An image of a Central Committee meeting in Hanoi. Image taken from this article.
General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng implemented an anti-corruption campaign in 2016 called "blazing furnace" in shorthand. Since then, the fire has ripped through both politicians and businesses, up to even the Presidency. Nearly 200,000 party members, 36 Central Committee members, and 50 police/military generals have been disciplined since the initiative began. In 2018, Dinh La Thang, the former party chief of Ho Chi Minh City, became the first sitting Politburo member to be criminally charged, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 2023, President Nguyễn Xuân Phúc was implicated in a corruption scandal and resigned. He was replaced by Võ Văn Thưởng, who was then also caught in a corruption scandal a year later in March 2024, making him the shortest serving President in Vietnamese history. The Presidency is current headed by Võ Thị Ánh Xuân while they find a new President; she also took that role in 2023.
The ousted leaders tend to also be part of the more West-friendly, technocratic faction inside Vietnam, either reflecting how these people also tend to be more easily corrupted, or how the Communist Party is slowly moving away from a foreign policy which allies itself with the West (as Vietnam has comprehensive strategic partnerships with several Western countries), or some combination. Of course, this shouldn't be overstated - Vietnam has maintained a close friendship with China for years, and both incumbent leaders are intimately familiar with anti-corruption campaigns and how and why they must be conducted in order to deliver maximum public benefit.
America clearly desires Vietnam to pick their side, because America strongly desires another vassal state in East Asia like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan to further encircle and isolate China. And so the headlines and commentary of Western state propaganda like Radio Free Asia, the BBC, WaPo, Business Insider, etc reveal their increasing annoyance with Vietnam's government. They often couch this in the standard "objective" economics language); about how removing leaders who foreign investors were reassured by might mean economic pain for Vietnam ahead. As Bhadrakumar noted in 2023, perhaps the BBC revealed their intentions the best:
Reading Vietnamese politics is always difficult — the Communist Party makes its decisions behind closed doors. But hard-line General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, who was given an unprecedented third term at last year’s party congress, appears to be consolidating his authority by ousting senior officials seen as more pro-Western and pro-business. Officially this is all happening in the name of fighting corruption,.. but it’s indicative of a power struggle at the top of the party… the likely rise now of more security-focused officials to the top of the party will be bad news.
Even a quick google search right now will show a bunch of articles by clearly nervous Westerners: Why Vietnam’s Escalating Anti-Corruption Campaign Might Backfire because, as we all know, only authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to things like public opinion and discontent, while Western "democracies" are insulated from such petty phenomena. Leaders here can have disapproval ratings of 60-70% and not even the slightest consequence will happen to them - a real sign of democratic freedom and justice over those primitive regimes in the East! Or, take: ‘Blazing Furnace’ Turns Vietnam Into Another Chinese Province; China turning both Russia and Vietnam into their provinces in just two years was a real diplomatic masterclass. Or, back in 2022: Vietnam's 'blazing furnace' crackdown burns $40 bln off stocks. Not the stocks! Anything but the stocks!
If your actions as a leader are pissing off Bloomberg, you are going in the right direction.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Vietnam! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Got in an argument with someone about slat armor and cage armor in Ukraine. My understanding is that the primary purpose of the armor is the same as it's always been - cause incoming shaped charge munitions to detonate prematurely so the jet of fluid metal can't form properly and cut through the tank's armor. With many modern AT weapons being small, relatively low-mass drones moving at slow speeds (a Lancent apparently does like 30m/s to a Kornet missile's 300m/s) slat, spaced, and cage armor of all kinds are being employed in Ukraine. UA artillery positions have covers of chain link fence, for instance, apparently designed to catch Lancet drones before they can impact and detonate.
And, so, the argument was this guy saying that this is all ridiculous cope and completely ineffective, and my counter was that various cage armor remains effective if it can cause pre-mature detonation of a HEAT warhead to fuck up the fluid metal jet, regardless of how fancy the incoming AT weapon is. And, especially with all these small loitering drone munitions that move slowly relative to traditional AT munitions, cage armor probably works well enough to be worth the extra weight.
Does anyone have access to any actual science on how various kinds of cage armor are performing against modern drone munitions? I'm really curious because to me this seems really straight forward - If a HEAT round can't detonate at the proper distance from the target it can't defeat the target's armor. And they're saying that's bullshit and this is all cope and doesn't work. And that doesn't pass the smell test to me.
Plus, on top of that, with many improvise drones just dropping grenades and mortar rounds, just having a chain link screen to catch the damn things so their detonator doesn't hit a solid surface and go off seems to have some legitimacy.
AAgain, any analysis of whether these defenses are accomplishing anything?
