Erdogan has won the election with 52% of the vote, with a voter turnout of 85%, winning five more years as president.

Naked Capitalism's diagnosis of Kilicdaroglu's failure is that he had to somehow simultaneously keep pro-KPDP voters on board and also attract voters of nationalist candidates from the first round, and was unable to square that circle.

Erdogan's party has lost seats in the parliament as nationalist parties have outflanked him on refugee issues - and even Kilicdaroglu couldn't seem to move against that tide, as he called for the urgent expulsion of 10 million refugees. The Nationalist Movement Party is now at 10.4% in the parliament, a party with ties to the Grey Wolves. Far right parties got more than 30% of the parliamentary vote. The left was unable to capture enough voters who have suffered in the economic crisis, with inflation rates have sharply risen far above even Europe's, and these voters instead went down the "blame my problems on refugees" path.

As a silver lining to this shitstain, this does at least mean that any hopes by NATO that Turkey will move towards the West more are probably dashed. This isn't to say that Erdogan will scorn the West - far from it, in fact, he let Finland in to NATO and will probably let Sweden in - but the :both-sides: strategy will continue, for better and worse, and if you aren't with the West, then you are against them.


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.

This week's third update is here in the comments.

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.


  • baguettePants [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Croatian president Zoran Milanovic, talked today at the local parliament of the capital city of Zagreb, when he was interrupted mid sentence by someone yelling "Slava Ukraini! Slava to Croatia!".

    His response was pretty funny: "Yeah, sure, OK..." dismissing him as some lunatic. Later he added "Slava Ukraini" is the same as Croatian Nazi slogan, or German "Sieg Heil" and that hundreds of thousands of people were genocided under the "Slava Ukraini" slogan. This, of course, prompted the (absolutely despicable in every way) Croatian prime minister to call him a Russian shill.

    Was pretty surprised the president who is (while mostly ceremonial figure) also the supreme military commander of a NATO country, to be that blunt about it.

      • baguettePants [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        “People are saying”, that no matter which side wins in Ukraine, we can now say we were on the right side!

      • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Can’t wait until the president calls the PM a westoid, and then the PM shoots back with tankie accusations

      • baguettePants [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Also, he called “some” western and (for some reason) Canadian leader illiterate for not knowing that.

        Russian media is having a ball with it.

        People are joking Ukraine is going to drone strike Croatia again. For those who don’t know, Ukraine drone striked the Croatian(NATO country) capital with an ancient Soviet drone which flew over 3 NATO countries, without any problem and thankfully didn’t explode on impact. Ukraine never admitted it and the current government covered it up ASAP with some vague investigation, which never amounted to anything.

        • BlueParenti [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Holy shit if that's true that's just incredible. Please tell me there's some news reports somewhere.

          • baguettePants [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s true. Even if the Ukrainian shitheads admitted to it, absolutely nothing “bad” would have happened to them, but no…can’t even admit and apologize for it. IIRC they launched some at Crimea too at the same time. They just fucked up.

            https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/ukraine-military-drone-crashes-into-croatian-capital-zagreb

          • baguettePants [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes, it was pretty hilarious. It flew over Romania, Hungary and Croatia.

            https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/ukraine-military-drone-crashes-into-croatian-capital-zagreb

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I mean some Croatians were the victims of genocide by other Balkan/Eastern European states, makes sense that there could be some disagreement about slogans like that.