Image from this article - and much of this thread's preamble adapted from it.
After the most recent failure of Lockheed Martin's ARRW project, which sought to be America's first true hypersonic weapon, the missile prototype is being abandoned. One reason for its failure might have been its unnecessary complication, with many subsystems and thus many points of failure. Another factor may be that these projects are being rushed as China and Russia's advantage grows in this field.
The other hypersonic missile being developed under the USAF is the HACM, which uses a different concept, and is smaller, allowing it to be carried by more types of aircraft. The Department of Defense has chosen the Australia-based company Hypersonix to develop these hypersonic weapons, which could reach Mach 7. The AUKUS alliance thus becomes an even more important one for the United States, with Australia both being a potential source of their first hypersonic missiles, and being a vassal country in the Pacific from which the American Empire can attempt to contain China.
In the meantime, American copium continues to grow over how hypersonic missiles really aren't THAT important, and how Russian ones don't even work as they increasingly batter Ukraine. At the same time, Russian development and production of their existing hypersonic missiles (the Kinzhal, Zircon, and Avangard) continues to accelerate. And that's not even mentioning China's hypersonic missiles, a large advantage against the US's aircraft carrier fleet in the event of a war.
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.
April 3rd's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 5th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 7th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 8th'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 decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
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 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.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). 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 ~ Another 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's army.
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
Absurdly (concerningly?) good timing. Here's my summary I just finished of Mercouris video, for comparison:
Today's Mercouris video: Russia Holds 90% Bakhmut, Sweden Refutes 6 Guys in Boat NS Claim, Macron Accused of Betraying US
Obviously, yesterday's Readovka report was exaggerating, and Bakhmut has not been totally captured by Russia yet - though even Ukrainian channels admit that Russia holds 90% of the town.
WaPo has said that Ukrainian artillery ammo is running so low now that Ukraine is having to use alternatives, even makeshift devices and bombs to replace them. The Ukrainian defense minister is running around in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean (Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, etc) hunting for artillery shells.
Mercouris talks again about the leaked documents, and notes that while the US clearly have a good amount of information about the Russian military, and obviously they have some advance information about Russian strikes and offensives and such, a lot of their intelligence appears to be either be open source information that we already knew about, or polluted by propaganda and spin (e.g. saying that Russia has failed because it hasn't taken much territory over the winter, when not a single Russian official even hinted that they would try a winter offensive and Surovikin even explicitly said they would conduct a grinding war). Therefore, assuming the documents are real, then either this is some deeper level propaganda campaign, or, concerningly (for Ukraine, not for Russia), America actually believes their own lies about Russia.
The Swedes have concluded that the Nord Stream bombing was a state operation and not the result of Six Guys In A Boat, so the story is now dead and we can safely conclude that it was American disinformation in order to attempt to counter Hersh's story, as even the Europeans don't appear to buy it anymore.
Slovakia is saying that they can't supply their Mig-29s to Ukraine because they've been sabotaged by Russian technicians. Therefore, we can conclude that either that Slovakia has already covertly sent their planes and don't have them anymore, or their planes are in shitty condition, and need a cover story,
Ukraine has launched a missile/drone strike on a town in Crimea, and the missile/drone was shot down. Perhaps Ukraine is testing its technology, or trying to locate where Russian anti-air equipment is.
Ukraine's commander of air defense has said that the Russians are increasingly using long-range precision-guided glide bombs, with weights 500kg and 1500kg, with devastating impact on Ukrainian positions - and that Ukraine cannot intercept them, and the only way to stop them is to shoot down Russian planes with F-16s.
The battle of narratives over the EU-China meeting continues: China seems determine to put a positive spin on it, saying how much they agreed etc, whereas the Western media is very angry with Macron for betraying the US, with authors also taking shots at German reliance on China too. However, it seems like the Chinese leadership were really not very pleased with Macron despite the Chinese media's spin given Macron's hostile comments, so Macron has tried to play both sides and has basically pissed everybody off, as he returns to a France that is both figuratively and literally on fire. It takes a great deal of skill to pursue an independent foreign policy that doesn't make at least one side angry if not both, and Macron does not have that skill. Meanwhile, Germany's Baerbock is on her way to China, as are further European officials, as the US sends its vassals to try and change China's mind on Russia, and they will all, of course, fail.
The Russian economy continues to look fairly stable and positive, and the ruble has been allowed to fall to ~80 rubles to the dollar as demand in Russia recovers, which is a longstanding Russian policy despite some panic (or hope, in the West) about it.
This is a better read by like 20%. I suppose the question is, would the proof reading - input editing -reproofing, take as long as typing up your TLDR?
I'll try it tomorrow.
As I'm not transcribing his words, I don't often need to pause (though sometimes he rattles off a bunch of facts in a row and I need to take it slower) so it doesn't take significantly longer to write than the actual video length. And I usually multitask while doing it.
I'm a little more interested to see if its summarization would be useful for the update posts. Right now I don't think I can use it to speed up going through the articles due to the hallucinations it has, so any information it displays, I would need to independently confirm is real, so I still need to go through the articles, and the time save that it could offer would probably be like, less than 1%.
But given I already know the material and know when it's bullshitting and can fix it, it could be nice for summarization in general.
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