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.
feel like we're in purgatory with this war, all sorts of reports about how ukraine's military is heavily degraded compared to three months ago, but russia is still much more reserved with their offensive moves than they were back at the start of the war. is the donbass really just so incredibly fortified that this is the pace of battle even with one side severely outmatching the other? or are the russians just playing it slow and safe to minimise their own losses now that the war has clearly gone on longer than the decision makers would have preferred? it's probably a bit of both, tbh. no doubt they'd prefer to grind down the ukrainians in static positions no matter how long it takes, and then have a much easier time taking major cities like kharkiv than they had back in feb/march.
I think anybody - including myself - who said back in April or whatever that the war would only take a few more months didn't have a good understanding of the war itself. Previously I laughed at claims that the war would last until 2023, and while I still don't think it has to - you could see it if Zelensky is willing to sacrifice his entire army en masse to hold the Donbass rather than retreat to safer lines. And Ukraine has a lot of people in its army. They aren't necessarily well-trained, but they do exist, and are a barrier to Russian advancement. So even if Ukraine is taking extreme casualties every single day, then it will still take several months to wear it down sufficiently that Russia can safely advance without taking many casualties of its own.
To make a prediction that I am not especially confident in, I think the DPR and LPR will be fully captured by 2023, assuming that the current rate of casualties continues for Ukraine. If Russia goes significantly beyond that, it could easily last well into 2023 if not longer.
If we see an Azov basement situation every time we hit an industrial city - and this part of Ukraine is full of industrial cities - then that drastically slows down the war. I believe that even if you look at @granit's explanation, that I personally think has a lot of merit, and go "No, that's cope, this wasn't planned, maybe Russia is winning but let's not go crazy", then I still think it's difficult to deny that Russia has time on its side in a way that the West does not, and that Russia a) wants to limit its own casualties as much as possible to prevent anger at home, b) wants to limit civilian casualties to build good faith - remember that many of these civilians near the front lines aren't going and reading the latest NYT article about how Russia is performing an ultragenocide against Ukrainian civilians, they're experiencing the war first-hand and realizing that the people are being treated fairly well - and c) wants to destroy as much of Ukraine's military as possible under those first two constraints.
If that's true, and you're the Russian general in charge, and you know the total size of the Ukrainian army, the size of your own army, and losses both of you are experiencing, and you plug the numbers into your calculator and you get that if you keep this up for 6 months then you probably win, then you don't go "But what will the western media and weird leftists online who are fighting over whether Russia is imperialist and problematic think if it takes that long?! They'll think that Russia is being owned by Ukraine! Let's accelerate this so that we can shut up those journalists who say that Russia's military is incompetent!!"; you go "Great, let's do that, now I'm gonna go and draw up some supply lines"
I'm not so sure about it DPA had an interesting thing in one video about russia posting about the foreign fighters and around 28% of all of them were eliminated (Killed, Wounded or Captured I assume) with an assumed 25% of ukranian forces dead that'd be 62.500 soldiers killed wounded or captured, with the ukranian goverment themselves saying "Hey we are losing 1000 troops every day" means that their casualties have doubled, this is of course assuming both the russian numbers on foreign fighters and the ukranian governments claims are right, I wonder how many people the ukranian government can shovel into those frontlines before the whole army collapses.
I read some weeks ago about the Ukrainians straight up press ganging random civilians in the subway. I also saw a video of the Ukrainians tying recruits together two and two for their medical checkup in order to prevent escape. I can't imagine the situation being any less desperate now.
It could also be that all of that is Russian propaganda and that the west is right about the brave Ukrainian people volunteering to jump head first into the meat grinder. Either way, at some point they will run out of guys sooner or later.
no way the ukrainians have lost 62.5k so far. i think about 20k is most likely. i'd assume that 28% figure for foreign fighters is heavily inflated relative to the ukrainian loss percentage - they're more likely to be involved in the nastiest fighting, they're probably more ok with dying in combat (i mean, if you're willing to travel across the world to fight for a shitty country like ukraine, then you probs don't have much on the line to live for), and it seems like a not-insignificant portion of them give away their position by posting about it and get themselves killed.