(He was also telling me that the shed tanks are carrying diesel generators to run point-defense guns. According to him older tank's power-plants can't run the point defense guns so they're using diesel generators strapped to the tanks. and this is bad because if hte generator gets hit hte diesel will catch fire and cook the tank crew alive. I'm pretty sure that's total bullshit because tanks have been designed with protection from incendiary attacks for decades, diesel is notoriously hard to ignite and doesn't explode, and anyway T-72s have giant barrels of spare diesel fuel attached to their rear anyway. While probably not filled in combat, it apparently hasn't been a problem for fifty years so I'm skeptical that 10 or 20 gallons of diesel fuel in a portable generator is somehow going to cook a tank crew alive.)
A lot of the earlier cages people were roasting for being the wrong bar separation width of whatever were welded together from random crap before they started rolling out more mass-produced ones. Lo and behold the armor works and both sides have made use of it, the Russians far more ubiquitously since they actually remember how to mass produce something for military purposes
Before even engaging with this I'd make sure I'm not talking to a reddit NATO shill, its only cope when Russians do it.
Cope cages on Challenger 2's last year.
This analysis is weird, what sort of point defense guns is he talking about? The Russians are mounting diesel generators to some of the turtle tanks but those are there to run the EW (electronic warfare) that's also mounted to the top of the tank. Some of the shed tanks have the EW suite but most don't, although one of the tanks that got popular on twitter was this type of EW tank.
This analysis is from analyzing the effectiveness of WW2 armor skirts on panzers. The nazis added this kind of armor to mitigate damage from kinetic weapons, especially from Soviet anti-tank rifles. This had limited effectiveness against HEAT rounds and could even theoretically improve the effectiveness of a HEAT round. This is due to the jet of the HEAT round needing the proper distance to form and some HEAT rounds just weren't long enough for this full effect.
The shed armor upgrade is mostly against drone attacks from above. It increases the distance that a HEAT round detonates from, and to a much greater degree than classic armor skirts. Not only that but it makes targeting the weak points on the armor much more difficult. It also greatly reduces of the effect of non-HEAT explosives on the tank. On the EW turtle tanks, the shed protects the more delicate EW equipment from small arms fire.
I don't have any actual proper sources. This is a very rapidly developing area of study.
Edit: "Classic" slat armor is actually for a different purpose altogether. It's there to crush RPG warheads and keep them from going off or at least disrupt the formation of the HEAT jet. A large part of an RPG round is hollow, this is necessary to make it a HEAT round instead of just explosive (HE). An RPG hitting correctly spaced slat armor at the proper angle will have the warhead be crushed by the slats. This will either prevent the detonate from working or just disrupt the HEAT jet.
If it was cope then the Ukrainians wouldn’t have copied them, nor the Israelis, Koreans, etc.
The winning argument here is "if it doesn't work why are both sides be doing it? and why would they be coming up with new and better ways to do it?"
Speed of the projectile actually doesn't matter much at all for FPV drones or ATGMs, they help in catching up to the target but both methods utilize HEAT warheads which are not kinetic weapons. Upon impact an inverted cup of copper inside the warhead is heated and propelled forward by the explosion, this metal jet punches through the armor making a relatively tiny hole and igniting/penetrating vital components or the crew, it can also cause spalling on the inside of the vehicle.
Kinetic weapons on the other hand, such as armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot rounds fired from main battle tanks, rely on a solid metal core being propelled at high velocities and do lose power over long distances.
What does weaken HEAT warheads is the distance the molten copper jet travels, spaced armor makes sure it detonates farther away from the armor and exposes the heated metal to open air thereby cooling it somewhat before making contact with the actual vehicle. As the other comment said, badly spaced armor can actually increase the effectiveness of HEAT warheads but I'm sure soldiers keep this in mind when doing these types of modifications to their vehicles.
As for the point defense guns, those aren't a thing on vehicles. We have seen small generators plastered on Russian "turtle tanks" but those are to power electronic warfare units on the outside of the spaced armor, these devices block certain radio frequencies in a short radius around the tank in the hopes of breaking the connection between a hostile drone and its operator.
My thinking is that the FPV drones, lancets or whatever, would have much less total energy than an incoming ATGM. Like the vehicle itself, not the warhead. So a relatively lighter cage or screen might catch the drone and stop it, messing up it's ability to detonate the warhead correctly.
You have a point there yeah, I've seen drones get stuck in netting/windows of vehicles without detonating, something that could technically happen to an ATGM but way less likely. I was more thinking along the lines of solid metal cages where they might be redirected due to the angle but almost always detonate.
Worst that might happen with leaked fuel on the hull is it will smell bad and be a slip hazard. Any tank properly maintained for NBC warfare will have enough seals to keep the fuel from leaking inside. Diesel fuel is hard to ignite and keep lit. IF fuel were to leak inside and ignited, it would be ignited by something that cracked the hull/turret and would have probably already killed the crew.
Most likely issue could be a small fire in the engine compartment, which is most likely separated from the crew compartment by firewalls and/or armor.