back in my map era, we're ukrainemaxxing right now
Declarations of the imminent doom of Ukraine are a news megathread specialty, and this is not what I am doing here - mostly because I'm convinced that whenever we do so, the war extends another three months to spite us. Ukraine has been in an essentially apocalyptic crisis for over a year now after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, unable to make any substantial progress and resigned to merely being a persistent nuisance (and arms market!) as NATO fights to the last Ukrainian. In this context, predicting a terminal point is difficult, as things seem to always be going so badly that it's hard to understand how and why they fight on. In every way, Ukraine is a truly shattered country, barely held together by the sheer combined force of Western hegemony. And that hegemony is weakening.
I therefore won't be giving any predictions of a timeframe for a Ukrainian defeat, but the coming presidency of Trump is a big question mark for the conflict. Trump has talked about how he wishes for the war to end and for a deal to be made with Putin, but Trump also tends to change his mind on an issue at least three or four times before actually making a decision, simply adopting the position of who talked to him last. And, of course, his ability to end the war might be curtailed by a military-industrial complex (and various intelligence agencies) that want to keep the money flowing.
The alignment of the US election with the accelerating rate of Russian gains is pretty interesting, with talk of both escalation and de-escalation coinciding - the former from Biden, and the latter from Trump. Russia very recently performed perhaps the single largest aerial attack of Ukraine of the entire war, striking targets across the whole country with missiles and drones from various platforms. In response, the US is talking about allowing Ukraine to hit long-range targets in Russia (but the strategic value of this, at this point, seems pretty minimal).
Additionally, Russia has made genuine progress in terms of land acquisition. We aren't talking about endless and meaningless battles over empty fields anymore. Some of the big Ukrainian strongholds that we've been spending the last couple years speculating over - Chasiv Yar, Kupiansk, Orikhiv - are now being approached and entered by Russian forces. The map is actually changing now, though it's hard to tell as Ukraine is so goddamn big.
Attrition has finally paid off for Russia. An entire generation of Ukrainians has been fed into the meat grinder. Recovery will take, at minimum, decades - more realistically, the country might be permanently ruined, until that global communist revolution comes around at least. And they could have just made a fucking deal a month into the war.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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.
I really don't believe that Russia's red line about long range missiles is a bluff. Putin specifically said that such attacks would mean direct conflict with NATO. Russia's nuclear doctrine was changed to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in response.
Russia's actual response (probably not nukes) remains a mystery, but I bet that they have something planned, and will do it if necessary. Of course, this will only happen if Ukraine actually launches the missiles.
The vibes I'm getting make me think that Ukraine may attempt massive combined missile/drone strikes on Russia, including Western weapons. I sure hope they don't try that, because Russia could genuinely consider that an existential threat worthy of using nukes over.
It isn't a bluff, but they're probably going to exercise restraint until they know what Trump will do once he gets in. They'll start escalating if Trump continues the strikes, likely at American targets in the middle east.
You know things are in the shitter if the hope is for the guy that escalated shit with north korea and floats a war in mexico is the one to cool it down.
Despite libs always bleating that Trump is cozy with Putin (fake) didn't he actually approve something under his term that allowed long range missiles to be moved closer to Russia? I don't have the source in front of me but I think it was one of the many reasons Russia felt threatened by the west
Trump actually cooled things down with DPRK and did a bunch of diplomatic breakthroughs because he doesn’t have a deep hatred for DPRK like seemingly every other person in US government.
My personal theory is that Trump fully buys all the bullshit being fed to him by his natsec advisors about Putin and Kim being strongman dictators ruling over their helpless brainwashed masses, but instead of having the proper liberal reaction of righteous indignation he's like "Wow, cool!"
Or perhaps the spirit of Juche just lives within him
Or he just has a more realpolitik “get your hands dirty” view of power and doesn’t see much of a difference between himself and other leaders
He's Donny Deals! Just wheeling and dealing all day long!
If nothing else, a leader who considers himself to be a "deal artist" might at least consider diplomacy before pushing the big war button.
Yeah I agree, I don't think Trump has a huge problem with NK. It's like one of his few not terrible things actually.
Trump is fixated on "taking the oil" and other resources, and DPRK doesn't have anything he wants to take.
Every imperialist is fixated on natural resource and value extraction, Trump is just dumb enough that he says it directly instead of sugarcoating it in 100 layers of ideology about Democracy and Human Rights
I feel like most imperialists have a broader view of their interests: resources, cheap labor, trade, geopolitics, and so on. Trump seems to have a short-term and direct view, if there's no immediate plunder he's not interested.
exactly, he's a short-sighted and dumb imperialist. An improvement over long term calculating imperialists
Plus petty and self-aggrandizing. Has massive "will sack competent ministers and chancellors because they take the spotlight away from the monarch" energy.
Seeing dipshits online cheering Biden on and talking about how epic he is to do "one last thing for Ukraine" got me feeling like I have the flu ngl
death cult behaviour
Sure is sad that our King got his brain melted by boiling oil in the siege and had to be put down like a sick dog, but at least he was so bloated and diseased that the enemy castle is rife with corruption and boils. Huzzah!
