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.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequent fiasco of privatization, the only political project holding Russia together at this point is a shared history, shared ethnic identity and some degree of national chauvinism. Now, I am not strictly calling Russia facists here, they are a capitalist nation that was on the verge of geo-political decline. As most elements of fascism are just capitalism in crisis, an element of that national chauvism is the idea of a 'stewardship of the people'. That is essentially what Russia is doing, which, within Russia atm is very popular, except for with Russian libs, who already weren't a fan of the whole 'Russian national identity thing', and are marginalized politically.
That being said, it is also clear that since the Western backed ultra-nationalist Maidan coup, and the responsive Russian supported and driven uprisings in Crimes, LPR and DPR, (in order to protect their oil interests and with a fair amount of local support, almost universal in Crimea, which is rare) that Ukraine has resorted to the old right-,wing standby of just straight terrorism on the local population of the Donbas for the past 8 years, and it was only a matter of time before this all came to a head, either from Ukraine or Russia.
Whether or not it will be 'worth it' will be debated by future historians. At the moment, I think the Russian people are generally ok with it, though there is a large degree of public suppression of the minority that are trying to be vocal about their opposition, and the geopolitical order is in flux, which is by Russian standards better than a certain decline into irrelevance. NATO is reinvigorated, the Germans position in the EU is weakened, and the U.S. has a place to funnel their MIC. Lotta win-win going on here. Russia seems to be managing fine, but the situation remains volatile for them economically. It is clear that even after privatization they have still managed to hold onto more state capacity than the U.S. If they will suffer from deflationary issues and major supply crunchs remains to be seen. The only real losers so far are the Ukrainian working class of whatever ethnicity as they have to deal with large scale military actions and all the brutality, both psychological and physical, personal, criminal and collateral.
Honestly you should just read the links in the OP. They are pretty informative.