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.
Doing the "NATO will fight to the last Ukrainian" bit but in complete seriousness
Is she the one who said Russians aren't really European?
Oh wait this isnt the megathread. Still thought y’all should know though
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
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
This is the core philosophy of judo, Putin’s favorite sport.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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,
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
Intrusive thought of the day: A Ukrainian soldier desperately trying to call Texas Instruments tech support because his Javelin isn't working, being left on hold and having to listen to a low quality recording of Imagine Dragons - Radioactive as his position is overrun.
All recordings of Radioactive are low quality recordings of Radioactive
Eurovision 2023 should be held in Ukraine, Boris Johnson says -The Guardian
Eurovision 2023 won’t be held in Ukraine; UK may step in -WaPo
Leading with a joke? Classy move.
European leaders gather somewhere in Ukraine for this shit
Russian artillery strike kills them all
Win win
It would be really funny if they found some venue in the UK and transferred jurisdiction of it to the Ukraine for the duration of the competition, kind of like how a part of a Dutch military airport became Scottish for the Lockerbie trial.
I know that millions may freeze and go hungry in Europe because of this, but I can't help but find it a little funny that the EU's plans to survive the winter are being fucked because of their own sanctions preventing a single piece of equipment from getting to Russia. Some real cosmic shit there. If God exists, he's laughing at Europe.
It's been said many times, but European leaders are declaring economic warfare on their own citizens.
I lowkey think European leaders are kind of in a war with the media at this point. Several leaders have shown cracks in their warmongering, but immediately the media jumps on them because "PUTIN IS HITLER" still gets all the clicks and a leader saying that we should maybe, perhaps not starve to death is political suicide right now.
My impression here in Germany is that Scholz is clearly not so sure about the war anymore, but the media is still fully on board the "Putler genocide Zelensky wholesome 100 ghost of kyiv heroic azov" train. And everyone is buying it hook, line and sinker.
Media power in this situation is waning. Interest in “Ukraine” on Google trends is down 99%. Only weirdos like us and blue checks care anymore. Material political concerns are growing more powerful while the idealist media warmongering is waning. There will be a breaking point where European leaders will start to break rank and implement necessary policies for their populations, or they will be replaced by nationalists who will
Interest in Europe is waning but it's at a much, much slower pace than in the US. We still have actual Ukrainians staying here as refugees. Here in Germany there's only one country separating us from the war. Additionally, our brains and attention spans aren't quite as fried as those of Americans.
I do think that eventually interest will have declined enough that politicians can quietly try to negotiate with Russia, but we are nowhere near that point. The war still dominates the media here.
As soon as millions are freezing the nationalists will get into power on a platform of isolationism and peace
Climate change has made winters in almost all of europe much more bearable. There is no scenario where "millions will freeze" when there are probably like a dozen below zero days in the whole winter. Also Germany and France just had big national elections so the nationalists will be unable to capitalize for month unless you somehow foresee a breakdown of civil society. And the last elections in Germany all had the nationalists lose compared to former years.
Honestly, the European leaders should be thanking their lucky stars they have nukes and NATO to protect them. Before this war if you'd have asked me who would win a conventional war with the West vs Russia then I would have immediately thought that Russia gets steamrolled, but honestly I'm not so sure anymore. The European militaries genuinely seem to have massively decayed over the last few decades. And considering the technological disparities; Russia with like, 100 hypersonic missiles, striking the 100 most important EU + NATO positions and airfields, would have a colossal impact. Russia probably still loses in the long run but man, that's a difficult war for the West to win.
"massively expendable" could also be referring to the fact that ammunition and missiles are single-use and in short supply for ukraine
Probably because the Russians blew them up. A lot of the stuff doesn't even make it to the frontlines.
U.S. officials weigh doubling the number of rocket launchers sent to Ukraine Politico
The Pentagon is leaning toward sending four more rocket launchers to Ukraine in the next tranche of military aid, according to two Defense Department officials.
If approved by the White House, the move would double the number of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems sent to the country, as Ukrainian and Russian forces continue their long-range artillery battle in Ukraine’s east.
The U.S. is already sending four of the HIMARS, a mobile rocket launcher, along with precision munitions that can strike targets 48 miles away. The U.K., meanwhile, is sending three units of a similar weapon, the American-made M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, with a range of 50 miles. Germany also announced this week that it will transfer three M270s to Kyiv.
...
“The Russians are 200 kilometers on our land,” Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, told POLITICO. “To shoot them there, we need a long range to be used on our territory, because otherwise, it’s just a ping pong game of artillery.”
