some point the intel they receive must reflect reality on the ground.
Your original question was a Downfall style situation comparing Hitler's last days to Zelensky in Ukraine. Mentally unstable? Sure but Zelensky does not have real control over the nazis that are part of the military and in turn these nazis have more than enough influence to force decisions e.g Mariupol.
Even the peace treaty everyone is hoping for carries the assumption that the nazis will accept peace which is wishful thinking given the past 8 years.
The Ukrainians must have at least some people in the army leadership who knows what they’re doing and at some point the intel they receive must reflect reality on the ground.
I agree with this, the AFU at least was a professional army the war was never going to be easy, nobody downplayed their strength, only that they don't have the means to fight a global superpower so they don't realy have hopes of winning.
The second bit of evidence is the last round of negotiations in Turkey where US/NATO told him to walk back all the compromises Ukraine was starting to make. There was a clear immediate and inexplicable shift where Ukraine was starting to make progress and then suddenly they reverted to this insane hard line suicidal stance of making impossible demands.
What is the best writeup of this? I'd love to have it on hand to...remind liberals of...things. Videos are good, but it'd be nice to have something written (too).
Here's something straight from Putin's mouth, reported in Yahoo:
"During the talks in Istanbul we managed to achieve quite a significant breakthrough, because our Ukrainian colleagues decided not to make Ukraine's international security guarantees conditional on such issues as internationally recognised borders of Ukraine, essentially bracketing off - with certain caution - [the issue of] Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Russian-recognised Donbas Republics."
According to the President of the aggressor country, after these agreements have been reached, Russia was faced with the situation in Bucha, Kyiv Region [where Russian troops killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians], which "the Russian army has nothing to do with," as Putin claimed. Putin complained that after the Bucha atrocities the position of Ukrainian negotiators on further settlement has changed dramatically. According to Putin: "They [members of Ukraine's negotiating delegation] have left behind their earlier intention to separate the questions of security guarantees and the issue of the territories of Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Donbas Republics. They just abandoned it. In their proposed agreement on this issue that they submitted to us they simply noted in two articles that these questions have to be resolved in a meeting between the leaders of the two countries. It is clear that if we defer these questions to the heads of state, without at least preliminarily agreeing on them within the proposed agreement, they will never be resolved. Under these circumstances we simply cannot sign [Ukraine's] security guarantees without first resolving the question concerning the territories of Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Donbas Republics."
Virtually no progress has been made since.
Given the totality of evidence on Bucha at least makes the perpetrator unclear (and, as I understand, based on current evidence from the rounds used and the motivations of each party, is more likely to be Ukraine than Russia), if one assumes that it was Ukraine or "rogue" Ukrainian Nazis that did it, then one has to wonder at the motivations. Do the Ukrainian authorities and negotiators genuinely believe that Russia did Bucha? Do they know that it wasn't Russia, but now they've dug themselves into a diplomatic hole, where making peace or surrendering would look bad and cowardly to other people knowing that everybody in the west thinks Russia did an intentional massacre of civilians?