They don't even admit his brain is melted anymore, they acknowledged it for a week and have now moved on
I honestly think ukraines strayegynfor a while has been to be able to use western weapons for escalators strikes so that other countries get dragged in and they don't have to fight the war on their own.
Which makes sense, I'm getting pretty tired of Americans saying that every Russian citizen deserves to be burned alive and then have that death celebrated by the international audience because Russia is waging a war, but it's ridiculous to suggest that America is invl9ved just because they're supplying intelligence, communication, arms, personally, logistics and are now putting together strike plans to be used against Russia.
Ukraine gonna paint a big American flag on the side of it and strike all the most inflammatory targets they can come up with in hopes that Russia retaliated against us.
And honestly I think Biden wants to take revenge on everybody by getting us into a hot war right as Trump gets into office hoping everybody blames Trump like they did Biden.
Russia opening up the conflict to one with NATO makes less than no sense. It would be actively detrimental to their goals in Ukraine. I could see Russia striking some covert NATO forces inside Ukraine in retaliation, but anything major would allow forces from e.g. Poland to enter into the conflict and extend it at a time where Russia is cruising towards inevitable victory, and outright military defeat of NATO would either take decades or result in nuclear war. Neither of which would be sensible.
Russia is boiling Ukraine's and NATO's frogs far more effectively than they are boiling Russia's. There's a similar dynamic at play with Iran and Israel, where Israel is like Ukraine and Iran is like Russia. Iran has no need to imminently strike Israel and destroy them because Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansarallah are (however unfairly to the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) are boiling Israel's frog far better than Israel and the US are boiling Iran's.
Ukraine's constant attempts to get the US and Europe involved in the war mirror Israel's constant attempts to get the US involved in the war, and Russia's willingness to be patient and accede to a degree of humiliation in return for a successful long-term plan also strongly mirror Iran's patience and somewhat embarrassing moments (trying to make a deal which delayed the strike on Israel a month or two ago). Neither Russia nor Iran can simply put up with countries constantly trampling over their red lines and so have to make big displays occasionally, but otherwise are content with how the geopolitical situation is progressing, I think.
In all: if you have time on your side, then tread carefully. If you do not, then flail wildly and go for million-to-one odds.
Again, Putin didn't mince words or use vague language this time. He said long range strikes with Western weapons would mean war with NATO. Maria Zakharova and Dmitry Peskov have since pointed to that statement as Russia's current stance.
It's not about victory in the Ukraine war, but rather deterrence between great powers.
Personally, I think Russia should have drawn clear red lines much earlier, and followed through with severe, shocking responses immediately, as it's the only language neocons understand. That said, I think this red line is real. The response may be underwhelming, but I bet there will be something.
the just-Kursk allowance seems like something Russia could safely ignore, it's pretty laughable that Ukraine still seems to think occupying a couple villages will net them something substantial in the negotiations, if these missiles were capable of stymieing Russia's liberating of the Kursk territory in the first place--which judging by ATACMS not slowing the Donbass front where they are already allowed to use them... seems doubtful
In deterrence theory, your policy has to be strictly applied lest your frog be boiled. Putin didn't say "no long range strikes, except in Kursk". He said "no long range strikes".
at this particular time when Russia is clearly winning, meeting the escalation in a fair way could open up the way for more effectual escalation on NATO's part, making it more difficult to achieve Russia's goals. 'Oh drat the wunderwaffen didn't make Putin surrender' is a less compelling battlecry to deploy NATO troops than 'they shot down our oh-so-innocent and uninvolved AWACS unit'.
There is a nuclear reactor and a nuclear weapons research and storage facility in Kursk. Where do you think Ukraine wants to use its missiles?
i mean if the idea is to get Kiev flattened then shooting at a nuclear weapon facility would be a good idea. i'm not sure they're quite that suicidal
They bombed the ZNPP for 2 years straight. They have depopulated their nation and pushed every man into a meat grinder. They are entirely that suicidal.
I feel like maybe you haven been paying attention. They aren't "suicidal" in that they don't consciously and actively wish to be dead but their track record seems to show that every time they make a decision they chose the thing that will hasten their own demise.
Good thing they are pretty much out of long range weapons and the capability to launch them
I dont know what more they would do other then what they have been doing? They will still make territorial gains regardless of ATACMS missiles hittinG Kursk.
The thing speaking against a forceful Russian response to an American attack is how the war is going. Like all the other Wunderwaffe, ATACMS is not able to conjure away the disparities in manpower and and military industrial capacity. An American missile attack would be a nuisance but it would not fundamentally be able to give the Kiev regime the upper hand, or even "the strongest possible position" for the negotiations more and more people are now accepting will happen at some time on the future.
Russia has found a strategy that works, retaliating in a way that opens up for more direct NATO involvement would jeopardize that without giving Russia much of a material benefit.