Ustinova said the four HIMARS already approved won’t be enough. “We asked for 10 times more,” she said.
...
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is calling on the West to supply 300 rocket launchers, 500 tanks and 1,000 howitzers.
4 out of 300. Almost 2%!
Love how the headline is crafted to imply that the number is huge. I thought they were sending Atleast a few thousands and found it quite amusing that the number was 4.
They are caught between a rock and a hard place, that demeanor is the look of a person being squeezed
I'm gonna post one of the dipshittery articles in the update here because I found it so... cleverly malicious by the Western media to write this. I don't know what's going on in Lysyschansk in terms of artillery, but in one fell swoop, they've essentially discredited every Ukrainian who ever complains that they saw Ukrainian soldiers firing at them (such has been repeatedly documented in Mariupol) by saying that they're being confused by Russian propaganda.
Russians breached this city, not with troops, but propaganda Seattle Times
LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — Gesturing to the artillery shell lodged in the ground and a rocket protruding from the wall, Maksym Katerynyn was in a rage. These were Ukrainian munitions, he shouted. And it was Ukrainian artillery that struck his home the day before and killed his mother and stepfather.
“The Russians are not hitting us!” Katerynyn barked. “Ukraine is shelling us!”
But that was next to impossible: There were no Russian soldiers for the Ukrainians to shell in the eastern city of Lysychansk, and it was clear that the projectiles had come from the direction of Sievierodonetsk, a neighboring city, much of which has been seized by Russian forces.
The fact that Katerynyn believed this, and that his neighbors nodded in agreement as he careened through his neighborhood condemning their country, was a telling sign: The Russians clearly already had a foothold here — a psychological one.
“I will ask Uncle Putin to launch a rocket where these creatures launched their rockets from,” Katerynyn said, standing next to the backyard graves of his mother and stepfather, referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He wanted the Ukrainian military to get out, he said heatedly, using an expletive.
It was not always like this in Lysychansk, an industrial city with a prewar population of 100,000. Now it is isolated from most of the world, with no cell service, no pension payments and intensifying Russian shelling. But some residents have turned into receptive audiences of Russian propaganda — or they have taken to spreading it themselves.
They are able to listen over the radio, both hand-held and in their cars, and to watch pro-Russian television channels when generator power allows. Given Lysychansk’s proximity to Russia, those channels appear to have a stronger hold in some neighborhoods than their Ukrainian counterparts do.
“When you’re hit over the head with the same message, you just drown in it,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York, who teaches a course on the politics of propaganda. “After awhile, you don’t know what the truth is. The message takes over your reality.”
The notion that the Ukrainian military is shelling its own people has been an oft-repeated message on pro-Russian disinformation channels on the radio, television and internet since the start of Moscow’s invasion in February. Aside from sowing doubt among Ukrainians about their own government and military, it has been a way for the Kremlin to sidestep accountability when it comes to civilian casualties caused by Russian attacks.
But that was next to impossible: There were no Russian soldiers for the Ukrainians to shell in the eastern city of Lysychansk
Like that's ever stopped them in the Donbass.
Whoever wrote that trash should volunteer to go live in a purely civilian neighborhood in Donetsk city and explain to the locals there how they have never been shelled by Ukraine, all those dead bodies were caused by Russian propaganda
I'm sure they'll be greeted warmly
Like most supporters of the war, she insists that Russia is not against the Ukrainian people but only “Nazis” who seek to carry out a genocide. “It is a war for peace” she concluded, apparently without irony.
As if most of the wars that have been carried out by America and Friends haven't been justified by similar, delusional platitudes. How many people thought that the purpose of the war in Afghanistan was to bring freedom and democracy to the people living there, once Bin Laden was dead and the Taliban mostly purged? How did that end?
I would say that any war that is carried out explicitly against fascism and fascists has the best chance of actually being a "war for peace". Russia's war on Ukraine isn't really that because they aren't coming at it from any kind of socialist revolutionary standpoint, but it's not quite as oxymoronic as this author thinks it is. I'm uncomfortable with saying that any war (aside from class war) is "justifiable" because you tend to twist yourselves into knots about the value of human life and long-term oppression vs short-term injury and death and so on, but on that murky scale, I think that this war is more justified than the US invasion of Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Vietnam, or Korea, or any other country that we've invaded. Again, that's not to say that it's "moral" or "good" or any other subjective measure that depends on what you personally value, just that anybody who says that Russia invading Ukraine is abhorrent and unjustifiable and then if asked if the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, or a future invasion of Iran or China, was or would be justified, starts stammering and stuttering about "Well, you've gotta respect the international rules based order... those countries are corrupt autocracies... human rights violations... " then they're a ridiculous fucking clown.