The Azovstal situation had a claimed 2400~ fighters get captured that would've been 12% of their entire losses if it were only 20k but even so let's just say they've lost only 20k that's 200 people getting eliminated (that means people getting wounded, killed, captured or surrendering) they still jumped from that low number to now 1000 people a day. My point isn't that they've lost a lot of people but that they are rapidly losing more and more people at some point you run the risk of running out of people that can instruct people to fight.
where are you seeing 1000 deaths per day?
https://tass.com/defense/1465843
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
that's 1000 casualties, not deaths. 200-500 deaths per day according to that second one.
I never said deaths? I said 1000 eliminated, i.e. taken out of action, i.e. killed, wounded, captured or surrender, eliminated means out of the fight, captured people don't fight for the ukr army anymore, for the ukranian army it doesn't matter if someone gets killed, wounded or captured because to them it's all the same, it's one soldier less you can throw at the russian army.
Edit: should also add this of course also means people that have fled the whole conflict
20k? You’re joking. It was over 30k back in April
if it was over 30k in april then the ukrainian army would literally not exist as a fighting force at this point. that claim is as ridiculous as the kinda absurd shit the ukrainian gov has claimed about russia's losses - you're talking greater loss rates, adjusted for the size of military theatre, than any major conflict since WW2, in a war which has been less intense than that conflict in every way.
Russian clobber list had 30k casualties in April and they have been roughly accurate thus far. Casualties, not deaths
Pretty sure Ukraine had 150k in the regular army at the start of the war without conscripts. 30k is not really that much considering.
Agree. Looks like Russia has started a holding pattern and only taking ground slowly and safely while waiting for the Ukrainians to collapse and even oppose the elenski government, all this while the EU and the US economy weakens and creates political pressure at home to make peace. Attrition is the game now no need to rush unless an opportunity presents itself
i'd be interested to see a map of major industrial facilities in ukraine for this reason. definitely seems like "retreating to an industrial zone with hostages" is becoming a pattern for the ukrainian forces.
your last paragraph makes a great deal of sense. hate to sound like a redditor but it reminds me of how the best strategy in HOI4 is to take the artillery-focused doctrine and then just let the enemy attack your entrenched lines for like 6 months until they're completely depleted, then roll in. when time is on their side, why rush ahead and risk the whole operation? the only thing i do wonder about is whether the ukrainians might pull back to the dniepr (or at least make some kind of retreat) once severodonetsk and lysychans'k have fallen - zelenskyy already stated that the loss of the cities would mean the loss of the whole east, which could possibly be preparing the ground for such a withdrawal. there's also the fact that the ukrainian military is full of far-right radical nationalists who might not follow such orders, however... which does beg the question, even if the ukrainian government wanted to make a large scale strategic retreat, would the army survive it in one piece?
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your comment is interesting and good and i'm taking it out of context, but this line specifically reads like something you'd see in a brainwormed wapo/nyt article about putin lmao
i do feel like you're giving the russian gov too much credit, like imo it wasn't really their intention to engineer a total rearrangement of the world order and economically collapse western europe with this war, so much as that's just the result of the war dragging on and the west's own sanction regime backfiring. it definitely plays in russia's favour, ofc, but i feel like there was a lot of hubris in the russian gov about the prospects of such a war militarily and the size of the NATO response - they didn't expect the west to cut off their own noses to spite putin, essentially.
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the natural gas situation definitely plays much more in their favour going into next winter than it did in february when we were just coming out of winter, like you said. as someone who lives in northern europe and isn't a millionaire i'm pretty scared about what next winter will look like tbh, like a big winter storm could kill thousands of people in the worst case scenario
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fingers crossed for melenchon, definitely. lots of strikes in the UK coming too. i think eventually the (very minimal, almost irrelevant) anti-war left in europe will make some gains as a result of the economic situation becoming untenable due to war, but the far-right will definitely also capitalise, and to a greater degree. scary, but at least the far-right will always fail eventually due to the severe inherent contradictions of their ideology.
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lula is a centrist
but yea, definitely effective against imperialism (though he did send "peacekeeping" troops to haiti and congo once, but in general he's pretty good in this area)
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A lot of the deaths were are going to see will be social murders. The problem for most people it's not going to be whether or not there's any gas in the pipes but rather that it will be too expensive for them to use, especially now that we're enduring heavier inflation than most of us has seen in our lifetimes.
Europe was going through an energy crunch before the invasion, I figure Putin at least considered Europe to be in a delicate enough position to invade Ukraine
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