With it being overwhelmingly likely that Ukraine will receive Germany's Leopard tanks (whether from Germany itself or Poland), German tanks once again roll into battle against Russian forces after nearly a century.
Can the Leopard succeed against the Russian army where it failed in Syria? We'll find out soon enough.
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 23rd's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 25th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 27th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 28th'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.
Fuck Discord. Every fucking g*mer community and two thirds of open source projects just abandoned everything and jumped feet first into another slick looking honeypot platform that steals data, sidesteps web standards and constantly begs for money.
It's always about convenience and market disruption. Discord showed up at exactly the right time to disrupt the voice-server market which was previously made up of Teamspeak, Mumble and a couple other apps with hundreds of thousands of groups individually paying for voicechat servers with various gameserver companies. Voicechat was the bulk of the income that gameserver companies made.
So discord came in and offered it for free while also having a MUCH better chat interface than Teamspeak or Mumble, it became a no-brainer for them all.
Then they've been salami-slicing for bigger and bigger monetisation methods ever since. That will continue until they slice too much off and some other app ends up taking their place by being equally free but also running better and more conveniently. Will be awhile til Discord reaches that bloat imo, unless they get sold to some real ghouls that just want a fast roi.
I 100% agree until the very last paragraph. I feel like we'll be stuck with this thing no matter how shitty it gets.
Everything in tech eventually dies to bloat because profit motive encourages every single application to permanently expand its features in pursuit of growth.
Eventually this causes an application to be less responsive at doing the thing it was originally very good at doing, this then enables another app without all the bloat to come in and do that job in a specialised way, taking its place.
Hope this applies to Google
I think they've avoided it by not actually putting most of their things directly onto the search engine, but instead branched out into different projects and kept them separate. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, etc etc. Not as one bloated poorly performing project.
The internet is ran on google and amazon unfortunately there’s no way of changing that in the near future.