The image is of Russians in Rostov climbing up a Wagner tank.
New thread's preamble:
What a mess. The amount of information going around is hard to determine, but we know with relative certainty:
- Wagner forces are in Rostov near the Defence Ministry building and are fortifying it; the Russian army and Chechens are en route
- A/several Wagner column is moving from Rostov to Moscow, and along the way Russia is setting up barriers and blocking roads, but it seems like Wagner is spreading out through western Russia wherever they can go.
- Prigozhin has no support from any internal force that we currently know of.
update: Lukashenko has saved Putin's ass. At least, that's the current narrative I'm going with - further analysis will probably change perceptions of the situation.
Old thread's preamble:
Mali's military government - which overthrew the old military government last year - has called on the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping forces in the MINUSMA program (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali), which is the third largest peacekeeping force in the world. It was established in 2012 in the wake of the Tuareg Rebellion, in which the northern half the country, calling itself Azawad, began a fight for independence from the southern side.
The "official" fighting was over relatively quickly - the Malian military, with the help of France, retook most of the country in a year or two. But insurgencies continue to plague the region, with local militias and Islamic State jihadists taking advantage of the chaos. The idea behind the UN mission is to stabilize the situation and patrol the area - this has made it the second deadliest mission so far.
After a decade of not much progress being made, first the French pulled out in August 2022 after anti-French protests inside the country, and now the MINUSMA force is being asked to pull out after similar protests. The Russian UN ambassador has said:
“The real issue is not the number of peacekeepers but the functions, and one of the key tasks for the government of Mali is fighting terrorism, which is not provided for in the mandate of the blue helmets,”
Additionally, MINUSMA released a report last year stating that the Malian government (with the help of "foreign military elements" of which the implication is the Wagner Group) has accelerated civilian killings and human rights abuses, which hasn't made the mission more likeable to the government, I would imagine.
Update on the situation in Mali:
The rebel coalition in the north, the CSP-PSD (Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development - man, this sounds like it was named in a Washington DC office), has said that if the UN mission is pulled out as the military government is demanding, then this would be a "fatal blow" to the peace accord and threaten regional stability. The coalition previously withdrew from the negotiating table back in December as they grew impatient with the two successive military governments, and it's possible that more active fighting will continue in Mali soon. MINUSMA's mandate runs out on June 30th and if it isn't renewed by then, we may see an orderly withdrawal of UN forces taking about a year, leaving Mali by itself (and, I suppose, the Wagner Group).
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[(https://hexbear.net/comment/3553612) 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.
not gonna lie, I thought this was common knowledge so I was surprised when people in the megathread were surprised about the proposed peace plan (which is why people sometimes talked about Boris Johnson being such a monster in the context of the war), but maybe I've just paid too much attention to the war lmao.
or maybe the narrative of "Russia retreated from Kiev because Ukraine killed too many soldiers/constraints on how far the army could keep supplies going/for some bullshit reason" took hold so quickly that the stated reason of "We withdrew from Kiev as a goodwill exercise due to the peace negotiations" faded quickly into the background? (not that I necessarily disagree with arguments about supply lines or even very high casualties, and I still dunk on the Russians whenever they retreat or do something stupid by calling it a "goodwill exercise" )
idk really
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If you remember the narrative that Russia was "pushed out" from Kiev was amplified by Bucha, it was a double wammy of propaganda that left a lot of people clutching their pearls over Russia not only retreating but also having the time and will to carry out a massacre while doing it. Of course we had detailed evidence debunking it, even video of the Nazis executing someone but it was still a time people were way too willing to give the Ukranian narrative the benefit of doubt.
These days at least I am personally far more willing to pass judgement on anyone still repeating western talking points. But back then we have to convince people the Russians wouldn't simply execute the people who literally use the same pro-Russian armbands.
Do you have any links about this? Not just the video itself, I don't want to see it and I'm not qualified to draw conclusions.
The Ukrainians posted this video on their own, some Botsman nazi guy which was very infamous for doing this already
THe dialog is basicaly
"They left in a hurry"
"Can I kill the ones without blue armbands?"
At the time it was pretty set in stone, Pro-Russian seperatists/civilians used white armbands, pro-Ukrainians used blue.
This is just part of the debunking narrative of Bucha. There is this old post that goes into most of it
On its own you could look the other way maybe, but
-The west refused an independent investigation at first.
-The mayor gave inconsistent statements, at first he did not mention such massacre.
-The Ukrainian Nazi self-published video I mentioned.
-The Ukrainians posted their own videos of shelling in Bucha, they even bragged about destroying Rus vehicles. There was a twitter thread detailing the satellite photos that basically corroborated that some of the corpses were just people killed at different times by Ukrainian artillery, again that they even bragged about killing Russians earlier.
