On Tuesday and Wednesday, this year's NATO summit will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in a grand meeting of some of the most awful ghouls currently populating the planet
Despite strong efforts and words from Ukraine, membership is still very unlikely to be forthcoming and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Sweden might not get membership for a while either, as Erdogan continues to play both sides off each other, but who can truly say.
All of this is in the wake of Biden announcing the delivery of cluster bombs to Ukraine, as he admits that they are running out of other munitions to send, ensuring that Ukraine, its people, and its children - the ones that remain, anyway - will continue to suffer for many, many generations to come. Cluster bombs have, I believe, already been used in the conflict, but now will presumably be used at a higher rate. The leader of Cambodia, a country that is a major victim of US cluster bombing, has said:
"It will be the worst danger for the Ukrainians for decades or even centuries if those cluster bombs are used," Hun Sen said.
"I know for sure that Cambodia is small and weak, and our voice is weightless, but with our pity towards the people of Ukraine, I call on the U.S. president, the provider, and the Ukrainian president, the recipient, not to use cluster bombs in this war because the real victims will be civilians, especially the Ukrainian ones," he said.
What a perfect exemplification of the conflict as a whole. Millions of Ukrainians will be thrown into the inferno, entirely disposable in the eyes of the West, so long as we burn some Russians in the fire.
The suffering is the point.
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.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third update is 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.
IOC not planning on inviting Russia or Belarus to the Olympics.
The Middle Easterners apparently aren’t people and thus the IOC would never ban America or the West for their illegal wars.
I just hate the rank hypocrisy so much.
The libs I know that were horny for Ukraine at the start have not posted at all about the NATO summit.
I hope they're feeling a little embarrassed about the naked geopolitics on display.
What a perfect exemplification of the conflict as a whole. Millions of Ukrainians will be thrown into the inferno, entirely disposable in the eyes of the West, so long as we burn some Russians in the fire.
When I started pretending to be a cartoon dog on twitter and began speaking like a 12 year-old, I made a promise to myself and to the west. I was prepared to fight this war to the last Ukrainian. If decades from now they're still being blown up by the bombs I send them, I'll know they're still resisting Vladimir Shitler and will salute every child who also sacrifices their time and energy to see this war through to its end. I'm doing my part and they will be too.
Libs' take on sending cluster bombs is that it's good because they are humane cluster bombs. Very clean and efficient. Much better than those dirty old cluster bombs already being used in the conflict. Unfuckingbelievable.
Please tell me that isn’t real. Humane cluster bomb? What does it do declare the children on the playground as enemy combatants first?
They claim only a couple percent of them don't explode when expected, so the amount of live ordinance being left around will be much smaller. Good ol' NATO, fighting a "CLEAN war". 😩
I'm glad I haven't looked hard enough to find out what their take on depleted uranium is.
The fail rate is going to be absurd. They haven’t been allowed to maintenance since Obama’s first term.
I don’t know if this makes more or less dangerous.
Now, now. Be nice. I'm sure since the Iron
Dome'sSieve's "90%+ success rate" the arms manufacturers who want to sell the weapons—and the bloodthirsty fascists who want to use them—have turned over a new leaf and are being completely honest about how great their products are.
is still one of the most insane stories I think I will ever see in my lifetime
Part of the problem with adventurism is that it's mostly taken up by people who are not smart, unlike
. Usually adventurists shoot someone who doesn't really matter since they either don't understand how things work or are simply too lazy.
I mean there were plenty of smart adventurists who failed. Like the guy who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. He had a solid plan (which only failed in terms of escape), took out the most important person, and yet apartheid still continued for almost 30 years after Verwoerd's assassination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitri_Tsafendas
Aww, that story had a sad ending, and not in the average way you'd expect.
They put him on trial, and instead of killing him, hid the political cause of the assassination, and had him declared insane.
CW Prisoner Abuse
Then after he was convicted, they made him a special cell next to the execution chamber to rot in, all the while torturing him the whole time.
Apparently he got some comradely positive reception at the time from various African political leaders, but after apartheid ended, the new government left him to rot in prison. And when he eventually died, he was even more politically ostracized and only ten people attended his funeral.
Well exactly, it failed to stop apartheid because apartheid is a system. If you understand power you don't try to stop a whole system by killing a single guy, you organize and wait for the conditions to align to make change possible.
