Image is of Putin and Scholz sitting on opposite ends of a frighteningly long table back in 2022. Folks, the table is gonna get ten feet longer.
The latest round of US-Russian diplomacy is taking place on August 15th in Alaska, where Putin and Trump are meeting in-person to maybe try and bring an end to this godforsaken conflict. While I don't want to totally discount the possibility that they may come to an agreement - you truly never know! - there's a lot stacked against this encounter yielding much of anything.
Russia appears to have demanded a land swap; that Ukraine fully withdraw from Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts (in exchange for unspecified Russian gains, but probably parts of Sumy and Kharkov) as a precondition for a ceasefire that could perhaps lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict, and Ukraine seems completely unwilling to do anything of the sort, saying that even if they wanted to, the process of just giving up a couple oblasts would take significant time and require referendums. I say that Russia has appeared to demand it, because there's been a lot of confusion - probably in bad faith - about what Russian diplomats and Putin himself have said and what the demands even are. There are some who speculate that Trump will sell out Ukraine and blame Zelensky for refusing to agree with Russian demands, and there are others who say that this just the latest of many examples of the US and Russia meeting up with such fundamental differences that a deal is impossible, and that Trump fully expects to put sanctions on Russia after Putin declines some harebrained American scheme.
Anyway. After the summit, in late August, Putin is due to arrive for a visit to India, at Modi's invitation. Previously, I was unsure exactly what India would do in response to American sanctions pressure, and now we appear to be receiving an answer, as Modi has made public statements that suggest that he is only getting closer to Russia. Fascinatingly, Modi will soon make his first visit to China in seven years at the annual SCO summit at the end of August, and Putin will be heading to China too on September 3rd. There is an increasing amount of dismissal about the potential of BRICS (especially one that contains India), and that dismissal is certainly rather justified, but I am still deeply curious about what developments may occur as the global south braces to face the remaining ~85% of Trump's presidency.
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Israel's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 all socially reactionary. 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 ~ A 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. Produces interesting and useful maps.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
Beyond the economics, there is simply no "hard power" element of the alliance. Russia and China said plenty of nice things to Iran and even sold Iran some military equipment beforehand, but when the time came to defend Iran, Russia and China were nowhere to be found. Even in Ukraine, China hasn't directly aided Russia in military equipment over the past three years, Russia had to go to North Korea for direct military aid in equipment and personnel, and purchased the intellectual property and designs of one way attack drones from Iran. Contrast that with the direct support the United States has given both Israel and Ukraine.
BRICS also has the fucking UAE in it lol, and Egypt, that pathetic US vassal state that is more complicit in the Gaza genocide than anyone other than the ones actively participating.
I'm glad that people generally seem to have moved on from the incessant "BRICS will save us" attitude that dominated "anti-imperialist" thought for a little while. Completely absurd idea. We have to do better than developmentalism sans internationalism.
I see the unwillingness or inability to exert military power as a better indicator that they're not willing to challenge the current hegemon than having poor grasps of MMT economics. Every single one of your economists can be Hudson-pilled, but if no one is willing to militarily stand up to the hegemon, then those Hudson-pilled economists will be quietly sidelined anyways since actually implementing those Hudson-pilled economic and fiscal policies will invite direct response from the hegemon. After all, the US is not going to passively stand there if they can no longer get their free lunch from the rest of the world.
The problem is that the mainstream economists in China can’t even see anything beyond neoclassical economics. We’re not even at step one, we’re still at step zero lol.
The chief architects of the whole property market investment-led growth strategy e.g. Justin Lin Yifu and Meng Xiaosong are still doubling down on “the more investments to raise consumer confidence” strategy. They literally believe that more investment will somehow make the consumers regain market confidence, without directly addressing the wealth inequality issue, where the people they want to spend to stimulate the economy simply don’t have the money to spend (which is made worse by the saving habit in Chinese society when it comes to economic downturn).
From pure anecdote, nobody around me is spending like they were spending back in 2018-2019. Back then, the general vibe was that money spent can be easily earned back, since the economy was booming. Even during the first year of Covid, while the Western countries continued to make a mess responding to the pandemic and China already opened up its domestic restrictions in 2021, people were even more confident that the Chinese model has now supplanted Western incompetency.
However, things have taken a worse turn since then. The property market implosion, especially in the wake of Evergrande scandal, had struck a huge blow into the people’s minds regarding their confidence in the economy. The post-Covid recovery that was promised simply did not arrive. By mid-2024, any last shred of hope for the promised recovery since China ended Zero Covid in early 2023 has turned into despair.
You can call that vibes-based analysis, but I find this kind of vibes to be very difficult to ignore. We’re not going back to the 2019 level of consumption for sure. It’s like when Democrats in the US tried to gaslight people into thinking that Bidenomics was so successful but most people outside of the top 10% simply did not feel that they live in the same world as the one that claims a strong GDP growth under Biden.
We all know that the economic framework needs to change, because that’s how you get to the solution.
You’ve made some super informative posts! I’m admittedly quite ignorant in terms of economics - is this something you’ve studied? Or have just developed a high level of literacy on regarding economic/current events? Anyway thanks - found this fascinating
This is closer to what BRICS-hypers think BRICS is