I'll be putting up effortposts and essays on the bulletins site, both to signalboost it a little more to people who mostly use the RSS feed, and mainly also to preserve them while the site devs need to make posts and comments beyond a few months ago unsearchable. And also to have it one full piece instead of split across multiple posts/comments due to the character limit.
So if you wanna write a long piece up on something you're interested in, or summarize a book or concept similarly to @shipwreck, then you can both write it up as a post (for the internet points and comment notifications), and, if you want, let me know (or I'll ask you permission) to put it on the site.
November 28th's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 29th's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 30th's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
December 2nd's (big!) update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
December 3rd's (short!) update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
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. Beware of chuddery.
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 fairly brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. The Duran, of which he co-hosts, is where the chuddery really begins to spill out.
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 ~ Now rebranded as Battlefield Insights, they do infrequent posts on the conflict.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
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 ~ One of the really big pro-Russian (except when they're being pessismistic, which is often) telegram channels focussing on the war. 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. 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
Any Western media outlet that is even vaguely liberal (and quite a few conservative ones too).
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.
Just a side comment on this: Based on the number of Ukrainians in the field at any one time (around 600k, from memory), this is pretty bad (for Ukraine).
Casualties traditionally mean "people rendered combat ineffective", not just killed, and with modern medicine, body armour etc. you'd expect a lot more wounded/maimed than killed.
PoW numbers seem pretty low this war, I think. We're pretty used to asymmetric warfare where civilians behind lines are sort of like PoWs (many combatants can just drop their guns and wear jeans). There haven't really been any major encirclements despite both sides trying to set them up, which is where a lot of PoWs come from, barring Azovstal style last stands.
I assume Ukraine still has a lot of people in the "combat aged males" category, but the first choices (16-30) are probably suffering a lot.
EDIT: This isn't really a tactical or operational concern, but rather concerning for Ukraine's already bleak prospects post-war. Strategically, the casualty rate is concerning, but Ukraine isn't riding off their own industry for the most part, so this probably won't shorten the war.