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.
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