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.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
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.
To be fair, the USSR did the same shit.
My current favorite ship concept is the Bora- (nee Sivuch-) class missile hover-corvette. Just a mad ship, it's a catamaran with retractable hovercraft skirts between the hulls. It can cruise at low speed on diesels, or it can lower the skirts, raise itself out the of water with blowers, and deploy auxiliary turbine-powered propellers into the water to motor at 100 km/h.
Or at least it could if it worked. They built two of them, 10 years apart, and they've been sitting basically derelict in Sevastopol since. There is a total of THREE SECONDS of video, and no photos, of Sivuch running at full steam. Which it apparently did once, during trials, in the 80s.
It's a cool three seconds, though: https://youtu.be/6i-dx8uD7FU?t=16
deleted by creator
They never did the crazy thing the US did with the F-35 where they started up a whole production line of prototype fighters, true. Mostly they just built one or two and kept them in paper service for decades (Sivuch hover corvette, Sokol and Uragan hydroplane boats, the Ekranoplanes, etc.)
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
My Favourite is their giant anti-sub Erkanoplans (basically a hovercraft that uses wings rather than propellers to form ground effect) which apparently had an internal vibration so intense it disintergrated the tiny bones in the crew's ears.
There was also the awkward thing where they replaced every heavy weapon in their army in every service with a recoiless rifle, from battleship guns to mortars to anti-tank aircraft, but in their defence the people responsible (Tukachevsky mostly) got purged hard for their failure.)