Here is September 30th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is October 1st's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Next week's thread is here!
New and Improved!
I have decided to permanently ditch NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, and Politico. I am replacing their analysis with better analysis. Thus, the Dipshittery section is being retired. I've spent the last seven months either laughing or raising my blood pressure at the truly ghoulish shit that comes out of these places and I no longer have the patience for them.
There are a few news sites that I am mentally referring to the "thin fucking ice" sites, such as the BBC, CNN, SCMP, and Euronews. They will stay. For now. But I don't like them.
Additionally, there are some mainstream sites that I think ultimately provide more good than harm to the updates: such as Reuters, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and some of the foreign-but-not-explicitly-left news sites from abroad. These will be kept.
Today's update includes only news and analysis from the non-MSM side of my feed. That's simply because this is what they've put out in the last week or so and I don't have time today to also do the MSM side. Tomorrow, once I'm back to only taking stuff from the last 24 hours, the updates will be in their true form.
I've also made some changes to the format of the updates themselves, to accommodate this new paradigm. Hopefully it works out. I may play around with the sizes of headers, and properly reintroduce spoiler tags so it's more of a "series of headlines" feel rather than a wall of text - the attraction of the updates and summaries, at least in my mind, is that you DON'T have to read an entire newspaper or equivalent. You can just skim through for ten minutes before you start work or your 14-hour long Hearts of Iron session - the two things that Hexbear users seem to do - and still probably be better informed about the world than your friends and family.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the “buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!” people.
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.
Last week's discussion post.
Honestly I kinda agree. I think that a defence-in-depth strategy is fine, and if that was properly communicated to everybody that that's what's going on then it might be better, but it's fundamentally contradictory with the idea that you're trying to liberate regions from Ukraine.
Like, the military paradigm in the first phase could be much more justifiably called "We're pushing back Ukraine and saving you!" but when it transitioned from those quick offensives to a stabilization and something resembling WW1 combat then it became less and less easy to describe it that way.
I believe that the Russian generals are infinitely more capable of conducting a war with the few resources they've been given by Russia than us shmucks on the internet, and my criticism isn't at how they're doing things, my criticism is purely the mismatch between a) the fact that you're supposed to be, in your eyes, liberating people but the front has been relatively stagnant for months, and b) the mismatch between NATO de facto becoming the opposite side in this conflict rather than Ukraine and that it took as long as September to really recognize that fact and begin to assign more forces there.
Like, no, you cannot fight NATO with 100,000 troops, Russia. The militia and mercenary groups aren't really gonna help you there either. I feel like this partial mobilization should have happened months ago. The West has been sending arms for months. You've clearly known that intelligence from NATO and officials from NATO are in Ukraine for ages. If it took the Kharkiv counteroffensive for that to set it, or if they needed public support to escalate and the counteroffensive was the first real opportunity to do so, that's an issue of communication.
It's a big messaging problem. Yes, the West has been spreading propaganda about how Putin expected to take the country in 32 attoseconds and the fact that he hasn't is proof that he's a mad insane idiot with an incompetent army and whatever, but I've seen few real attempts by anybody in the real upper levels of the Russian government to even explain what's going on and why it's fine if they lose a village here or a town there.
To summarize, I think there's a real disconnect between the Russian military command and the rest of the country and Russia has been way too sluggish on the civilian/propaganda front, if not the military front (if this is All Part Of The Plan).