Shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:
The Soledar Salt Mines (also called Artyomsol Salt Mines after the State Enterprise Association Artyomsol that operates the mines) are located in the city/suburb of Soledar in the Bakhmut municipality in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The scale of the mines is vast. The mines have 125 miles of tunnel, are at a depth of 288m, and many of the chambers are 30 meters in height, The largest resembles a hangar of about 100 meters long and 40 meters width and 40 m height, and has accommodated soccer matches and the inflation of a hot air balloon.
On the 5th of January, 2023, the Wagner Group and Russian Armed Forces took parts of Soledar's east, forcing the Armed Forces of Ukraine to step back and take up defenses further west and in the central parts of Soledar. The salt mine has since become a critical point for Ukrainian defense of Soledar and Bakhmut, utilizing the deep tunnels of the salt mine to maintain a defensive line in Soledar, as well as to keep stockpiles of supplies and launch attacks on Russian positions from their rear.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
January 9th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 10th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 11th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 13th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 14th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
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.
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Whatever the response I'd say China is in for a rough ride. A friend in China was pro let it rip and I explained that an American style response would probably leave 5 million dead and an Australian style response would leave 1 million (quick calc). He didn't really care, he just wanted the restrictions to end. What was worrying was he had only had 2 shots and he talked about the distrust in locally made vaccinations. I could believe this as I noticed when I was there the huge distrust in locally made products (or the consideration that foreign is better). I really hope China's vaccination rate is high enough. Granted he is the most anti gov Chinese guy I met. So take it with a grain of salt.
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AFAIK China isn't reporting them regularly anymore (makes them no worse than western countries, of course) so anything else is just speculation.
But if anybody has anything solid then I'd like to hear it. I don't trust literally a single thing that the West is saying about China in regards to this so I've largely been skipping past all news from them, and it seems like non-western sources either don't really report on it, write articles suggesting what's happening is fine and good according to X or Y expert (which I don't really believe; you can argue that it's better than what the West is doing but that bar is on the floor so it's not hard for China to step over it), or sometimes quote western sources.
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If machine translation works here's a summary of the press conference they just held today with some data in there.
Some useful data perhaps for measuring the extent to which the medical system may be overwhelmed: infections peaked around Dec 21 or so—based mostly on the infection rate among visits to ER (8.8% on Dec 22, down to 2.9% on Jan 12), fever clinics (33.9% on Dec 20, down to 10.8% on Jan 12), and general outpatient care (5.7% on Dec 19, 0.9% on Jan 12). Hospitalization peaked around Jan 5 (1 million 625 k on Jan 5, 1 million 270 k on Jan 12). Moderate-to-severe hospitalization cases peaked around the same time, and by Jan 12 the utilization rate of available hospital beds capable of caring moderate-to-severe patients was 75%.
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Well the difference is that in China almost everybody is vaccinated, so all of the country either has immunity or rapidly spreading breakthrough infections. The newer covid variants are some of the fastest spreading viruses in history actually
Death toll is around 60k for the past month. Mjority of them old people. I believe it has peaked in most places so I don't see the death toll ever reaching US levels. In the end it will probably be somewhere between 100 and 200k
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https://m.weibo.cn/status/4857870459603736
it was announced today
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