I'm having increasing difficulty maintaining the time and energy to put into these updates, especially after having moved. My earlier rhetoric about doing this until the war ended (or past that) sounds increasingly foolish now that the war won't be won, militarily at least, for many months longer. I'm also returning to academia soon, which will keep me very busy, and also want to get back to reading theory more, as I've had less time for that, and my reading list is building up.
My choices are thus:
a) fully 'hit da bricks' and stop the updates and the megathreads (presumably somebody would take over posting them, at least while the war continued);
b) stop the updates but maintain the megathreads, posting some of the most important pieces (e.g. from MoA, Naked Capitalism, etc) I find in a few times per day;
c) maintain the updates and the megathreads, but prune the updates to the point where I'm essentially just posting headlines. And might mean that I also couldn't post summaries as, well, I'm not really reading the articles (and the difference between the update and the summary would be fairly negligible anyway).
I don't think the first option is necessary, but I also don't know how useful the third option would be to people. Like, this isn't (just) some kind of self-actualization exercise for me to know more about the news, nor a blog really, it's meant to be a resource. But I'm fine with doing just the headlines, it would take like an hour every day which is a time investment I'm comfortable with. The debate I'm having with myself is whether, at that point, if I'm really filling a niche - i.e. if there are better resources if all you want are the important headlines.
So I'm split between b) and c), essentially.
But for now...
Here is November 14th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary!
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.
Extremely funny timing that just after Ukraine and the US do their whole "Actually we want to negotiate, we've been willing to this whole time, Russia's just being unreasonable by not giving up their entire leverage", this shit happens, and Ukraine's switch is immediately flipped to "WE MUST DESTROY THE RUSKIES. HELP US, NATO! WE WILL CRUSH THEIR SKULLS UNDER OUR BOOTS TOGETHER!"
not to go all out conspiracy brain but the lever pulling on rhetoric like that really makes me wonder if ukraine shot that missile into poland on purpose
edit: nvm its SAM and missing a russian missile in mid air is a good enough explanation for me
I imagine Ukraine would try and put together some kind of missile or drone that could have conceivably been fired from Russia and shoot it at Poland if they wanted to do a real false flag. Again, NATO would know that it's a false flag because they've got almost every information-gathering device on the planet looking down at Ukraine's territory, but that's not the point - the US has always been a fan of completely fabricating casus bellis to enter wars they wanna go into.
Someone in Ukraine could have done this on purpose but usually the simple and boring explanation, in this case an Ukrainian AA oopsie, is the correct one.