:macron:

The devil went down to China,
He was goin' to give Xi a spiel
He was in a bind, pension reform enshrined
And he was willin' to sit and kneel

Image from this Politico article.

Macron (and Ursula von der Leyen, though nobody seems to care about her) went to Beijing, with the initially stated aim of trying to convince Xi Jinping to bring Russia to its senses. Obviously, the Chinese were entirely uninterested in this given that they had just formed an alliance in all but name with the Russians, and the two countries are now united in both long term economic deals, and also in their opposition to the Western bloc.

Macron's visit has, unexpectedly for me, been an interesting one. It sometimes feels like every media source I see has an entirely new outlook on what happened. But one thing is for certain: the western media appears to be quite annoyed by Macron, because he supposedly went to tell Xi off for being naughty, and then made statements while there warning that Europe must not become America's followers, thus implying he's pursuing an independent foreign policy.

But at the end of the day, all of these words are just... well, words. We shall see if Europe, or at least western Europe, will actually try and strike a balance or if they will continue to be vassals of the US. I'm certainly not holding my breath.

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 10th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.

April 12th's update is here in the comments.

April 14th's update is here in the comments

Sorry everyone, I'm having a busy weekend, so it'll be a three-update week this time around.

Links and Stuff

Want to contribute?

RSS Feed

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.

  • Socialcreditscorr [they/them,she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    They seem to have be relying on Ukrainian propaganda numbers and publicly available deployments data, like the open source Deployment Map. For the record, this is not a knock on the Deployment Map site - I use this resource frequently and find it very useful.

    This isn't real.

    The point, of course, is that the Pentagon, with its nearly unlimited resources, does not seem to have any unique insight or intelligence streams of its own in this regard. They gesture vaguely at the map and mutter, “there’s probably a brigade or two in this area, maybe 8,000 men. Or 4,000. We don’t really know.”

    This can't be real.

    One other issue is the Pentagon’s estimate of Russian vehicle losses. It seems that here too they are copy-pasting external estimates. In this case, they appear to be using the “documented” vehicle losses from the Oryx project.

    In one particularly egregious case, a picture of a Ukrainian Msta howitzer had its crew photoshopped out and was marked as destroyed Russian artillery piece.

    What the fuck is going on?

    • meth_dragon [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      so von der lyin' oopsies the 100k AFU casualty figure publicly, yet the pentagon for some reason is working with official AFU numbers of <20k?

      are these docs just not high enough of a pay grade? lie to the lower level commisariat, keep shit ideologically in order at the bottom while the galaxy brains at the top figure out their next 5D chess maneuver?

      one thing that serge says that i take issue with is that the documents are internally consistent; how does ukraine lose/severely attrit pretty much all its tanks, most of its artillery/AD and multiple high profile infantry formations and still be under 20k casualties? like azov alone accounts for ~2k, and even NYT admits bakhmut by itself churning through multiple brigades at a time. on top of the very public mobilizations, these numbers literally do not add up. how are they squaring the circle?

      edit: oh they're from joint chiefs of staff... i guess that's my pay grade conjecture out the window.

      • Flinch [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        how are they squaring the circle?

        that's the magic of ✨ ideology ✨

    • randomquery [none/use name,any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      It feels to me that the leak is deliberate and the documents could be fake. This also seems to be the opinion of this guy who is usually reasonable and knowledgeable.