First article is very good. Second one has some serious brainworms
The decision to go to war in Ukraine was the result of neuroses in Putin’s inner circle, not of some surge of nationalist revanchism among the general public.
Yeah nothing to do with Ukrainian Maidan, 8 years of ethnic persecution, NATO expansion, Russian geopolitical interests. It’s just Putin and his friends are crazy
second article is from some american thinktank so no surprises it's brainwormed
2nd one was written by a person with compost for brains.
The World Has a Choice: Work Together or Fall Apart NYT
Or - how can we solve the problem without solving the problem?
expand
It is a natural human impulse, and a political one, to turn inward when threatened by a crisis that appears beyond our control. The world is facing several such forces at once: food shortages, inflation, the persistence of Covid-19 and the effects of global warming. Taken together, they threaten the stability and prosperity of nations around the world. That threat could hasten the retreat that many countries are already making away from globalization and international cooperation.
This is the wrong lesson to draw. Covid, climate change and now the specter of a global food crisis show clearly that the world’s problems are intimately linked, as are solutions. The power of cooperation has been on display in the coordinated response to Russia’s aggression. More cooperation, not less, is required to navigate a path forward through other crises.
...
High inflation in other developed economies underscores that the rise in prices is a global phenomenon, one that is caused in large part by global disruptions in the flow of oil, food and other goods. As the Fed squeezes demand, the Biden administration can ease the economic pain by working to expand the availability of goods and services. Some of the obstacles are domestic: America needs to get serious about building more housing, for example, the single largest expense for most American families.
Others are global: The White House needs to put its shoulder to the work of expanding the global production of energy, both through encouraging the near-term extraction of fossil fuels and by investing in the development of sustainable sources of energy. We also have called for President Biden to end his blanket tariffs on imports from China, a move the administration is reportedly considering.
The United States can help itself and the rest of the world by working with other nations — especially the countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia that are most at risk — to address a major impending food crisis. Shortages are already acute in parts of Africa, and some of the reasons are well known: the extreme weather of climate change, the economic ravages of Covid-19, the inequality of resources. But a new and devastating problem has been created by Russia’s cruel war on Ukraine.
...
As is so often the case, it is the poorest countries that suffer the sharpest blow, and history shows that hunger can quickly turn lethal. Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Yemen are already feeling the pain of food shortages, The Washington Post notes; rising prices have set off protests in Argentina, Indonesia, Tunisia and Sri Lanka, among other countries.
...
There is merit in trying to put world food supplies above the exigencies of conflict, but easing the sanctions that Russia is demanding — those imposed on Russian exports and financial transactions, as a Russian deputy foreign minister, Andrei Rudenko, said on state media — would mean giving in to Russia’s aggression and attempt at humanitarian blackmail.
What might yet work is a joint appeal to Mr. Putin by the countries that stand to be most affected by the food crisis. Mr. Putin has met separately with the leaders of Turkey, Israel and the African Union, among others, and has insisted publicly that responsibility for the emerging global food and energy crises falls entirely on Western greed and Western sanctions. He repeated that message forcefully in a speech on Friday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, blaming the United States for the world’s instability.
But he may find it harder to brush off an appeal from nations that are threatened by hunger, especially those that have so far resisted Western pressures to join in the ostracism of Russia. The United States should encourage and support such an appeal, which would get these countries involved in a way that serves their critical interests. And if an appeal includes a proposal to provide an escort of ships flying Ukrainian flags, Ukraine might feel less distrustful.
Nah, I don't think that would work. As the Western media has endlessly repeated, Putin is a mad, autocratic, tyrannical, psychopathic dictator who cannot be reasoned with.
International trust and cooperation are in desperately short supply, but it’s the only way out of any of these intertwined crises. The Biden administration should see this moment as a critical one for America’s leadership in the world, and step up to meet it.
It's now up to Africa to stop this war. Do the work Africa. Do better.
