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.
‘Empress of terror’: Japanese Red Army founder released from prison The Guardian
Once described as “the empress of terror”, Fusako Shigenobu founded the Japanese Red Army, a radical leftist group that carried out armed attacks worldwide in support of the Palestinian cause.
I'd say we stan a queen but no, we only stan the Empress :sicko-fem:
Long live the Empress of Terror, may death come quickly to her enemies
Westoids simply can't help themselves, not being racist to not-quite-whites for months and months on end is too hard for them.
Don't you know? Refugee status makes your skin 2 shades darker.
probably just throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. If something proves to be effective, the'll know which weapons to send
also they are trying to test how capable their weapons are against Russia
While this is true, how is sending 50-100 pieces of those equipment going to help
it's not, but it could give at least some info on how effective those weapons are.
It also seems like the west is trying to find a wunderwaffe - something they can send in relatively small amounts and doesn't completely suck shit. Initially it was the javelins and the bayraktar drones but those systems don't seem to work that well
OK somebody please explain to me what is the point of dripping these fancy weapons into Ukraine knowing full well that they’re not going to change the course of the war?
They refuse to accept Russia is a military power therefore they will keep sending little bits of shit weapons hoping it will work.
What Ukraine needs is impossible to give them, they need to be transformed into NATO mechanized infantry and armor divisions, but this would require 500 billion or more not to mention the trained manpower. This needed to happen years ago before the war. But then Putin rightfully understood the timing window was closing. If Ukraine could get proper NATO equipment and training things would be different.
But giving a Javelin to conscript now a isn't going to do anything. Tons of reports already, as soon as Ukrainian troops give away their position the Russians drop everything on them, artillery, airstrikes, missiles etc. And that is all assuming the shit weapon actually works.
You kill a Russian T-80? Cool now your battalion is going to get shelled to death for the next 24h. In any case as long as the US keeps spending money on shit like this it is good for everyone else and we need to hope they continue.
And the author of that article, David Axe, says that the US should give just 30(!) of them to Ukraine! Russia has thousands of artillery pieces!
You can skip the "study" part, all these are overpriced pieces of junk. PS Russians already have Switchblades - https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2022/05/27/captured-us-made-switchblade-drones-well-use-them-against-ukraine/
When the point of the war is political objectives and not military ones. :smoking-fish:
the point is that they need to be replaced, which will benefit those that rule you..
OK somebody please explain to me what is the point of dripping these fancy weapons into Ukraine knowing full well that they’re not going to change the course of the war?
We get to funnel more money to the MIC and the longer the war goes on the more Russia and Ukraine get bled. Once Ukraine is nice and indebted to the US we can force them into austerity and then they'll be a new source of cheap labour and resources.
The MGB of the LPR has opened a case on the fact of the spread of tuberculosis from a drone. According to the investigation, on November 11, 2020, the AFU dropped infected leaflets from a drone on the territory of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR.
The study revealed their dangerous strains of widespread drug resistance. The spread of infected leaflets was also indirectly confirmed by publications in pro-Ukrainian telegram channels. https://t.me/sputnik/5112
The US ambassadors in a hysterical manner demand from the countries of the world to block the work of the Russian media. This was reported by Maria Zakharova, the representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry: "Here it is in all its glory, the dictatorship of liberalism." https://t.me/sputnik/5103
They've been in use for almost 100 years, China just too stronk
North Korea says its Covid-19 outbreak has been brought under control, with state media reporting falling caseloads for a seventh straight day Friday as healthcare workers “intensify” testing and treatment.
:bloomer:
Russia aims to conclude free trade agreement with Egypt Egypt Independent
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that negotiations are actively underway to conclude a full free trade agreement with Iran, adding that similar negotiations are planned with Egypt, Indonesia and the UAE, RIA Novosti reported.
The Russian President made the statement in a speech at the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council on Friday.
The Eurasian Economic Union includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.
This completely undermines the absurd Lithuania/British plan to send Egypt's navy to Odessa.
They don't think the people have accepted Russian occupation. They are living in a fantasy world where only bots and Putin wouldn't gobble Zelenskyy's nob if given the chance.
Even if they could bring themselves to acknowledge that eastern Ukraine is mostly happy about Russian occupation. They don't think more than a few days in advance. There is a reason they are called "Reactionaries."
They'll be considered the same as Russians are. Victims of Putin's regime that we're trying to help but also collaborators to Putin's regime that we have to sanction.
Ammonia is also lighter than air. Last time looked into it (because hydrogen is super dumb), they have figured out fuel cells for ammonia as well as synthesis without haber process, but I think they’ve had some fairly exotic catalysts. Anyway ammonia should win, go ammonia :crush:
Drones. Crutches. Potatoes. Russians Crowdfund Their Army. NYT
Across Russia, grass-roots movements, led in large part by women, have sprung up to crowdsource aid for Russian soldiers. They are evidence of some public backing for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort — but also of the growing recognition among Russians that their military, vaunted before the invasion as a world-class fighting force, turned out to be woefully underprepared for a major conflict.
The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the care packages familiar to Americans from the Iraq war. The most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.
“No one expected there to be such a war,” Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the city of Novokuybyshevsk on the Volga, said in a phone interview. “I think no one was ready for this.”
Ms. Plotnikova, 47, has already made the 1,000-mile drive to the Ukrainian border twice, ferrying a total of three tons of aid, she says. Last week, she posted a new list of urgently needed items on her page on VKontakte, the Russian social network: bandages, anesthetics, antibiotics, crutches and wheelchairs.
...
