Links and Stuff
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.
Yesterday's discussion post.
People here weren't kidding that most Americans don't care about the war. I just came back from the US and nearly everybody I talked to didn't have the war on their mind at all. They were mostly angry at Biden and Washington for rising prices and inaction on stuff like gun reform. The few that did talk about Putin were people who made good money and had time to spend playing armchair general. An even bigger number were boomers.
I try to give my normie friends short periodic updates on the war when we hang out (like 5 minute summaries every 2 weeks) but they have just totally lost interest. They used to ask me what was going on and watch Medhurst or something with me, now they just don’t care anymore
I’m used to it though, this is how it was for the entire duration of the Syrian Civil War. No westerners cared about it at all, except to shit on Assad and call him a fascist barrel bombing dictator
I'd rather have them not care because them caring just leads to doubling down on the NATO rhetoric.
True… if they aren’t going to be anti-imperialist or invest in learning about the conflict then their best option is to just stay out of it completely. Better they are indifferent than repeating NATO lines and beating the drums of war.
Prices have risen cuz of the war. That's they only reason they have risen. Yet Americans are like
Why is everything so expensive now!
You could tell the political side based on who they blamed. Libs blamed Republicans and Chuds blamed Biden. What I found most interesting was how little the average American even knew of politics. Not a single mention of Manchin or Sinema outside of people who followed politics in their spare time.
Americans are mostly idiots that are programmed to just consume. So not surprising
Then again, we're kind of guilty of the same thing. More people where I live stay on top of politics effecting our department but the knowledge of what goes on at the central level drops significantly unless the President is going through yet another scandal.
The internet greatly distorts our perceptions of how many people actually care about all this.
Which makes the whole "We mustn't let the world forget about Ukraine! Putin's strategy is to make people stop caring about it or actively angry about it until the sanctions are lifted!" thing by journalists so funny. Like, dude, 90%+ of people forgot about Ukraine about two weeks after it started. They either outright don't give a single shit either way because they're too busy with their own lives, or they're vaguely pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia but they aren't like, informed about current events there aside from the odd glimpse at a headline in the news as they proceed to scroll down to look at an article about the latest culture war fad.
We, along with the redditors and bluechecks (and even they don't really care anymore, though they're more pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia than your average dude on the street) are the only people who care enough to have some idea of what Russia and Ukraine are currently doing. We're the weirdos. I would wager that the number of people in the world outside of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia who could tell you anything at all about the war right now (even if it's just "Russia is attacking Severodonetsk" or even "Russia is fighting in the Donbass" is easily less than 1%.
I keep catching myself, as an USAmerican, thinking that the war in Ukraine only started 2 weeks ago. Its weird and I don't like it.
The war is not the only reason.
There is a supply chain crisis that predates the war by several years, and 2 years of an ultra-loose monetary policy. The money supply was literally increased by 45% in 2020 alone in massive trillion dollar printing sprees, this money was given as business loans and stock market injections.
China also has recently had massive lockdowns in major economic and shipping centers that cause downstream effects.
We were already seeing stagflation before the current crisis in Ukraine even started, and most of the global economic effects since then are caused by artificially imposed sanctions and not by actual shortages or issues. The only direct economic impacts of Ukraine war itself is grain and sunflower oil. Ukraine isn’t a big enough player in anything else to be relevant.
Yes thete are other reasons. But the commodities are because of the war.
Moreso because of the sanctions than the war
The war led to the sanctions so it's the same thing.
With out the war there would be no sanctions and commodities wouldn't be sky rocketing
No it’s not because the unilateral sanctions are both illegal and completely optional. Europe did not need to self destruct and destroy its own economy in service of American hegemony, they opted into it. Notice how China doesn’t blow up the world economy in a fit whenever America invaded Iraq or Saudis invade Yemen.
Putin did not force the wests hand. They did not need to do illegal and unprecedented sanctions and an embargo on themselves. It’s purely idealist delusion in service to American empire.
:grillman: