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.
Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, told Italy’s Mario Draghi that he’s willing to facilitate grain and fertilizer exports as global concern mounts about food shortages and rising prices — but only if sanctions on Russia are lifted, which isn’t likely.
Let's see what's most important to yanks and their vassals, preventing hunger in Africa and poverty in their own countries or keeping up a failing attempt to destroy Russia.
Okay, this one is not hard at all. They don't give a shit about Africa or poverty, is all just concern-trolling.
I'm pretty sure that the concerns are because food supply to the west in getting threatened and it may make the hamburgers costlier. They don't give a shit about Africa.
🇬🇧🇺🇦⚡Putin is making gradual, slow but tangible progress in Ukraine, British Prime Minister Johnson says
He also suggested that Zelensky create an alliance against Russia as an alternative to the European Union. According to media reports, the foundation of the association is distrust of Brussels and Germany's response to Russia's aggression.
In addition to the UK and Ukraine, it may include Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
The Br*tish wants the Ukraine to create an extra-Russophobic knock-off of the EU.
First of all I thought the Ukraine war was supposed to have united the west more than ever, and here they are making clubs to exclude the less bloodthirsty countries of the west.
Second of all, does this have any realistic chance of ever becoming reality? And what will they be able to do to interfere in the war that they are not already doing? Will they do something that would be able to escalate the war by provoking a Russian response?
does this have any realistic chance of ever becoming reality?
Nah lmao. No country will actually commit to an alliance with Ukraine. They will only talk about how they are ready to join anyday now and leave it at that once the headlines die out.
"I wasn’t supposed to be in the White House. I was outside with the guillotine just two years ago." -Chris Smalls I hope once he is done building unions he goes back to his first calling.
The Biden administration is preparing to step up the kind of weaponry it is offering Ukraine by sending advanced, long-range rocket systems that are now the top request from Ukrainian officials, multiple officials say.
Senior Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have pleaded in recent weeks for the US and its allies to provide the Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. The US-made weapon systems can fire a barrage of rockets hundreds of kilometers — much farther than any of the systems Ukraine already has — which the Ukrainians argue could be a gamechanger in their war against Russia.
It's this going to be like with the other stuff the yanks have sent, isn't it? The stuff that actually reaches the front will be operated by conscripts without sufficient training to use them properly and without the necessary logistical support to keep them supplied and maintained.
I'm of the opinion USA doesn't want to win the war just make a big mess.
The American MLRS isn't any better than (and is probably worse than) Russian rocket artillery, and Ukraine had plenty of that at the beginning of the war. Much of it was destroyed by Russian counter-battery fire, cruise missiles, tactical ballistic missiles, etc.
The shipment they're talking about might not even fully replace the lost rocket artillery, and it has training requirements and multiple-thousand-mile supply lines for ammo. It's not going to turn the tide.
It's easily worse.
We don't even have that many of them in the USA armed forces. And we barely know how to use them.
Russia has surpassed us on almost every level in war fare.
They are locating m777 howitzer battalions the ukrainians are using through sound signature alone.
Yes, and the final frontier will be planes, which the US itself won't send because it would take way too long to train Ukrainians with (and you don't wanna put your planes into a near-peer war and risk them being exposed as being useless, in a similar sense to how navies are now useless against hypersonic missiles and to a lesser extent drones). And when the war is over, that'll be the thing that the media latches onto.
We'll see a fucking Forbes article by David Axe with the headline "If The United States Had Sent F-22s To Ukraine, They Would Still Have All Their Territory." after the war is done and the media does a victory lap because Russia lost because they didn't take Kiev and a trillion Russian soldiers died and "only" took 4+ oblasts and ~25% of the territory from Ukraine. There always has to be another Thing We Could/Should Have Done, because the admission that Russia was actually strong enough to destroy Ukraine and take their territory is too much now. Russians have been utterly dehumanized, and what does it mean if you can't even beat somebody you deem to be subhuman?
It's essentially what the Nazis would have had to contend with if they somehow remained the dominant political force and stayed as the government in Germany after they lost the WW2 against the Soviets. That contradiction has to be answered somehow. Hell, that contradiction was part of why the Nazis achieved power in the first place, only after WW1. To be "stabbed in the back", you need somebody to accuse of stabbing you in the back, and that'll be the US government withholding planes for liberal bluecheck Americans coming to terms with the coming reality in post-war Ukraine.
