No update today.
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.
I think there's varying levels of truth for all countries that are sanctioned. The socioeconomic pressure that it exerts will either strengthen a nation and "hone" it to be genuinely more unified (Russia, Cuba, DPRK, etc), not really unify the nation significantly but also not drive it apart at the seams (Iran imo), or cause it to shatter, and this shatter is then exploited in an imperialist invasion of primitive accumulation and profit extraction. That's not to romanticise it, of course, or suggest that spartan living conditions will create strong men that create good times that create weak men that create bad times and that whole theory, just that it's an observable effect.
Sanctions are almost a weird, triple-edged sword in that sense - they weaken you by default, of course, and they might destroy a nation, but they also might also strengthen it. And the bigger the nation you try to sanction, the more likely that it'll strengthen them into self-sufficiency than destroy them. But to see that, you first have to acknowledge that the goal of countries isn't, or shouldn't be to create infinite capitalist growth, but to provide for their citizens. And that's how western nations might have thought that they were owning Russia in 2014, or in a sense the 1990s, or in the early weeks of this invasion - and then come to realize that actually, if you're looking at the situation in its totality and not just "haha, Russia can't make as much capitalist profit, get fucked idiots", then you have to admit it was a terrible mistake.