Here is September 5th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is September 6th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is September 7th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
No updates on Thursdays.
Here is September 9th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is September 10th's update!
A few improvements:
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I'm gonna try and include more images, now that I've figured out how to do it on my end without things getting confusing. Namely, I now have a whole folder on my computer dedicated to this stuff where I can put things. A truly incredible development. However, a lot of the articles don't have images, and if they do, they aren't all that noteworthy - think "typical stock image of an oil barrel or a dude looking frazzled at a stock market screen". But still, there's usually at least 1 or 2 images that I can and should put in every day for added pizazz.
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I'm actually using the tagging system, instead of it just being "ukraine" and "russia" the whole time, and will be slowly working on adding them for the previous updates too. Eventually, you will be able to search by country throughout the whole update list, from the ever-present "china" or "united states" to the very rare "uzbekistan".
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More consistent climate and space updates. Hopefully.
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100% more love for our trans comrades.
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Adding what you people post in these megathreads to the summaries too. The tyranny of only referring to my own work without talking about anything of the comments you guys make shall end.
On that note: do you have a lot of knowledge about the current state of a particular country (beyond mindless electorialism)? Do you, for some reason, have a lot of knowledge about hydrogen power, or the fossil fuel industry, or renewables, or rare earth mining, or have you delved into a wikipedia rabbithole on a topic and became a semi-expert? Hell, are you an actual expert? If the answer to any of the above is yes, please comment more! There are like 200 countries on this planet and I realistically only have time to talk about a fraction of them on a given day, and of that fraction, only a single article. I may have a vibe about certain countries, but if you wanna rant about the current situation in X country or how neoliberalism is ruining Y country, but you think "nah, who gives a shit" - I give a shit. Some of the best content in these megathreads is people being like "The general media narrative around what's happening in this country is wrong, here's what's actually going on here."
I'll even quote your username in the summaries if you do it. It's a meritocratic version of the general megathread's username list that they do every time. The thrill of a purple number next to the bell in the upper right corner of your screen can be yours for the low low price of a microessay for our reading pleasure.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the "buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!" people.
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, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
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.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
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 ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
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.
Telegram channels estimate Ukrainian losses in the Kharkov counteroffensive to be between 2500 and 5000 men. There are some indications that things are slowing down a little, but I would expect Ukraine to take Izyum and likely more locations in the coming week before the human wave truly starts to travel back down the beach. Russia is busy evacuating Izyum of civilians, which indicates they also believe it will be taken (and moving civilians out of a location means it's much easier to retake - their desire to avoid civilian casualties to build goodwill has been a major factor in slowing down the Russian offensive over the last few months).
edit: never mind, the wave might not slow until the LPR/DPR's borders are hit, Russia might genuinely be giving up Kharkiv oblast and thus thousands of square miles of territory for some reason
edit 2: I haven't the slightest fucking idea what's going on any more and my head is hurty from staring at maps and trying to figure out where Russia is and what they're doing. I'm taking a double dose of the copium pill and the grillpill and ignoring this for the next week. Updates will continue. Still not taking reddit or the MSM or pro-Ukrainian info at all seriously
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Russian telegram is saying that the
Russian Armed Forces are giving up Volchanskwhich is miles away from the Kharkiv front and right next to the Russian border. It wasn't even particularly threatened by anything.edit: Russia is evacuating Volchansk of civilians, not the army itself; though the fact that they're doing this is not a good sign if you expect to be in possession of that city in the future.
It genuinely looks like Russia is ceding all of Kharkiv oblast to Ukraine.
men will literally give up hundreds of miles of territory instead of devoting more soldiers that you actively have in your army to your war
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Presumably Russia will fight long enough to get the civilians evacuated and then withdraw into the LPR and DPR and defend that. Because right now there doesn't seem to be any attempts to seriously defend anything inside Kharkiv.
I'm not even necessarily opposed to the move so long as Russia doesn't go full joker and leave the civilians loyal to them to be torn apart by Ukraine. Territory, particularly Kharkiv's territory, isn't essential to Russia here. The success of Ukraine's counteroffensive might spur goodwill but what even is there left to give Ukraine?
If Russia seriously just withdraws from Kharkov's territory and then goes back to a slow artillery bombardment strategy as if nothing happened then a lot of people are gonna lose faith though. So hopefully this actually leads to something concrete.
