It's my weekly rest day, so no update today.
I just want to thank everybody who has engaged with these threads, from the frequent commenters, to the background lurkers, and even the people who come in thinking this is the main megathread and start telling us about their banana bread recipe or something like that.
I'm hopeful that my daily schedule will stabilise for at least the next few weeks, if not months, and I can finally get a reliable stream of updates rather than those punctuated by random breaks.
Of course, may the war end soon, and may Azov, Right Sector, and every other group get what they deserve. And, of course, these threads will continue past the end of the war - unless the end of the war coincides with a sudden and brief increase in the air temperature to several million degrees in every city on the planet.
Yesterday marked the 72nd day of me doing this. I'm gunning for 72 trillion more.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
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.
Yesterday's discussion post.
They officially don’t frame it as oppositional at all. The official CPC line is that China is minding its own business, developing itself peacefully and going their own way. They don’t have any “clash of civilizations” narrative driving them like the West does.
The extent to which the Chinese are hostile to the West is based on how aggressive the West acts towards them in preventing their development. They are starting to see the West as forces opposing their own peaceful rise instead of neutral trade partners, but there’s no big official Chinese state narratives about the evil US empire (at least not yet)
Well, they have recently been favorably comparing their "whole-process democracy" to America's sham democracy, and they do talk shit about America's crimes pretty frequently on all the state media I follow. Although it's usually tit for tat.
They are slowly being forced into a more hostile stance against the West, due to the West’s aggression towards them. The main way that it gets expressed currently is either “taking the high road” or doing hypocrisy-owns on the West diplomatically, which is much different than the West’s policies of sabotage, sanctions, coup attempts, funding fabricated smear campaigns (like the Uighur genocide narrative), etc.
Yeah, obviously it's just in response to western aggression, but they definitely have increasingly been going after the west as undemocratic, oppressive, warmongering, etc. Remember those reports they put out about human rights violations in the United States? The article's just wrong in its framing, implying that it's mutual aggression versus one-sided aggression from the west and China defending themselves.
Those are the “hypocrisy-owns” I spoke of. China is basically just using the western narrative and flipping it, using it against the west as a “nut uh” to negate Western criticisms. It doesn’t really signify anything greater about China’s ruling ideology or how they frame geopolitics, it’s merely a turnabout
Yeah, I'm in agreement.