Image is from Vladimir Putin's speech that he gave on February 24th, 2022, announcing the beginning of what he called the "special military operation" in Ukraine.
On February 24th, it will be one year since Russia began the invasion of Ukraine.
And while it's sometimes felt like it dragged on, what a dense year it's been! We've seen the anti-hegemonic axis of Russia and China closely bind together to oppose America, with several other nations joining or aligning with them. We've seen de-dollarization go from a passive, gradual process to one that is actively taking place for the explicit purpose of weakening America's hold on global finance and trade. We've seen Europe fully subjugated, as it sacrifices cheap energy for the sake of American interests. And we've seen Latin America continue to generally shift leftwards and away from American interests.
We've also seen death and destruction on a staggering, though far from unprecedented scale. The number of soldiers killed in Ukraine has been stunning, all for the whims of NATO, and the number of refugees flooding out has only pushed Europe further into nationalism and racism. We've seen the standard and quality of living of hundreds of millions of people - if not billions - noticeably decrease as a result of the economic warfare and sanctions and price caps. We've seen massive protests and perhaps attempted color revolutions, and successful coups. We've seen earthquakes. We've seen climate change accelerate, causing droughts and heatwaves throughout entire regions - in America, in Europe, in China, and in the Horn of Africa. And the coronavirus pandemic has only gotten worse, while governments manufacture the consent of their citizens to stop caring and leave behind even basic preventative measures in the service of capital.
The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. And balloons.
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.
I am on break for the next week as I recharge my batteries. The next update will be on the 27th. I will post a few links here and there so the thread isn't just dead.
Links and Stuff
American anti-war rally on March 18th by left groups!
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.
I was one of the many that took the L there, then steadily built my confidence back up in the months after until the Kharkov offensive, and then I finally learned my lesson that even if tried to rationally find out what was going on and what would happen next, I, as an average shmuck, simply have way, way too limited information to make confident predictions in the future, and so does everybody who isn't in the upper echelons of governments around the world.
Kharkov was definitely a systematic error on my part in misjudging the amount of fight Ukraine had left in them - and the amount of help that NATO was truly going to give them - but something like America blowing up Nord Stream was both fairly unpredictable (I'm sure there are some seers out there who took Biden's initial warning literally) and extraordinarily impactful for events afterwards; all analysis of what Europe's fate might be had to be rebuilt from scratch. A similar event could happen tomorrow and it could entirely throw off any predictions I could make.
Anyway, this is why, e.g., I don't discount the possibility of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporozhye, and I don't even discount that it'll be successful. And why I don't try and predict if/when Russia will do an offensive. I'm just riding the wave and interpreting events as best I can, and hoping that conditions develop such that leftists in western countries have a sufficiently large window to affect change in some way, unlike for the last few decades.
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