They will be operated by us special forces who make sure they aren't fired into Russia and then peace out.
I usually don't discuss domestic US politics in these updates aside from unions and really significant things, mostly the evil empire's wider influence on the world, but:
Biden’s Approval Slump Hits a Dreary New Milestone Bloomberg
The bad news for President Joe Biden is that his popularity has fallen, this past week, into dead last place. Of the 13 presidents during the polling era, none has been in worse shape at this point in his first term, almost 500 days into a presidency, than Biden’s 40.5% approval rating. That’s according to FiveThirtyEight’s estimate of his average standing in all the public opinion polls. It’s not quite Biden’s own low point — he briefly dipped a bit lower in late February — but it’s close.
Is there any good news for the president? Sort of. His 40.5% is not a historic low for first-term presidents. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman all had lower lows. Clinton, Reagan and Truman hit bottom before being re-elected, with the latter two dipping well below 40% closer to their elections than Biden is to his. Indeed, there’s no relationship between approval ratings at the 500-day mark and re-election.
The news is worse for Democrats with respect to this November’s midterm elections, however. It’s not clear when voters make up their minds before heading to the polls for general elections, but political scientists do know that presidential approval ratings are usually strong factors affecting midterm results.
It’s impossible to be certain about the reasons for Biden’s miserable ratings, but I believe that the big factors have been the pandemic and the economy, with the latter pretty much about inflation. If that’s true, then moderating prices and waning Covid-19 surges would be the factors most likely to turn things around.
That is, of course, easier said than done. Especially since what seems to matter are results, not policies, even concerning circumstances over which presidents have little short-term control. The other potential bit of good news for Biden is that what usually matters is the direction of change, not the level. So if gasoline prices trend down over the next several months from the current national average of $4.60 a gallon to $4 or so, Biden may well be better off than if prices had been at $4 the whole time, and may even be better off than if prices at the pump were slowly rising to, say, $3.75 a gallon. The same should be true of inflation overall.
Remember that approval ratings tend to drive pundits’ (and often politicians’) views of the president and everything he does. When a president is unpopular, then pundits ascribe that trouble to practically everything the president is doing. That’s a fallacy. If it’s true that inflation and the pandemic account for the bulk of Biden’s unpopularity, then other things he’s doing may actually be helping him, not hurting him. But much of what presidents do, even what they do publicly, just doesn’t change the way people think about his success or failure.
I feel like one of the most significant things and yet virtually never talked about, which I've increasingly tried to hammer home, is the idea that the sanctions on Russia were fundamentally necessary as a reaction to the invasion. Like, as if it was a case of simple casualty, and that there is no universe where Russia invaded and we didn't put sanctions on them. When that's not true at all. The West put sanctions on Russia, and they put unprecedented sanctions on Russia, seizing their foreign reserves, and those sanctions are largely the cause of the strife around the world and also in the West. Sure, the invasion of Ukraine itself is impactful because it's a supplier of commodities and food, but in a universe where the invasion is happening and the West is still supplying weapons and maybe puts minor sanctions on Russia but not the kind they currently have, I think the global impacts are at least an order of magnitude lower than they are currently.
Maybe Russia invades Ukraine anyway further down the line, but for this current conflict, I'm 100% sure that if the West did actual diplomacy with Russia and addressed their concerns, then this could have been avoided. There were two Minsk agreements already, and Russia, quite reasonably, saw Ukraine as breaking them. This is the West's and NATO's fault - there's a direct line of casualty that runs throughout the last decade at least with the 2014 coup. You're in a different reality entirely if Russia's interests are respected, one that avoids the mass deaths and the destruction of a country that we're currently seeing, at least in 2022.
So the idea that Biden's approval ratings aren't really something he can fix is kinda true - he could do things like legalize weed and forgive student debt and a bunch of other stuff but the supply chain issues are a bit more fundamental and would take longer to fix - but he and his administration, and the "deep state" (not in the QAnon sense but the real sense that we're largely governed by unelected officials in various agencies), are responsible for the poverty facing many people. But, of course, Bloomberg of all places could never acknowledge that, so all we can do is stare down the oblivion of the midterms.
Sanctions are double-ended?! b-but what about the international rules-based order!?
