Image is of Chinese FM Qin Gang and German FM Annalena Baerbock, in Berlin.
Conor Gallagher over at Naked Capitalism details the latest in EU idiocy - foreign ministers backed a more hardline position on China and are considering putting sanctions on Chinese companies that they accuse of supporting Russia. The ideological contagion of “you are either with us or against us” has, without a shadow of a doubt, taken root in the brains of European politicians despite whatever words fall out of Macron’s mouth.
The obvious problem here is that China is the EU’s biggest trading partner for goods, their second largest import market, and their third largest export market. China’s manufacturing is equal to that of the US and Europe combined, outputting most pharmaceutical ingredients, processing most rare earths, manufacturing most solar power wafers, and leads the world in the clean energy market in general - important, as the EU has given up cheap energy from Russia. It is not impossible for the West to develop their own domestic alternatives, but it will take several years to do so, and the sanctions war may escalate independent of that timetable.
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.
This week’s first update is here in the comments.
This week’s second 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.
Huge explosion in western Ukraine, followed by a huge uptick in radiation being detected. It looks like Russia found and destroyed Ukraine’s stockpile of depleted uranium rounds that were given by the UK
This is NATO’s chance to accuse Russia of nuking/dirty bombing Ukraine and enter the war - will they take the opportunity?
I think NATO knows that without a direct attack on a member there’s not enough actual support for an intervention among their home populations. A war against Russia means mobilization beyond their existing standing armies. Imagine handing out draft papers while Parisians are burning down their own city.
I think NATO is also quietly terrified of their most modern equipment being publicly proven obsolete on a modern battlefield.
not enough actual support
When have bourgeois democracies ever cared about what the public wants? To say nothing of how bloodthirsty westerners tend to be and how easy it is to get them to support war.
Give them 2 days and the entire population will be ready to march to Moscow
moon of alabama points out that the uptick is statistically small and started the day before the strike
moon of alabama is such a faszinating website ,… just this one wierd oldschool blog… are there other sites like that ?
If they were bombed at location signals a day prior doesn’t seem weird. Radiation emits from its source and will give of energy from there. Depending on the shielding, say lead vs iron the emission would be diminished to varying degrees. Tracking could definitely be more difficult while the sources (the ammo) are intransit.
Hot off the presses, today’s article from the New York Times.
‘Approaching. Move In.’ How Ukraine Reversed the Momentum in Bakhmut
Choice quote from the article.
It is led by Colonel Biletsky, a former ultranationalist politician and co-founder of the Azov regiment, a group that was part of Ukraine’s national guard before the war and is now integrated into the country’s military forces, with little or no political bent.
Biletsky really is everywhere. I had really expected he would have been killed by now.
I still occasionally think about the Irish sesh gremlins who, in the first few months of the war, pretended to be fighting as volunteers in Ukraine by taking pictures of themselves in the woods wearing camo and wielding airsoft guns and then spent all the money people donated on hash and MDMA :rat-salute:
At their summit in Reykjavik the Council of Europe wants to make a register of all Russian war damage in Ukraine with the intent of making Russia pay reparations after the war.
The west is not even close to winning and they’re already fantasising about how to make a new Versailles treaty.
Media here is creaming themselves at the possibility of this being called the “Reykjavik Declaration” :doomjak:
wait, there is more, there has been speculation for months if whether the man, the myth, the legend, Zelenskyy, would grace our humble shores with his presence. Naturally his travel plans must be kept secret so we would never have known until now.
Sadly (for them and us cringe enjoyers) he will not be here in person but will be addressing the conference in some fashion.