Ukraine’s military, tapping into Western support for its cause, is benefiting from a far more extensive crowdfunding campaign that is delivering millions of dollars worth of donations in items like drones, night vision scopes, rifles and consumer technology.
Crowdfunding means that your army is unprepared and failing and bad, and that your government has left the soldiers behind and the common citizenry needs to fill in the gap, except if you're on our side, then you're a plucky underdog and the aid you're getting from your citizens and other countries is inspiring and represents a wider battle of democracy vs autocracy. The citizens of a country pitching in to provide extra material in a total war sense has been a thing since at least WW2, if not earlier. Nobody says that the movement in Britain to convert gardens into farms was indicative of the weakness of the British regime in their opposition to the forces of Germany such that the common people instead had to supply goods for the war effort - it was sold as an inspiring movement and an example of British patriotism. It's virtually a case study in the kind of media manipulation and propaganda Parenti was talking about in Blackshirts and Reds.
Anyway, this article does the classic thing of taking a tiny or minor part of the war and then making it seem representative of the entire affair. Even if we assume that it's true, and that the pro-Russian forces aren't getting enough aid from the Russian government, I'm curious about what the split is between supplying aid to the Russian Armed Forces vs the Donbass militia, because the latter probably is very undersupplied and needs support, and the western media virtually never makes a distinction between those two forces.
If they acknowledged the difference of Donbas militia, readers might look into it, and they don't want history to exist before February.
Ukraine war has literally been crowdfunded since day 1 holy shit
The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the care packages familiar to Americans from the Iraq war. The most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.
I'm having flashbacks to the stories I used to read during the Bush Jr. years about how the families of smaller regular US Army units and National Guard units were buying body armor, scopes, etc when their units were ordered to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Oh... the stories I've told the few right winger family members who asked about my time in the Army...they were visibly in a state of cognitive dissonance...
It's a really fucked up political system where only an objectively horrible person like Donald Trump is one of the few people who can make this obvious and sensible point.
sounds good until you actually read his dumbass plan for how to solve this issue
Apparently, Russian forces at Lyman have already moved on to attack Slovyansk, with footage of equipment being moved down the major road connecting the two cities. There's reportedly fighting about halfway along it, in Raihorodok.
The situation in Severodonetsk is confusing. Kadyrov was definitely exaggerating as I expected when he said that the whole city had been captured, but it does appear that a section of the city has been fully captured and cleared, and there's active urban warfare of some kind taking place right now. The outskirts of the city are being checked and cleared by LPR scouts to push the Ukrainians into the city proper. Kadyrov is claiming, a little more reasonably but still unverifiably, that at least some Ukrainian forces are retreating from the city. Now, the main bridge between Lysychansk and Severodonetsk was destroyed by Russia earlier, but there's still other (presumably less safe) bridges across, so it's still plausible that a retreat is ongoing. Essentially, we've got layers upon layers of fog over the situation and we'll have a better idea in the coming hours and days.
Additionally, Russian telegram claims: "Scholz and Macron, during a telephone conversation with Putin, called on the President of Russia to release 2.5 thousand "defenders of Azovstal" - French government". I'm not sure what terms they want or if this was just a polite request to let the Nazis go from their imprisonment.
After Europe said that the process for Ukraine to join the EU would take many years and couldn't be fast-tracked, Intelslava: "Zelensky said that if European leaders do not want to see Ukraine in the EU, they should clearly say so. He also opposed any alternative to joining the European Union." It's incredible how much of a manchild he is. We are ruled by failchildren.
So that'll be Luhansk wrapped up then. Progress in Donestk has always been slow, Mariupol obviously taking a lot of time and resources, and it's borders being further from Russia, but now I wonder how long the operation will take there. The Ukrainians have obviously known they'd be coming there specifically, I imagine they're well dug in and fortified. I don't know how the geography and urban centers may differ from previously taken locations, but it could be rough. Maybe they'll try to flank the whole region, I remember seeing a pincer like shape forming early in the war to the west of Donestk, though that seems to have been abandoned, but still might be the best way to wrap this up quickly than a full assault from Luhansk, though it seems that's where the main body is right now as it finishes it's actions there, so that would require some reorganizing.
Any thoughts on what's Don-next?
You roll it up from behind imo, there's probably going to be a fight for Slovyansk and then right after Kramatorsk, from there it'll probably be advancements from the north of Donetsk since there'll be less fortifications there.
Slovyansk and kramatorsk are the biggest clusterfuck expected, they are fortified, cross firable, and big. Kharkov is unassailable, unless army and economy explodes into smithereens. They’ll need 80k troops for one city, and have giant front to defend.
Thumb rule : If Media specifically says "Independent" then it's definitely not independent.
Ukrainian supermarkets now sell anti-Russian sausages and cheese complete with ethnic slurs and war propaganda. You've got to admire capitalist creativity when it comes to blatant grifts:
"You should buy my brand of sausage instead of that other brand because... uhm... Putin would be so owned if you did!".
Imagine having such a large surplus and spending most of it on your people. They should be cutting social welfare and funding police like the civilized West, that's proven to be popular and shores up faith in the government.
Trump: "Putin is just copying my plan to make Mexicans pay for the wall by making NATO pay for Ukraine"
WaPo: Russia has incited genocide in Ukraine, independent experts conclude Report... by the Washington-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-base ** Raoul Wallenberg** Centre for Human Rights, also concludes that there is “serious risk of genocide in Ukraine,” and that states have a legal obligation to prevent genocide from occurring.
8 Years too late. Seriously a foundation named for a guy who saved Jews from Nazis is bad mouthing Russia fighting Nazis who were trying to repress people for their ethnicity.