-The coup-de-grace though is this narrative later, turns out the west does a shameful report on the Bucha victims and discovers WW1 style shells, supporting the Russian narrative. But of course it doesn't change anything because the idiots actualy think the Russians would shell the position they were just holding.
The most important point is these types of shell fragments were also found in Donbas region in 2015. Also WW1 artillery shells found in Ukraine in 2014
So basicaly two versions
A) The Russians are so incompetent and so starved for ammunition(literally the narrative back then, "Russia will run out of missiles/shells soon" was THE meme) that they continually dig up WW1 artillery shells filled with banned fragments, so much so that they are so ubiquitous they end up being used in Bucha, to kill pro-Russian civilians by shelling the town, at a time the Russians had it under control.
B)The Ukrainian nazis continue their usual tactics of shelling civilians like they did for 8 years in Donbass, they lack shells and the industrial capacity to make them so they use whatever illegal and/or old shit they could, they shelled the Russians in Bucha who had to retreat. Upon arriving there the Nazi Botsman group finished off the few surviving pro-Russians as conspirators, only they were too stupid and recorded incriminating evidence by themselves, which they later even deleted.
We can also point out to statements from Podolyak and others about their open hatred towards what they call "collaborators" in Crimea and Donbass. Put 1+1 = 2.
The video isn't graphic. Its allegedly a Russian Nazi who served in Ukraine AF doing a sweep of Butcha. I don't speak Ukrainian but supposedly some guys out of frame say "we have 2 here who aren't wearing our color arm bands" and he says "shoot them" and there are 2 gunshots.
I've never heard a reasonable argument against the allegations. All I have heard are "AI deepfake" "Russian misinformationski" tier denials. There was apparently positive Geolocation from the video. Nobody ever tried "that's not what they are saying" and the claims they were Russian actors was debunked by the fact that the guy in the video posted it and he was a known Nazi from Russia who was fighting for Ukraine in the donbas before the war.
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An article from April 2022:
The second part of your question is thus answered. The first part about details is, strictly speaking, "no", but from Peskov's statement it's not too hard to infer that Ukraine would have only been asked to give up Donbass (and Crimea I guess) and if I recall correctly, Russia initially had no problems with Ukraine joining the EU (I think they're a little less enthusiastic about that now but I don't know for sure).
These terms would probably also necessarily mean that Putin would have given up the "denazification" and "demilitarization" parts of his war aims stated on February 24th, given that it's hard to imagine a situation where the Ukrainian government would have freely given up the neo-Nazis (if you could even really draw a dividing line between the government and the Nazis), nor their NATO-supplied weaponry.
All in all, basically "Give up territory that you barely control (and much of it you don't) and never join NATO, and in exchange you don't have to do anything about the fascists, you can have Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts back, you can keep your weapons, and you can join the EU". An absurdly good deal for Ukraine.
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Yes, I don't think we had a full undertanding of the scope of the discussion. The sides were arguing over the size of the AFU's future armed forces, amongst other things. I guess we could have assumed that, but it would have been speculation.
i think, from the posts the other day, there was room for the implication, or even the insinuation, that the russians had a full agreement with ukraine, and were withdrawing from kiev (as pursuant to that agreement), only to have ukraine ignore their end of the agreement.
there's a big difference between the above, which it seems there's not been any evidence for (though i haven't read the thread today :/), and russia withdrawing as gesture of "good will" to facilitate further negotiations. the former never happened; you would publicize the peace deal and terms, and russia would squak about it immediately (not over a year later) if ukraine backed out.
edit: re-read the tweet, not even an insinuation: "when Russian military sorrounded Kyev, a peace deal, mediated by Erdogan, was signed by Kiev". lol bald faced cap.
There was speculation at the time that the column moving toward Kiev had been a feint designed to keep Ukraine from sending resources to the east and south, and that it ended about when it became obvious that it wasn't a serious attack...because Russia wasn't devoting a bunch more support to it, as it would need to to actually accomplish anything.
Still sounds fairly plausible to me....
100%, this is still my preferred interpretation. It was designed to put pressure on Kiev both politically and militarily and bought time for the Russians and the militias to become situated in the Donbass to resist the coming Ukrainian assaults there. Unless the soldiers inside Kiev surrendered, it would have been impossible for Russia to take the city and the Russia generals would have obviously known that.
However, Ukraine instead took the lesson of "Russia wanted to take Kiev and we fought them back because they're so incompetent!" and similar lessons from Kharkov and now here we are today, with Ukraine learning the wrong lessons, assuming Russia would instantly break and run, and getting smashed on the battlefield because of it.
One of the most important rules of maintaining your country and/or empire is to never believe your own propaganda. This was has been a very good case study.
Some of the few western generals with opinions worth listening to have written about that interpretation in the marine gazette.