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.
Germany only has 20,000 high explosive artillery shells left, report says -Reuters
20,000 artillery shells is about 1 days worth of shooting for the Russian artillery. Shell expenditure ranges from 10k-40k+ depending on intensity of the combat. Ukraine tends to be outshot by about 5-1 at best so this would be maybe 5+ days of shooting for Ukraine.
230,000 shells wouldn't last anywhere near 30 days of intensive combat and 2031 is 8 years from now. It's truly incredible how neoliberalism makes accomplishing anything borderline impossible.
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which— oh, wait, I'm getting a report here that... uh, apparently, the capitalists don't actually have any rope?! And it will take them... 10 years to produce another batch?!
The capitalists will sell us the rope in the metaverse, though it'll take a while to find a programmer who doesn't mind a 100 hour workweek to program in and design that rope because they keep dropping dead from "exhaustion" or whatever those weak-willed idiots are calling it
Its Ok. If we are willing to pay they have some nice Egyptian cotton bedsheets they are willing to sell us that we can make do with.
any neoliberal in office after 1993 can’t win wars… all they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, austerity, commit war crime, eat hot chip & lie
Just-in-time-manufacturing and its consequences etc etc etc.
deleted by creator
ambitious!
What's not written in this article is each and every German artillery shell will probably cost about $3.3k a pop. They used to cost "only" about 2k but with increased demand, consolidation of the German MIC, and the destruction of Germany's supply of cheap energy by a mysterious third party; the MIC has really jacked the price up. I don't know how much Russia pays for a new artillery shell but it's probably significantly cheaper, they're not that complicated to make.
How much artillery do they even have left? 230,000 shells will last for a long time if you have only few cannons.
According to wikipedia Germany only operates the PzH 2000 for 155m shells. It has 108 left. 22 were sent to Ukraine by Germany and other countries. They turned out to be real pieces of shit that broke down all the time, this matches with pre-war reporting. Apparently 100 shots per day is considered "a high-intensity mission" by Germany.
108 Guns * 100 shots per day * 30 days is about 300k shells. So you're right, this would be enough for what Germany considers high-intensity combat. Two-thirds of the things would probably be broken even before any shooting if the below article can be trusted so that stretches the shell supply even further. Of course those 230k are probably split among different calibers of shells but I don't want to do those calculations.
Two-thirds of German PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers are unusable (outside of Ukraine)
Wow it’s almost like destroying your economy has consequences and these people truly believe they can do war economy against russia and china, ridiculous!
Conidering they work half the day thats 10 or so shots per hour? Is that a muzzle loader?
Denel in South Africa has a deal to manufacture and sell some of these 155mm shells to NATO countries running out of them. But I don't think we can make that much
https://www.defenceweb.co.za/featured/rheinmetall-denel-munition-wins-big-new-155-mm-ammunition-orders/
This would be a great time to have a revolution if there were any revolutionaries.