Image is of one of the six salvos of the Oreshnik missile striking Ukraine.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that appears to split into six groups of six submunitions as it strikes its target, giving it the appearance of a hazel flower. It can travel at ten times the speed of sound, and cannot be intercepted by any known Western air defense system, and thus Russia can strike and conventionally destroy any target anywhere in Europe within 20 minutes. Two weeks ago, Russia used the Oreshnik to strike the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine, particularly its underground facilities, in which ballistic missiles are produced.
Despite the destruction caused by the missile, and its demonstration of Russian missile supremacy over the imperial core, various warmongering Western countries have advocated for further reprisals against Russia, with Ukraine authorized by the US to continue strikes. Additionally, the recent upsurge of the fighting in Syria is no doubt connected to trying to stretch Russia thin, as well as attempting to isolate Hezbollah and Palestine from Iran; how successful this will have ended up being will depend on the outcome of the Russia and Syrian counteroffensive. Looking at recent military history, it will take many months for the Russians and Syrians to retake a city that was lost in about 48 hours.
Even in the worst case scenario for Hezbollah, it's notable that Ansarallah has had major success despite being physically cut off from the rest of the Resistance and under a blockade, and it has defeated the US Navy in its attempts to open up the strait. Israel has confirmed now that their army cannot even make significant territorial gains versus a post-Nasrallah, post-pager terrorist attack Hezbollah holding back its missile strike capabilities. In 2006, it also could not defeat a much less well-armed Hezbollah and was forced to retreat from Lebanon.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 all socially reactionary. 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 ~ A 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. Produces interesting and useful maps.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
Imo it changes very little.
Hezbollah will need to smuggle its weapons through Syria but this won't be very difficult. Some losses will be incurred but most will get through.
Besides this, not much? Gaza and the west bank will go on as they have. Hezbollah is probably in a rebuilding phase. I suspect south Lebanon is not goign to be recovered.
Hamas is unaffected. They've been cut off from everywhere and making do by themselves for a long time. They themselves seem to support the islamist rebels in Syria rather than Assad.
The situation for Israel itself is unchanged, they are not strengthened by this and are still on course to collapse unless they can bring and end to fighting, rocket/drone attacks, the blockade by the houthis, fix the international divestments and boycotts.
A charitable interpretation is that Israel has regained some aerial assets that it was committed to using to regularly bomb Assad.
The minorities in Syria are probably fucked though.
"They themselves seem to support the islamist rebels in Syria rather than Assad."
What is this based on? Ive only sern an interview with someone who apparently wasnt in Hamas anymore then and nothing else. Would be szrange if they supported a faction who explixitly seek good terms with israel
I haven't checked the evidence but was told by some people i trust that it was the case in 2015 so I've had little reason to check into the current position, I'm not sure they're in the business of meeting up and making formal organisational statements at the moment either.
This apparently strained their relations with hezbollah and iran considerably in the past.
This is essentially my position, yeah. Hopefully it also delivers a firm message to Pezeshkian to redouble support and to not hesitate as much any more, nor sign any backroom deals. Of all the organizations for the Resistance to lose, Syria is probably the least impactful. It did very little over the last year directly against Israel and its most useful factor is who it borders; smuggling is universal and unstoppable, the strongest governments in history never managed to stamp it out.
It's very important to take a step back and think in terms of resources and assets.
The biggest harm to the region this does is the potential that this brings about an extremist islamist state.
If this happens it will of course become a great justification for Israel to wage war on it, and to take the land for Greater Israel.
I mean isis hasn't attacked pisrael in the past. The isis inside/friendly rebels on the outside provides quite the asset to cia, to train anti-russia/china/whole central asia tbh rebels.
I rather suspect the biggest danger is them doing that, than attacking pisrael. Accounts posting friendly coverage of them very suspiciously talk about chechnya/uzbekistan/xinjiang/iraq, and not a word of palestine (i assume those are bots of pisrael or qatar, but whatever it shows shaping of direction)
I'm not saying they'll attack izreichell. I'm saying that the israeli supremacists will have every excuse they need to fulfill their dream of biblical Greater Israel expansion. There will be little political opposition to them fighting religious extremists compared to Gaza.
I rather think they don't because cia says so, pisrael is usa's pony not the other way around. They paid for hospitals for those fsa/al nusra rebels, i'd rather think they'll go along with a charade, unless they are attacked. Rebels for the same reasons won't attack them, and will do the above.
What's the basis for these parts of the claim?
I don't have evidence just vibes. Seen a lot of smuggling over the years. It gets through even in better and more secure states. Syria will be anything but.
US will probably identify some of it and bomb it in transit but I think it'll be a small amount. Vibes really. The transportation itself will be harder and require more effort to hide it though.
But put it this way, if the US/Israel knew of the shipments already they'd have bombed them even with Assad in power. The change in power won't amount to a tangible change in information of weapon shipments until the state becomes far far stronger.
Interesting angle that I haven't considered. From how the coalition of jihadists barely tolerate each other and will almost certainly begin fracturing, possibly on ethnonational lines, there probably won't be a strong anti-resistance state anytime soon.
To stop smuggling, a strong (anti-resistance) state has to be build, which would involve the strongest warlord taking out his rivals in a brutal civil war, and this warlord would have to entirely focus on offing his rivals before doing anything else. He can't exactly send troops to Lebanon to fight Hezbollah because troops that are in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah won't be in Syria fighting rival warlords' troops. An uneasy truce between warlords would just mean a weak/non-existent state that can't meaningfully police its borders and stop smuggling. Worst case scenario for the Resistance is probably if an anti-resistance warlord controls territory that borders Lebanon and Jordan and has consolidated his hold enough that he can't be easily dislodged.
The people of Syria are absolutely fucked though.
Worst case scenario in my opinion is the US decides to back one of them entirely to destroy the others and consolidate the state, possibly under the agreement the kurds are left alone (not even sure of that).
Yeah, that's the really bad scenario. He could also leverage his status as America's golden boy to get the other warlords to lay down their arms. I don't know what the best case scenario would be. Most likely it would be an anti-Resistance state where the state is too busy state-building to be too much of an obstacle to the Axis of Resistance and Syrians within this state live in okayish living conditions. But I don't think that's going to happen at all.
I don't think that's viable. leaders might stand down but this would just give rise to new factions as it would change the differences between groups that make them seethe at each other.
Yeah the resistance to Israel has taken a blow, but they are in no way going to stop fighting. It has entered a new stage.