Image is of Chinese FM Qin Gang and German FM Annalena Baerbock, in Berlin.
Conor Gallagher over at Naked Capitalism details the latest in EU idiocy - foreign ministers backed a more hardline position on China and are considering putting sanctions on Chinese companies that they accuse of supporting Russia. The ideological contagion of "you are either with us or against us" has, without a shadow of a doubt, taken root in the brains of European politicians despite whatever words fall out of Macron's mouth.
The obvious problem here is that China is the EU's biggest trading partner for goods, their second largest import market, and their third largest export market. China's manufacturing is equal to that of the US and Europe combined, outputting most pharmaceutical ingredients, processing most rare earths, manufacturing most solar power wafers, and leads the world in the clean energy market in general - important, as the EU has given up cheap energy from Russia. It is not impossible for the West to develop their own domestic alternatives, but it will take several years to do so, and the sanctions war may escalate independent of that timetable.
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.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is 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.
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1658281863327129601
Ukrainian air defense desperately trying to take down a target. Looks like around 30 missiles. Assuming they are patriot missiles, that volley was around $120 million lol. And whatever they were trying to protect probably still got destroyed.
Air warning issued only on Kiev today, apparently. Then this happens, lots of AD missiles are fired at unknown target(s), either these missiles are capable of engaging multiple targets at once or the AD battery was firing in full panic trying to stop something. Not much is known yet, information is still coming out (photos of debris in the city from supposed Kinzhal missiles). We still don't know the nature of the battery in question, Patriot system is likely (as S-300s were reportedly running low and I bet Patriots were kept in the capital as it is the "best" AD system available). Some say the russians absolutely saturated the area with either lots of drones or slower cruise missiles from multiple vectors that allowed the Kinzhals to reach it's targets freely, there is a clear explosion in the vecinity of the AD battery anyway. Also some are super mad at the people filming the whole thing because it's giving their positions away, but this is bound to happen, it's 2023 everyone has a phone with a camera ffs.
Also some AD missiles behaved quite erratically, like very off-target.
30 patriots, 30 kinzhals. one step closer to putting Putler in the Hague!
edit: satire can no longer outpace western propaganda