But yeah, I suppose the end of every phase so far has corresponded with a withdrawal of Russia from a large area in Ukraine.
So Phase 3 has begun.
Not much territory that they can leave behind now, though. The only oblasts they'll occupy after this will be Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporzhye, and Kherson. The former two were the whole point of doing this war and the latter two are supposed to be joining Russia's territory come November.
Who knows, maybe it's some galaxy-brained move in the long run and by December we'll all be praising Russia's military genius at abandoning Kharkiv. I'm certainly less optimistic about Russia's chances now. My previous statement that Russia had a choice whether they want to win or lose this was remains true, but it sure seems like they'd rather choose to lose it than deploy the vast majority of their army to help their little expeditionary force they have in Ukraine.
It seems strange that the entire future of Russia and the balance of world politics hinges on this conflict and Russia is half-assing it so much. Shouldn’t this be like, the time to all-in? The west hates you 100% either way, what’s the point of the restraint it’s not earning you any favor
The silver lining for Russia here is that by retreating they preserved their manpower. They could still contest the captured areas in the coming days if more reinforcements arrive from either elsewhere in the LPR or across the border.
The downside is that Russia’s methods of prioritizing the lives of its soldiers results in extreeeeeemely slow advance of territory, while the Ukrainians are happy to throw away tens of thousands of lives to quickly gain it back. How does Russia actually push to victory if Ukraine can re-take 6 months of slow push in a weekend?
What I don't really understand is why there's been so little fighting coming from Russia. Ukraine didn't retreat like Russia did in the same situation, they fought to the death for those cities.
EDIT: Saw this on telegram. Might be true or a cope answer (this seems more likely):
There was an official comment of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation about what is happening:
In order to achieve the goals of the NMD, a decision was made to regroup troops in the areas of Balakleya and Izyum in order to build up efforts in the Donetsk direction. Within three days, an operation was carried out to curtail and transfer the Izyum-Balakliya group of troops to the territory of the DPR. A number of distracting and demonstration activities were carried out with the designation of the real actions of the troops. In order to prevent damage to the troops of the Russian Federation, a powerful fire defeat was inflicted on the enemy using aviation, missile troops and artillery. The RF Armed Forces destroyed more than 2,000 Ukrainian and foreign fighters, as well as over 100 pieces of armored vehicles and artillery in three days.
Where exactly the new lines of defense will pass is still unclear. But in fact, in addition to Balakleya and Izyum, one can expect the abandonment of a significant part of the controlled territory of the Kharkiv region.
If the decision was "Y'know what? Fuck Kharkiv oblast, all my homies hate Kharkiv oblast, we're moving everything west of the river to the DPR" then that would be great and fun and all but the last couple days they've been showing their reserves travelling to towns and cities near the site of the Kharkiv counteroffensive. Presumably they're doing, y'know, battle there, and not just sightseeing.
Like, okay, you can redirect your forces out of territory you control in order to strengthen your forces elsewhere, that's allowed and a military strategy you can do, and one that you can convince people that you did on purpose; what you can't really do is say that that was the plan all along while you're actively being beaten the fuck out of there by your enemy in their counteroffensive, and also moving your reserves to try and counter that counteroffensive. Like, if you're gonna do a mass retreat, do what you did in northern Ukraine and withdraw orderly and leave nothing for Ukraine to attack into. It's not a strategic withdrawal if you're being fired on the whole time.
Still, extremely funny if this was actually the case and all that territory, including many of the civilians was just given up to Ukraine at the exact moment that they just happened to do a counteroffensive. I'm sure in 3 months when the DPR's frontlines have moved 14.5 inches forward, we'll be positively praising the merits of that good decision.
At this point, who the fuck knows what Russia is doing. I'm just gonna wait a few days to see what their true response is going to be.
Agreed, I'm taking the grillpill from now on this shit. No point speculating on information that may be wrong and is at best incomplete. I'm just gonna chillax and go with @granit's strategy of laughing at Europe's self-inflicted plight and let this situation simmer for a week.
Am I coping? Yes. Have I been owned? Absolutely.
Still not paying attention to whatever those losers on Reddit or the mainstream media are saying. I'm sticking with the side that's only been wrong 10% of the time rather than 95%.