Get it? The Sturmabteilung?
Anyway, Ukraine will probably launch its counteroffensive soon. Maybe this week. Maybe next week. Eventually, for sure. Probably. So I'm taking the week off to prepare for it. Your regularly scheduled programming will be back on May 1st.
Image is of dragon's teeth fortifications in Ukraine, from the wikipedia article.
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.
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.
Reddit is posting about how when Ukraine captures Crimea, Russia wouldn't dare using nukes.
I mean they probably wouldn't just for the optics of it, but if your geopolitical strategy for anything has, at any point, the words "...and we're assuming that when we do this thing that they have threatened to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, we won't get nuked for it..." then you shouldn't be let within 30 miles of any political or military position
in fact, I would go so far as to say that there's likely a clique within NATO that explicitly wants Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and are trying to engineer situations and prompt events such as to make that more likely. Nobody in the upper echelons of NATO cares in the slightest about Ukrainian lives - they could bathe in the blood of a thousand Ukrainians and not lose a second of sleep over it (honestly they'd probably like it if Thiel is anything to go by) - this is purely an exercise of trying to weaken Russia militarily (failed), economically (failed), and diplomatically (failed).
So there's probably some people in there that are going "If we can make Russia use nukes in Ukraine and have that not escalate to a wider nuclear confrontation, it's win-win! We lose nothing, and this is one of the few remaining acts that Russia could do that would meaningfully drive global public opinion against them!"
It’s also entirely irrelevant what Russia would do if that happened because it’s not happening lmao.
“Russia wouldn’t dare use nukes if I single-handedly defeated the Russian army, beheaded Putin, and declared myself the new Czar”
A lot of redditors think Russia's missiles just wouldn't work if fired. And a lot of Americans think the US is able to shoot down ICBMs. For once, I am glad the US is not run democratically.
Well, if it were run democratically, the state propaganda really couldn't have as tight a grip on media though, probably. I mean, can you really even call it "democratic" anyway if people are deprived of the information they actually need in order to make decisions, even if they otherwise have the power to technically make them?
And when I clone Dinosaurs in my Garage PETA wont dare take away the goats I plan to feed my T-rex.
At this point :reddit-logo: is so astroturfed and divorced from reality it really doesn't serve any purpose.
So is Putin a deranged, megalomaniacal Nazi who will literally do anything to conquer the world and avoid losing anything, ever, or will he totally just renege on his explicit threat to use nukes? I am confused, :reddit-logo:.
I thought at least alleged leftists on Reddit were getting past this whole Russiagate/no-U.S.-culpability bullshit at this point, but both this and other Ukraine-related posts I've seen lately lead me to believe the war propaganda has as tight a grip as ever.
Leftist where pretty much banned last year
The enemy is too
strongintelligent and tooweakirrational.