Image is of the drying Canelon Grande Reservoir in Uruguay as the country battles three consecutive years of drought, its worst in nearly a century.
Quoting every country and region that is currently suffering under unprecedented climatic conditions and posting every graph showing extremely concerning things happening would make this preamble way too long, so I'm gonna keep it short and merely say that, holy shit, the consequences of fossil fuel executives' actions are looking real fucking bad.
Hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, are currently enduring higher than average temperatures sometimes reaching up 48 degrees Celsius or 120 degrees Fahrenheit or even beyond. Drought is putting pressure on water supplies basically everywhere around the world. And El Nino is activating, which will only do further damage.
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 and third update have done the Dragonball Z fusion dance and created this long-ass thing that took me... a while to get done.
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 wasn't just ethnic Russians, Ukraine was killing ethic Ukrainians in Donbas as well. I would de-emphasize the ethnic aspect. Being Russian or Ukrainian in these areas is more of a political question for many people in these areas due to the intermarriage over centuries. It's not like the US with the one drop rule.
I would rework this somehow. The way you currently have it implies that Ukraine is Nazi-run because of its Nazi past, this is just not true. Ukraine became Nazi-run and then emphasized the Nazi collaboration part of its past over the Nazi fighting parts of it. Stepan Bandera was honestly kind of a historical nobody before the government made him into the father of the nation. His organization was important but he kinda wasn't.
I think there might be value in separating out a historical primer from our general beliefs. Going from the coup all the way up to Zelensky. It would be a lot of words though.
Gotcha. I wanted to connect the Ukrainian WW2 collaborator movement to modern Ukraine but then it just turns into a history documentary, so I've decided to shift the part about Bandera up in the 'here's why Ukraine is fascist' section and not in the 'history' section.
I have also replaced "ethnic Russians" with "separatists", which seems about as neutral phrasing as I can imagine.
I'm personally okay with the whistle-stop tour of recent Ukrainian history as it stands, I think there should be some explanation of the version of events as we see them because otherwise you might end up with people going "hey, these people are talking about being historically literate but they aren't talking about the Revolution of Dignity that overthrew the pro-Russian stooge in 2014 and instituted freedom and democracy and justice, and Russia's barbaric invasion of Crimea, what the hell." I mean, they'll probably still think that but I do wanna try, for the people who are very fuzzy on what's actually happened in the last decade or so and might just know "uhhh Russia invaded Crimea in like... 201...4? and then, uhh, they invaded Ukraine in 2022? because Putin's evil or something? that's what the media tells me" but also don't wanna read a whole brochure on Ukrainian history
all I want to really get across is "Here are our beliefs that many/most of us feel about the conflict, here's why we think that, and in summary we are communists that are against the West and for the anti-NATO coalition making us fairly rare in the grand scheme of the whole western left, so if you feel about the same way then you can hang out and talk about current events in a safe space, if you wanna argue about these things with us then we'll listen if you make good points but we'll laugh at you if you don't, and if you're one of those NAFO weirdos then we'll probably kick you out"
Separatists works, as would Ukrainian separatists since they're all Ukrainian there regardless of ethnicity. You do also need to include Minsk 2 and possibly Minsk as well. Somebody else mentioned it already and I can't believe I forgot about it.
Probably a good call it keep it as short and sweet as possible.