Absolutely, the guy who killed him was a bit of a nut anyway so it's not like he was going to be organizing.
E: wait sorry my bad, was replying to this from inbox thinking it was about the guy who killed Shinzo Abe, not Verwoerd.
I feel like part of the problem at this point is that they’re wise to it. I feel like adventurism would be most impactful by causing great chaos in the state, but at this point they’ve got redudnant paths of power (eg. president -> vp -> speake -> … in US), that you would need to do like 20, 30 adventures simultaneously and that’s literally impossible
You could literally bomb all of congress and the white house simultaneously and the hydra will just sprout more heads. Adventurism is futile, you gotta completely overthrow the capitalist mode of production; workers taking over their workplaces, loyalty cascades in the armed forces, complete disobedience and disregard for law enforcement. If you don't have the movement that can make that happen, you're not in a position to do any violence. Anything less than that and the state will just perform its function and restore the status quo, and the fascists will imprison or kill everyone involved in the failed uprising. Adventurism is a trap, folks. It's not a coincidence that the FBI actively instigate it, it literally helps them.
I disagree, that would unironically cause enough chaos for months to give signifigant breathing room to socialist movements around the world, but if you had enough organization and mass support to pull that off you could just easily seize power anyways. I’m not arguing for adventurism, it’s a waste of time
Well it might give a little breathing room, but the way I think about it is that the state keeps society in stability, resisting 2 forces: the oppressive, monopolistic tendencies of capital, and the liberatory force of labor organization and socialism. In the US, the former is orders of magnitude more powerful than the second, there is no wide scale organization to speak of. So if the state were to go dark, we'd have a corporatist, fascistic regime up in less than a week that'd be ready to kick the contradictions into high gear. Not a socialist revolution.
Ultimately all of this is just hypothetical and not very fruitful discussion since we agree that adventurism mostly just helps our enemies.
Why was Sweden so desperate to get into NATO anyways? They are literally surrounded by NATO countries, there was tangible zero threat to them.
And now they have to waste 2% of their GDP on military spending instead of using it on literally anything else. For what? Where's the benefit?
I now firmly believe that Western cope over the Soviet Union beating back the Nazis is contributing to the west thinking this war is winnable.
“The soviets only won because of our material. This time Ukraine is the one with our support.”
As if somehow foreign aid could win a war. It helps, but it’s not even close to a determinative factor. Countries willing to donate enough to the cause to win are parties to the war. If you aren’t willing to be party to the war, you wouldn’t send enough to win. The distinction barely exists at that point.
Anti materialist nonsense propaganda has once again become a rake the imperialists have stepped on.
CNN correspondent has an unexpected materialist moment pondering a Russian warship at a Cuban dock
Yes indeed mr cnn haircut, if America is running around with an economic stick hitting other countries and Russia (or China) offers a carrot, the results are plain to see
Another Freudian slip I heard a while back was Jens Stoltenberg saying
I think Ukraine belongs to NATO.. I mean belongs in NATO, hehe
Aren’t these sentences identical? I feel like I’m missing something obvious lol.
The CBC has decided to be pro-cluster munitions. Highlights from the article include:
Cluster munitions are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians and have been banned in more than 120 countries, but military experts say they would be an effective weapon for Ukraine's army against Russian forces, which is why the United States has decided to provide them.
"There's no question these things are very effective," said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
"It will be a useful increase in artillery effectiveness," he said. "It's not going to be a game changer, but in the end, it will make Ukraine virtually more effective."
So these weapons cause untold human suffering for decades to come, and won't be the desisive wunderweapon to win the war, but they're an effective weapon so...
They pointed to U.S. army data that found that during the Vietnam War, the number of conventional high-explosive 155-mm rounds fired for each enemy soldier killed in combat was 13.6, compared with only 1.7 for cluster munition shells.
It's cool and good to point to Vietnam war era bodycounts to justify your civilian killing weapons
But Cancian, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said even if the failure rate is double what U.S. officials are saying, the cluster munitions would still be "pretty damn effective."
