Image is of the Germany coal power plant Staudinger, taken from this article.
Germany has closed down its last three nuclear power plants, after decades of protests against them in the wake of Chernobyl and then Fukushima. They were going to be shut down last summer, but then some obscure event happened in Ukraine or something, and that kept them alive for a little while longer as energy uncertainty mounted.
Now with the assurances that their natural gas supply will be healthy and sufficient, as their pipeline to Russia that supplied much of their gas is now gone, and new renewables will be sure to fill the gap, as Baerbock does everything in her power to anger China (the dominant renewables and rare earths manufacturer on the planet) things are looking bright for the German economy and energy sector, making this the right time to finally shut down those pesky nuclear power plants, which emit orders of magnitude less pollution and less radiation than coal power plants.
The European environmental movement is going swimmingly.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we’ve collected.
April 17th’s update is here in the comments.
April 18th’s update is here in the comments.
April 21st’s update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
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. Beware of chuddery.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Another big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia’s army.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
TeleSUR: EU Will Return Frozen Russian Reserves
As per the article’s discourse, despite the overt backing of the notion of allotting funds to Ukraine by prominent officials in the EU, notably the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, executing the same could prove to be challenging in practicality and is predisposed to fail for diverse grounds.
Die Welt reported that anonymous insiders familiar with the EU’s plans have explained that the frozen reserves of the Russian central bank amounting to €300 billion are widely dispersed throughout Europe and are deposited in numerous accounts. These accounts often have no direct connections to Moscow.
Ok so I was reading this article and then I came across this line:
The newspaper reported that Brussels lacks a precise understanding of the whereabouts of the funds in question.
Wtf? How are the funds frozen if they have no fucking idea where they are?
I believe someone posted an article here last week about this - only a fraction of russian funds have been “found” and frozen, and the majority of those are liberal, west-leaning russian billionaires. The RusFed finances were moved out of Europe by 2014, is the claim, so the seizure of the funds was just a massive own-goal by the west shattering the bedrock of trust and security any non-western nation might have thought the banking system offered.
edit: if this is true then backing away from this action is maybe the best thing the west can do that isn’t an outright admission of a complete and total fuckup
How are the funds frozen if they have no fucking idea where they are?
EU leadership released a memo stating that all Russia assets are to be frozen, so now they’re frozen, ok? If you want to argue that they’re not frozen, you’ll have to point to a bank account that should be frozen and isn’t. And you can’t do that. So therefore there’s no problem.