With it being overwhelmingly likely that Ukraine will receive Germany's Leopard tanks (whether from Germany itself or Poland), German tanks once again roll into battle against Russian forces after nearly a century.
Can the Leopard succeed against the Russian army where it failed in Syria? We'll find out soon enough.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
January 23rd's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 25th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 27th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
January 28th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
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. Beware of chuddery.
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 fairly brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. The Duran, of which he co-hosts, is where the chuddery really begins to spill out.
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 ~ Now rebranded as Battlefield Insights, they do infrequent posts on the conflict.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
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 ~ One of the really big pro-Russian (except when they're being pessismistic, which is often) telegram channels focussing on the war. 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. 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
Any Western media outlet that is even vaguely liberal (and quite a few conservative ones too).
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.
I think it transcends video games, there probably were 19th century wargaming nerds that had a 100 piece circulation newspaper writing how the russian empire was about to lose the great game because the british empire had superior flintlock technology and better horse breeds and stuff like that. There probably were ancient roman failsons that etched stuff how the roman pila was the best javlin there is in some wax.
Yeah the mentality of focusing so heavily on weapons technology predates video games. John Dolan of Radio War Nerd has talked a lot about how common it is and how he even used to do it a lot while reading stuff like Janes.
theres a really interesting book i read called dreadnought which focuses heavily on the naval buildups leading up to world war i
and for starters during the whole ironclad period of weird ship design and rapid changes in ship technology (and very few actual naval engagements during that time for them to actually be tested) nobody had the slightest fucking idea what worked or what didnt (at one point they were all convinced that ramming spikes were making a comeback). but then particularly during the big naval race for big-gun battleships after the launch of hms dreadnought, absolutely everyone in the naval high commands in every country was convinced that the single important component was the number and calibre of main guns that your fleet had, and if you had the biggest and the mostest guns that was basically gg. and then yeah it got to the actual war and it turned out that actually a bunch of boring nerd shit that nobody wanted to think about was actually kinda more important, like being able to signal orders to the fleet (through blinding black smoke at full steam), as was having captains that would actually listen to those orders rather than just ignoring them and charging in suicidally, as was training your crew to actually be able to hit anything, as was stuff like ammunition magazines that werent super-explodey, etc etc. but yeah big guns are cooler than all that boring shit so nobody ever learned anything
is that Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie? I'll have to put it on my list of things to read.
yep thats the one! its a great book, although i think it leans too heavily towards european royal families' petty familial shenanigans and fuckups as causative factors, but it does also really centre the very capitalist crisis of overproduction of stupid amounts of heavy weaponry (especially warships) and the massively destabilising effects of that, as well as the imperialist friction in the scramble for africa. and the stuff about the development of ship design and naval tactics through the ironclad period is fascinating and funny as shit.
That sounds very similar to how the BBC's mini-doc 'Fall of the Eagles' describes the interim moments before ww1 as, as well as Kotkin's first Stalin book now that I think about it. Lots of monarchist bootlicking while mentioning there's a whole world outside the royal family circle that's experiencing immense and deep turmoil.
Honestly the interim period between the American Civil war and ww1 is such a fascinating period to study since you really start to see how the actions that happened in that historically obscure period truly set the groundwork for todays world.