Map of Russian fortification lines on the Zaporozhye front.
The counteroffensive has begun, after a series of failed Ukrainian attacks in the preceding few days. The axis of attack does appear to be towards Tokmak, which is also the strongest part of the Russian defensive line.
From the late night of June 7th/very early morning of June 8th onwards, Ukraine has been sending waves of forces in to attack Russian defense lines. Ukrainian air defense is barely active if at all, with Russian aviation able to freely attack Ukrainian columns going through minefields. We've seen potential glances of Leopards and various western armored vehicles. Russian morale seems high so far.
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
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.
deleted by creator
Yeah send in the reinforcements.
I actually feel bad now for making light of the war.
I've been trying for a few days to join in the fight, but the lemmy.ml sign-up button just spins a loading icon forever and never lets me actually sign up and even though I have a lemmygrad.ml account from a while ago, I can't see most of the lemmy.ml comments (even though I can load the lemmy.ml federated posts fine). It hasn't inspired much confidence in me for hexbear federating tbh.
Yeah I had that spinning thing but I ignored that and it worked out once they cleared my signup. I also have an old lemmygrad account and I just checked and I seem to be able to see everything just fine, so :shrug-outta-hecks:
Did you have to contact a mod or something? Or do you just mean that once you got approved, you were able to log in? Because I don't even know if my sign-up request has gone through for anyone to even see it.
As for not being able to see all the comments, I don't know what the deal is there either, but I did check some lemmy support communities and it looks like the problem is happening to others, but it's mostly only people trying to make their own instance that have posted about it. I suspect it actually happens a lot more but most people don't realize it because the only way you'd know it's happening is if you checked the same post on the instance you have an account from and also from the instance you're not logged into, like on a different browser or device. I can look at a post on lemmy.ml and see 35 comments, but then load that same post from lemmygrad on a different browser and only see 4 comments, but everything looks "normal."
Ok this was some days ago, but it did hang either on signup or on first login, not sure, and then everything worked fine like an hour later. Haven't had a problem since.