The nub of the Ukrainian argument for using them, he said, is that every day the war goes on, Ukrainian civilians are killed, and they have to weigh that with the risk of dud weapons killing their own population
We need to salt the earth with explosives that ensure no one will be able to walk across a field in Ukraine without fear of getting blown to pieces to prevent more people from being blown to pieces
There's more in the article, including a token bit of "what about the bombs that don't explode?" but the grand majority seems like it's trying to justify the use of these horrible weapons
Found an article from last year about some foreign mercs in Ukraine with some fantastic bits in it
Zabielski belonged to a squad of western volunteers, attached to the Ukrainian army, called the Wolverines, according to Tristan Nettles, a Marine Corps veteran who was with Zabielski the night he died. They were a group of thirteen English-speaking men: one Pole, one Canadian, two Brits, and eight Americans, all of whom had military experience. “Every single one,” says Nettles, who previously did a tour in Iraq.
Le epic wolverino squad! Just like that movie!!!
Against the backdrop of the battle of Severodonetsk, where brutal fighting remains ongoing, the Wolverines were sent on a mission to clear enemy mines near the village of Dorozhnyanka. Their objective was to create a safe path for their unit’s vehicles in advance of a Ukrainian assault planned for the following morning.
Foreign volunteers being used for more dangerous jobs, nothing new here
Two of the fighters made their way to the observation post to relay the order and resupply Zabielski and Gary with water and fresh batteries for their equipment. When they learned that they would have to stay out another twenty-four hours, Zabielski and Gary decided to move to a position they considered more suitable.
Nettles blames the thickness of the vegetation, the heaviness of the fog, and a failure to maintain proper distance between personnel for what happened next. “Stephen apparently triggered a trip wire, which detonated a mine that killed him and severely injured Gary,” Nettles says.
The bad news went out over the radio, and a Canadian fighter named JT drove a vehicle in the direction of the explosion to evacuate the casualties. But JT had trouble crossing some train tracks, and in an effort to get over, he made a serious mistake. He maneuvered the vehicle over a portion of the tracks that had not yet been cleared of mines. “Which resulted in his vehicle exploding with him still inside,” Nettles says.
Wandering around the mine filled bush at night sets off a mine, killing one of them. Another drives his vehicle right into the minefield and blows it up
They squad carried Gary out on a makeshift stretcher. Extraction of Zabielski’s body would have to wait for the following day. Already it was light out. “There was no security,” Nettles says. “We should have all been slaughtered, because no one had guns on the wood-line, and most everyone was being extremely loud, and we were very close to the burning vehicle right next to the Russian position. If the Russians had any tactical competence or courage at all, they would have sent a forward observation team, who would have seen our group with no weapons up, carrying a stretcher, and killed us all.”
Blaming his survival on Russian incompetence sounds like a weird take to me but what do I know
The Wolverines, the squad that Zabielski belonged to, is in disarray, Nettles says. “Only three of us remain now from the original thirteen,” he says. “The deaths and injuries have been in vain because it is an absolute shit-show out here,” he continues. “We had a two-hour firefight that later turned out to be against Ukrainian special forces. It is unbelievable what goes on here.”
Nettles, whose tour in Iraq was near Baqubah, with the 2nd Marine Division, says that his motivation for volunteering to fight in Ukraine is to bring attention to the plight of a South African woman, Ashley Oosthuizen, who is unjustly imprisoned for life in Thailand for drug crimes that she did not commit. “If it was not for Ashley,” he says, “I would not be anywhere near this ridiculous mess.”
“The media only tells one side,” he goes on. “I am here. I see the reality. Bridges blown up while friendly forces are still on the other side, no communication between units, friendly fire all the time.”
For example, Nettles says, “They tell us we have support, and then fire off three mortars and call it a day. They give a guy who has never used an automatic grenade launcher and then tell us he will be our indirect support at night from 1.2 kilometers away. I didn’t make this shit up. It is a fucking shit show. The Ukrainians are brave — I’ll say that. As for the rest, I can only shake my head as good men die for no reason at all.”
And this is all the juiciest bits right at the end. First of all, two hour firefights with their allies and comrades-in-arms. His motivation for fighting being some South African in Thai jail. The stories of incompetence
I genuinely hope (I'm not optimistic) that when America and the EU ban Chinese students from their universities, that this will be a massive slap in the face for Chinese and other Asian guasanos. They need to realize that they aren't even considered to be "honorary aryan" and that westoids will always see them as barbarian hoards no matter how much balls they lick. America and the EU would love to see China implode and tens of millions dying like the collapse of the USSR.