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.
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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.
With Russia's missile strike last night involving an ICBM or IRBM with a conventional payload, there has been a lot of talk about the potential nuclear threat or nuclear capabilities. Which is valid of course, such weapons usually carry nuclear warheads.
However, I managed to find this interesting quote from 2012 from Sergey Karakaev, commander of the Russian strategic missile forces, on the development and construction of Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) or Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) weapons. Such weapons are intended to deliver a precision guided conventional weapons strike anywhere on the globe, within an hour from launch. It is a capability that the US in particular has been pursuing since the Bush Jr administration, first looking to convert a Trident SLBM to a conventional payload, and then on the development of hypersonic weapons. This caused tensions between Obama and Putin in 2013. Anyways, here is the quote from Sergey Karakaev from 2012.
It seems as if Russia has demonstrated this capability. This existence and deployment of this potential CPS system by Russia changes a lot of calculations around escalation in a potential NATO - Russia conflict.
From videos and pictures of the strike, which I'll post below in a spoiler tag, we can see six seperate re-entries into the earth's atmosphere, and each re-entry contains multiple submunitions, based on screenshots of the video, about six submunitions per re-entry event. So six re-entries with 6 submunitions each, for 36 hits total. That's quite a payload if it came from one missile. If being the keyword.
videos and screenshots
Video 1, alternative xcancel linkVideo 2, alternative xcancel link
Video 3 alternative xcancel link
Video 4 alternative xcancel link
Video 5 on Reddit
Literally the last thing you’ll see before the world ends
Yeah, if it's striking an underground bunker or hardened asset you'll see this kind of thing before the nuclear blast. If it's an air burst explosion thousands of metres in the sky , you won't even see this, you'll just see the nuclear blast...
It's terrifying.
video 4 looks like fucking space laser bursts
That's what atmospheric re-entry at speeds of between 2.5-3 kilometres per second looks like, that's the speed of the weapon claimed by Putin. Mach 10, 10 times the speed of sound.
something ive missed is whether this hit something important? it'd be a powerful demonstration either way but was it the middle of nowhere or what
It hit an Ukrainian space (ie. missiles) factory in Dnepropetrovsk.
It hit a weapons factory apparently.
Putin said that it hit s military installation. Whether that is true or not, it's really hard to know. No side gains anything from being truthful.
"Conventionalized ICBMs" wasn't on my 2024 bingo card of horror, but here we are.
But yes, much of the same technology used in ICBMs, especially with regards to multiple re-entry vehicles and a MIRV bus/post boost vehicle that deploys the MIRVs. MIRVs with submunitions is a new technology though.