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Well, Prigozhin gets to live in Belarus instead of being on the wrong end of an Iskander, Wagner forces (in Ukraine at least) will probably get integrated into the Russian military, and SHOOOOIIGUUU and GEERRASSIMOOVV get to keep their jobs. Putin looks like a weak leader but at least things are intact. Also, the front in Ukraine hasn't broken down or anything.
I imagine a ton of things have happened behind the scenes that we either will never know about or will only slowly come to know about in the future.
About as happy an ending to the Wagner saga as we could hope for given the nature and historical horror stories of mercs. Or is it the end...? (Yes. Hopefully.)
And I have it on good authority that Stalin is currently looking down on this situation from heaven and incessantly swearing at these motherfuckers for what they've done to his country.
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 and only update is here, because I am on my regularly scheduled week-long break that I forgot about until now given all that's going on. Next update will be next Wednesday.
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.
It served three purposes imo:
a) in the best case scenario, Ukraine's army might be so unprepared and overwhelmed that the city could be taken outright (like with Kherson City), this obviously didn't happen. this is different to the common claim of "Putler thought he could take the city and be greeted as a liberator, but his disastrous miscalculation and ignorance of the sheer tenacity of Ukrainians has shocked him!" - I can't imagine that the Russians were at all surprised that they couldn't take the capital city of Ukraine in a month or two.
b) It put pressure on the government to sign a peace agreement, which worked until the West stepped in and told Zelensky to rip it up
c) It disrupted Ukrainian plans to assault the Donbass by forcing them to move equipment and troops to Kiev - this was all pre-mobilization so while their army was still relatively strong compared to most European armies, it didn't have all the expendable reserves to throw at Russia to delay them yet. in fact, given that the initial deal didn't seem to mention Ukraine having to give up Kherson and Zaporozhye, that offensive might have also been a feint but it worked much better than the one towards Kiev because Ukraine only had the forces to protect Kiev and the Donbass front, and not also the south.
I don’t think points A and B can be true (which I think they are) and it can be a feint at the same time. That’s like calling a punch I whiffed on a feint because it didn’t hit you. With the clarity of hindsight it seems that Russia expected to rapidly advance on the capital and force conciliations but once the west began arming Ukraine and those overextended flanks became easy targets for new man portable AT weaponry, the advance became an unsustainable position and Russia was forced to retreat and reorganize. Fundamentally changing how they would prosecute this war
I think you're using a non-military definition of feint. You seem to be treating a feint as a fake attack. A feint is a real attack that is designed to draw defensive forces towards it.
"A feint attack is designed to draw defensive action towards the point under assault. It is usually used as a diversion to force the enemy to concentrate more manpower in a given area, to weaken the opposing force in another area.[2] Unlike a related diversionary maneuver, the demonstration, a feint involves actual contact with the enemy. " -Wikipedia
Russia attacked Kiev and that meant Ukrainian reinforcements had to be sent there instead of to the south or east. I don't know what Russia intended exactly but it looks like a feint from here. It could have turned into a full siege of Kiev if Russia had reinforced that front instead of the others and in that case either the Donbas or Kherson attacks would have been feints. This is pretty standard Soviet Deep Battle doctrine, you attack on multiple fronts and reinforce the ones that breakthrough, the attacks that don't succeed still function to pin enemy forces into place. There's no reason a feint can't be turned into a full attack and Soviet doctrine didn't make a real distinction between them.
I think you're basically exactly correct here. Russia attacked Kiev for both political and military reasons, decided not to reinforce the area, and then pulled back when defending it became too costly. I think the disagreement is largely on the definition of a feint.
In military terms that would be called a shaping operation. (I'm only sort of joking).
It's far from impossible for major military operations to have more than one objective, even mutually exclusive ones in the case of the failure of plan A, then plan B, then plan C, etc
it might have gone: "Well, we'll march on Kiev and see if we can take the city quickly. If we can't, and we probably won't, then we can at least use the pressure to form a peace deal. If that also fails, then we have distracted Ukrainian forces in the Donbass while we situate our men there and supply the militias."
I feel like if the Russian planning stopped at plan A or plan B, and they didn't expect to have to fight for Donbass territory because Ukraine would sue for peace or collapse, then we wouldn't have seen, for example, the battle for Mariupol, which began in the first week of the war, especially given how hard urban combat is (and proved to be in Mariupol's case)