Image from this article - and much of this thread's preamble adapted from it.
After the most recent failure of Lockheed Martin's ARRW project, which sought to be America's first true hypersonic weapon, the missile prototype is being abandoned. One reason for its failure might have been its unnecessary complication, with many subsystems and thus many points of failure. Another factor may be that these projects are being rushed as China and Russia's advantage grows in this field.
The other hypersonic missile being developed under the USAF is the HACM, which uses a different concept, and is smaller, allowing it to be carried by more types of aircraft. The Department of Defense has chosen the Australia-based company Hypersonix to develop these hypersonic weapons, which could reach Mach 7. The AUKUS alliance thus becomes an even more important one for the United States, with Australia both being a potential source of their first hypersonic missiles, and being a vassal country in the Pacific from which the American Empire can attempt to contain China.
In the meantime, American copium continues to grow over how hypersonic missiles really aren't THAT important, and how Russian ones don't even work as they increasingly batter Ukraine. At the same time, Russian development and production of their existing hypersonic missiles (the Kinzhal, Zircon, and Avangard) continues to accelerate. And that's not even mentioning China's hypersonic missiles, a large advantage against the US's aircraft carrier fleet in the event of a war.
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.
April 3rd's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 5th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 7th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 8th'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 decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
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 relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Another big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia's army.
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
Almost every Western media outlet.
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.
NYT: Ukraine War Plans Leak Prompts Pentagon Investigation
:cope:
Yeah, I agree, these numbers are bullshit. There's no way that Ukraine's dead is under a hundred thousand.
Honestly, it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens to these figures post-war. Like, when they can't locate the 500,000 dead Russian soldiers after the war is over and can only find like 30,000, are they just gonna go "Well, the Russian government is hiding this information from us and paying their relatives to act like they're not dead"? How long is the wikipedia article going to list hilariously inflated Russian casualties and hilariously deflated Ukrainian casualties? Will there be a quiet admission ten years from now, when nobody gives a shit anymore, that they lied about the casualty figures?
the Soviet archives have been open for 30 years and people are still say the Holodomor was intentional, what do you think?
By the time this is all over there wont be a western tally. Like there are no official Nazi figures for the total deaths at the end of WW2. Eventually the numbers just stop and what they were saying before the end was so obviously fabricated, nobody pays any of the reports any mind.
With migration away from Ukraine as high as it has been since like 2010 and then the mass of refugees there will likely never be a good tally of what this war did to the population. With the poor record keeping of Ukraine (sending enlistment letters to men on the front etc.) there will be no way to track where everyone went and how they died.
The rest were incinerated by the mobile crematoriums that Russia definitely brought to the war.
The relatives were also incinerated.
And the same goes for any discrepancies with civilian casualty numbers or any other problems. Russian economy seems to doing fine? They incinerated their economists. Putin isn't dropping dead? That's not Putin, it's a body double. The original Putin was incinerated. Western weapons aren't performing as desired? They are, all the evidence was just incinerated. Hunger in the third world because the US won't let them buy Russia grain or fertilizer? Wrong! It's because Russia incinerated all their grain and fertilizer so they don't have any to export.
It's very possible that Ukraine's KIA numbers are below 100k. Bear in mind that this document lists exclusively KIA; killed, wounded, and missing generally sum to around ten times KIA alone.
There are two versions of the documents being shown around forums. One claiming what was showed among the entire page in this forum and another with Ukraine deaths at 16-17.5 kia and Russia kia at 35-43k. This version is at the bottom of the imgur album linked on this page. Here is that version
Have the Warthunder forums confirmed the accuracy of these documents?
so NYT the immediately confirming this before the OSINT guys and the twitterati get a chance to muddy the waters means it's real, right? either the start of a pivot to withdrawing support (likely) or an elaborate 11D chess move to make the Russians think the Ukrainians are more owned than they are before an offensive (lol, lmao)
reddit-ass war
how do i see the documents lmao
I've uploaded what's been posted on other forums here, seems like there might be other docs out there. There have been conflicting/edited versions of that last image of casualty numbers (all of which seem like bullshit for one reason or another - I'm convinced by this explanation for the numbers) but that's the clearest/ least sketchy detail image
based thanks