"rules-based order" is just america constantly doing bill maher's "new rule" bit
apperently iran has also stated it willl seize 17! more greek flags ships more , if its Tanker and Oil is not returned ( many many ships are greek flagged in the World and a bunch of them cross in the Persien Gulf ) greek has a strong shipping industry , but will it have that once every ship under Greek flags becomes a target for retaliation or will they all move to Panama or Cap Verde ? this will be very interessting..
Some guy that probably owns a Himmler Bored Ape lecturing me about how this war is good for supply chain shocks
The commander of the AFU company was arrested for an interview with The Washington Post, in which he spoke about the real state of affairs at the front.
The American edition published an article about the Ukrainian unit in the Kramatorsk district. As the commander of the AFU company Sergey Lapko told reporters, the situation on the front line of the Ukrainian army is extremely difficult.
The Russian armed forces are superior to them in armament:
"When a Ukrainian tank fires from our side, it betrays our position. And they start firing at us with everything — Grads, mortars. And you're just praying to survive."
The Ukrainian command sends untrained volunteers to the combat zone: "We fired 30 bullets, and then we were told: "You won't get any more, it's too expensive."
Lapko said that they lack logistical support and military leadership. People believe that they are being sent to certain death. Many refuse to fight.
A couple of hours after the interview, SBU officers arrived at the hotel where the military met with journalists. Lapko was removed from command and sent to the base in Lisichansk. https://t.me/sputnik/5055
Kissinger, on his birthday, has been added to the Ukrainian semi-official enemies-of-the-state list Mirotvorets * :michael-laugh:
Reason:Participation in the information special operation of Russia (aggressor country and terrorist) against Ukraine. Spreading narratives of Russian-fascist propaganda and blackmail - nuclear war, global decline, famine, migration shock, Chinese offensive, etc. in exchange for the truncation of Ukrainian territory (minimum - as of February > 24, maximum - without Donetsk, Luhansk and the entire south, including Odessa). An accomplice in the crimes of the Russian authorities against Ukraine and its citizens.
Because of what he said in Davos**:
Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself
As WaPo suggests :
The “status quo ante” mentioned by Kissinger [..] refers to restoring a situation in which Russia formally controlled Crimea and informally controlled Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Which is also, as WaPo writes in the very next sentence, what Zelensky demanded a few days earlier: :stalin-stressed:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emphasized that part of his conditions for entering peace talks with Russia would include a restoration of preinvasion borders.
So why is Kissinger on the bad guys' list??? Probably because despite these quotes and explanations, both WaPo and The Telegraph (the latter originally reported the Kissinger quote) used highly provokative headlines (and as we know, few people read beyond a headline):
Kissinger says Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end war
Henry Kissinger: Ukraine must give Russia territoryRussian-language media has picked it up this way too and ran with it, making a hot delicious meal out of it. Without wishing him a very good die, which is unacceptable.
* Mirotvorets "is a Ukrainian Kyiv-based website that publishes personal information of people who are considered to be "enemies of Ukraine", or, as the website itself states, "whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law". The website was launched in December 2014 by Ukrainian politician and activist Georgy Tuka." It is full of communists, artists and politicians who visited Crimea, reporters--whoever has said something that goes against whatever the current Ukrainian state line is.
** In a WaPo op-ed in 2014 Kissinger has actually voiced similar things re the role of Ukraine in the US-Russia relationship, so I guess he should've been placed on Mirotvorets much sooner:
Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.
critical support to ukrainian fascists in their mission to capture and kill henry kissinger
Kissinger realized he doesn't have much time left so he decided to have a good take to try and make us feel weird about celebrating when he dies.
Man, reading the wiki page for this website and it seems like its all but explicitly an assassination list, even with how sanitized wikipedia tries to make it.
Just coincidentally publishing personal details of former politicians that end up murdered days later.
The LPR has announced that they have cut off all escape routes for the Ukrainians in Severodonetsk. Safe retreat is now impossible.
Either they decide to break out in force and sacrifice their positions in order to save their men or they wait for allied forces to break them out. Former would be best for them, it allows them to create a shorter front line and to save experienced soldiers. But that would mean abandoning all of the Oblast of Luhansk
She's a ghoul but she's class conscious and she's right to be worried. If you are barely able to make rent you might be cowed by fear of losing what little you have but if your children are starving while someone else is eating waigu steaks you go out and do something about it. Hungry people don't stay hungry for long.
The spark that ignited the October Revolution were women who went to the streets of Leningrad (then Petrograd) protesting lack of food for themselves and their children.
