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.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday’s discussion post.
Former Brazilian president says Zelensky wanted war
Brazil’s former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was interested in plunging his country into a war.
“He did want war. If he didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more,” da Silva, who served as president from 2003-2010, said in an interview to Time magazine that was published on Wednesday.
Da Silva said the West is encouraging Zelensky. "He thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation: “OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV,” the former president said.
Da Silva said he doesn’t know the president of Ukraine but thinks he’s acting weird. “It seems like he’s part of the spectacle. He is on television morning, noon, and night. He is in the U.K. parliament, the German parliament, the French parliament, the Italian parliament, as if he were waging a political campaign. He should be at the negotiating table,” the Brazilian politician said.
Da Silva said that, “People are stimulating hate against Putin. That won’t solve things! We need to reach an agreement.”.
Lula Be Wrong Challenge, difficulty impossible
Obviously Lula is absolutely spot on here.
Apart from being a bit of a puppet, I wonder if Zelensky just took a good look at the situation he inherited when he got into office (a dreadful economy, population loss, a civil war in the East, massive corruption - not all of it friendly to him - and an increasingly militarised block of Nazis who would only tolerate him for so long) and realised that any kind of peacetime unity was going to be impossible. So a nationalist war, with formalising the Nazi bloodlust against the Donbas, was the only route he could see to a Ukrainian project that he could maybe survive (politically and literally).
Obviously thats a fucking ghoulish calculation on his part, I’m not defending it, but it would at least be some sort of rational beyond a naive-turned-unhinged coke-fuelled ego trip.
It’s pretty straightforward. He’s a puppet and his anglo masters told him “agitate against Russia and do not compromise in any way, make the maximum demands, we totally have your back dude. Oh, if you don’t do this you are out of the job and we will find someone else who will”
We don’t have to analyze Zelenskyy’s psychology here. It’s pretty straightforward. He’s a comprador puppet for foreign imperialists and he’s doing his job.
