Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Apparently there aren't actually any defensive lines beyond Avdiivka? Whoops.
Even the NYT is admitting it:
Defense in depth is pretty basic army stuff at this point isn't it? So either the Ukrainian army just forgot to build any defenses behind the front line or they're so lacking in men and equipment that they just couldn't
Westerners have so demonized the Soviet Union, it seems they’ve convinced themselves all the “human wave” stuff really was what won the war for the Soviets, rather than incredible planning and logistics operations.
“We hate our enemies, so we refuse to admit they have anything worth learning.”
This is the result. Westerns advisors trying to replicate a victory that never happened with insane tactics made up as a form of propaganda.
"If you don't know yourself or your enemy, you'll never see a defeat in battle. Trust me bro." - Sunzi
Ukraine will not follow Orcish Soviet Strategies but will instead use cool and wholesome NATO strategies that involve an overwhelming air force as step 1.
but ukraine where is your air force
Protection in... thickness
They didn’t want to build defenses in depth because that would require them to acknowledge the possibility of losing ground, which they absolutely couldn’t do, so here they are. Some commander admitted as much in a previous article I read, I think the one from the times about Ukraines lack of defensive lines.
You would think so but that's not how westernized militaries necessarily operate.
They heavily rely on their vehicles to mount a mix of area defense to block and emplace the leading offensive element of the oposing forces with a flexible and mobile defense that relies on mounting counter-attacks around the attacks of the offensive element of the opposing forces in order to force retreats at the threat of encirclement.
Of course the dipshits of the Pentagon are completwly high off of their supply and make shit up to inflate their force projection and ego by calling their current strategy some shit along the lines of "Full-spectrum dominance" which doesn't mean jack shit.
Of course we're talking about Ukraine which is trapped between using old Soviet strategies and being forced to use "superior" western strategies
In addition to what others have said, I'm sure a lot of it is corruption, that funds that were allocated for defensive emplacements were embezzled and siphoned off. Ukraine was a famously corrupt country before the war, and war makes it easier to do corruption. If everyone is already riding high on Slava ukraine then who's going to miss paltry second and third lines of defence anyway.
Their status as ubermench and trust in western wunderwafen convinced them they didn't need defensive lines.
Can't find 'em because they're dead from the lemming-like suicide charges the fascist high command of Ukraine sends the people headlong into.
No no you see the government transfered money for local government to build stuff, which is totally what they did with the half a meter trench they dig somewhere in astolavskayakovka.
Ukraine is spending 20% of GDP in their war economy yet the effort appears to be deeply unserious.
The most corrupt country in Europe isn't spending its warbucks appropriately, how could anyone have predicted this outcome
GREAT JOB!