The spark that ignited the October Revolution were women who went to the streets of Leningrad (then Petrograd) protesting lack of food for themselves and their children.
really nitpicky but that was the february revolution wasn't it?
Minor nitpick that, ultimately doesn't matter, but the M777 is a towed howitzer. Not self propelled like an M109 Paladin. Makes it even easier to find, as spotters get to look for a larger "footprint" as extra vehicles will be in an area where M777's are. And a bit easier to get counter battery working effectively as M777's need to be hooked back up to a truck/track to be moved before the red rain falls.
As Things Fall Apart Biden May Want To Escalate MoA
Is reality setting in? Is that why a Washington Post reporter, who has been on the frontline in Ukraine, was allowed to write this?
"Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned
[A]fter three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.
The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine. They quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive."
...
The men were put into a frontline ditch and have since been shelled again and again without any ability to respond. They then disregarded the orders from above and left. They have now be arrested. The military values of such units was zero to begin with. Untrained men under command of an inexperienced civilian and with no real weapons have no chance to hold out against a professional military force like the Russian army.
...
But the biggest part of the responsibility for the life of those men falls to the Biden administration. It tried to push Zelensky to invade Donbas in early 2021. Back then Russia started large scale maneuvers and made clear that they would intervene. Zelensky got cold feet and pulled back.
When the 2021 attempt had failed the Biden administration did not change its general plan as it is part of a larger strategy to push the 'west' into a new cold war with Russia and China. After the 2021 attempt on Donbas had failed the U.S. immediately prepared for a new attempt to provoke Russia in Ukraine in spring 2022.
The Ukrainian assault began on February 16 when over several days Ukrainian artillery increased its bombardment of Donbas by a factor of 40. Russia reacted to that and on February 24 preempted the planned ground assault. The above part of Biden's plan to provoke Russia into a war as a means to strengthen the U.S. position in Europe has worked well.
But how long will the coalition of the 'west' hold when inflation, energy scarcity and hunger set in? European unity is already falling apart with each country scrambling to fulfill its own energy needs. Everyone can now see that the Ukraine, and with it the U.S., is losing the war. Meanwhile Russia is doing much better than anyone had expected.
What is Biden's plan now as things fall apart? Escalating towards a wider war is an option but the risk of it is much higher than potential gains. Still, for Biden it may be the only way he is willing to go.
So the whole "If Putin thinks he's losing the war he'll become desperate and go nuclear!" was projection all along?
This entire war has been a projection exercise, imo. Just apply whatever negative things Ukraine was saying to Russia and you'll have the reality of the situation. 25,000 dead Russians? Actually Ukrainians. Increasing desperation for Russia? Actually for Ukraine. A need for more sophisticated weapons for Russia to take on the Ukrainian forces? The opposite was true.
I thought this article was from the Washington Post or some other mainstream source and I was amazed to see language acknowledging that the invasion of Ukraine wasn't completely "unprovoked".
this texas shooting shit gets worse and worse. sick to my stomach. feeling like we're in for another summer of rioting at this rate - especially with people being pushed to the absolute edge in every other way right now. it's so unbelievably horrible...
My money's on this being the reason why Biden's not calling for an investigation. They want to keep people from getting too pissed off. Those protests might not have accomplished much directly, but they definitely scared some people.
One drawback of warmer weather is that it deprives Russia of an excuse for failure, just as the Germans blamed the blizzards of 1941 for their failure to take Moscow, rather than their own arrogance and sloppy planning. If Russia can’t defeat Ukraine this summer, it won’t be because of the weather.
Russia's going to lose and they won't be able to blame it on the weather.
Lol :cope:
Who's gonna tell him that Russia already won? Moving the goalposts for what constitutes a Russian victory doesn't change anything in the real world.
I just posted about this in /c/latam, but thought folk here might also be interested:
In the tradition of each Summit of the Americas since the 2005 Mar Del Plata Summit, we unionists, activists, grassroots organizations, and progressive people of the Americas are calling for a People’s Summit on June 8th, 9th, and 10th to counter the 9th Summit of the Americas to be held in Los Angeles, CA.
The People’s Summit will host three days of art, music, speakers, debates, workshops, panel discussions, performances—all which uplift the voices of the people and imagine a new world; one that puts people’s democracy first. Join our movement and join our call for a People’s Summit to discuss the real crises facing our communities within the region.
https://peoplessummit2022.org/
