Thank you @SeventyTwoTrillion for all your effort. :sankara-salute:
If you have any useful resource links please tag me in a comment with the link:
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to this if you can, thank you.
Links
Time/Map: https://time.is/Ukraine
Leftist discussion threads:
https://hexbear.net/post/177324
https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/t03foy/genzedong_russiaukraine_master_discussion_thread/ :kitty-cri-texas:
Twitter military updaters:
https://nitter.42l.fr/RWApodcast
https://nitter.net/ASBMilitary :kitty-cri:
https://nitter.net/Militarylandnet
https://nitter.net/MihajlovicMike
https://nitter.net/KofmanMichael
https://nitter.net/TadeuszGiczan/status/1498673348183744518
https://www.youtube.com/c/DefensePoliticsAsia/videos
obvious disclaimers about taking all of them with tonnes of salt etc
Global South Perspective: https://nitter.net/kiranopal_/status/1498723206496145413
Better war/propaganda analysis:
https://www.understandingwar.org
https://www.moonofalabama.org/
News updates:
https://www.cgtn.com/special/UkraineCrisis.html
Live: https://www.cgtn.com/special/Live-update-Ukraine-Russia-border-crisis.html
YT/Video in Ukraine:
Previous megathreads
!news@hexbear.net RSS Feed https://hexbear.net/feeds/c/news.xml
I honestly haven’t been paying much attention, but why did the Russian army back down from Kiev?
Either they got beat up, or they’re pulling back to focus their forces on Donbass.
It’s definitely the later, granted the reason they pulled back is that they’d probably get beaten back if they stayed any longer. The numbers of Russian forces around Kiev was small compared to the amount in the South and East of Ukraine, and due to Ukraine’s mass mobilization efforts, staying in the area could mean that they’d be substantially outnumbered with long supply lines stretching through a region where the local population is much more hostile to Russia than the Ukrainian population in the South and East.
They were never going to take Kiev anyways unless the city surrendered immediately without a fight, so better for the Russians to pull their force out now before they get bogged down and overrun, and then redeploy them to the areas they actually have a reasonable chance of taking/holding.
They probably envisioned a best case scenario in which they would be able to quickly encircle Kiev and scare the Zelensky government into a quick surrender. That scenario failed to materialise. Instead the troops were used as a feint to draw spread Ukrainian troops over a wide front, preventing a sizable part of the Ukrainian forces from being deployed to the Donbass.
I don’t think they planned to conquer Kiev or to stay in the area though. The number of troops was too small to effectively take such a large city and unlike in the south they didn’t bother to reorganise local government and replace Ukrainian currency with the ruble.
While the troops were being fixed at Kiev, Russia methodically destroyed Ukrainian fuel infrastructure, severely restricting their mobility, making it hard for the troops to get to the Donbass front. They also took down almost all of Ukraine’s air defences, making Ukrainian military columns moving to the south very vulnerable.
Or they just fucked up and tries to cut their losses, I know as much about this as anyone else.