Summary:
News:
Boris wants Ukraine to host Eurovision in 2023, while Ukraine thinks that's a stupid idea. The EU is reminded that sanctions go both ways, as they still can't get a piece of pipeline equipment from Canada to Russia, which is causing major strife throughout Europe. EU countries are now taking gas out of their storage due to reduced pipeline transmission, which is not what is supposed to happen in summers. Ursula von der Leyen says that "Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective", which, I assume, consists of licking the boots of the US while exploiting developing nations. Rostourism is working on accepting Mir bank cards in seven new countries, and five more countries are also ready to join. The rebuilding of Mariupol begins apace, with 12 new five-story houses being built and will be ready by autumn. Russia's economy is being "destroyed", but also America's. Medvedev says that Macron, Scholz, and Draghli are "fans of frogs, liverwurst, and spaghetti". The UK is desperately searching for more seasonal migrants to exploit as Ukrainian ones are unavailable. Assange is going to be extradited to the US by the UK, though he may appeal (and probably lose), proving that we can repress journalists just as well, if not better, than the so-called "autocratic" nations. Europe faces a major heatwave (I expect this to become a repetitive news item). France's nuclear plants remain offline due to a variety of problems.
China will accelerate trade with Russia in the coming months, and also launches its third aircraft carrier, which is getting closer to parity with US aircraft carriers. Bangladesh and India experiences major floods. Protests in India over military reforms result in trains being set on fire. Bilaterals explains why the IPEF is really just about India, and it's not going particularly well for the US.
The DPR could start supplying grain to Syria via Mariupol, after Assad begins the procedure to recognize the DPR and LPR. The DPR also agrees to supply fruits, vegetables, and construction products from Iran. Kzakhstan, meanwhile, says that they do not recognize the DPR and LPR, saying that they are quasi-states, drawing parallels with Kosovo. Iraqi gazelles are dying of hunger due to climate change. Iran's thermal power plants generate record amounts of energy. The US sanctions UAE and Chinese firms that are working with Iran's oil producers, which will surely help bring Iran to the negotiation table. Israel attacks Gaza again.
Pelosi blames the cost of living crisis on the war in Iraq, which was later corrected to Ukraine by her office. There's a Sriracha shortage in America, caused by climate change. The midwest and southeast will get even hotter soon. US gas prices increase due to shrinking stockpiles and refinery bottlenecks, and the admin is mulling over whether to put limits on fuel exports to contain national gas prices. A majority of Americans believe that the US is already in a recession, and a majority of executives think there will soon be one. The Poor People's Campaign is marching in Washington DC. Cuba is switching to electric transport due to fuel shortages.
Oil markets are heading for an insanely difficult summer, due to Russian production set to decrease, along with surging oil prices and post-pandemic travel. Bitcoin goes below $20,000, the lowest since December 2020.
Conflict and Climate:
Donetsk's water supply has been stopped due to Ukrainian shelling. There are up to 1200 civilians in the Azot plant, and the soldiers are using them as human shields, preventing their evacuation. The LPR has entered the zone, but they do not plan to storm the factory. Slovenia is now also almost out of military assistance that they can give to Ukraine. The two American mercenaries have been filmed in DPR's custody. The US decides to not give Ukraine some drones, as they could fall into Russian hands. The Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine admits that Russian artillery is counter-battery and extremely effective, and that Ukraine can't easily repair broken artillery, leading to problems. Ukraine reveals that up to 50% of its heavy weapons stock has been destroyed during the war. Arestovich, one of Zelensky's main advisers, accuses the West of not wanting to really defeat Russia.
Droughts may affect 75% of the world by 2050. Polar bears have been found living in Greenland, adapting to local conditions. The Bonn Climate Change Conference is deemed a failure.
Dipshittery, Good Takes and Hope:
The West reacts to Putin's statements at the SPIEF, though nothing particularly strong or cope-y yet. WaPo accuses European leaders of wanting to appease Russia more than wanting Ukraine to win. Podolyak, another adviser of Zelensky, says that Ukraine can win the war in 3 to 6 months if it gets all the heavy weapons it needs. The Seattle Times notes how "Russian propaganda" is causing Ukrainians in Lysyschansk to think that Ukrainians might be shelling them, instead of Russians. The WaPo says that the West should bunker down for a long war and keep weaponry pouring in, hoping that Russia cannot keep this up for years. RT responds to this by rightfully suggesting that the WaPo is willing to let developing nations experience mass starvation in order to oppose Russia.
Popular Resistance points out the hypocrisy of the West accusing Nicargua of being a dictatorship after it "purges" a bunch of NGOs. Canadian Dimension posts a good article summarizing American imperialism, and also how it relates to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Summit of the Americas was a flop, while the Worker's Summit of the Americas was much more successful.
Extra:
UK paratroopers are banned from a NATO deployment after an orgy in a military barracks. Trump warns that WW3 is on the horizon, and teases a presidential run in 2024.
Account of Severodonetsk from an American volunteer: https://twitter.com/sethharpesq/status/1538265828134887424
