Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
- Never go to a second location.
- Always get the interior ministry post.
- Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
- If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
- If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
- Never give up your nukes.
- Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
- Never let the opposition delay elections.
- If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
- Never trust a South American with a German name.
- Never move anywhere for a religion.
- Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
- If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
- Never become an FBI informant.
- If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
- Never relinquish your arms.
- Always get it in writing.
- If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
- Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
- Always pay your mercenaries.
- Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! 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.
Serious question: What will Russia's response be if the US gives the OK for the Ukraine to hit sites deep in Russian territory with US missiles? Some options:
-Russia starts indiscriminately carpet bombing Ukraine. All of it.
-Russia gives the Houthis some Khinzhals and the western fleet in the Red Sea goes bye-bye
-Russia directly and rapidly arms Israel's opponents, gives them to go-ahead to bye-bye Israel
-Nuclear war (on the dance floor)-
-a hyped Putin speech where he strongly warns the US of retaliation and then doesn't really do anything
He turns red, blows steam out his ears, grabs his hat and tosses it on the ground and stomps on it. “BIIII-DEEEEN!!!”
Khinzals are air-launched from jets and wouldn’t be of much use to Ansarallah. What they need are ground launched hypersonic anti-ship missiles
I’ve been told this is conspiratorial but isn’t there a chance they already have these?
Am I wrong to think they don’t necessarily need to run tests on weapons already tested by the Russians?
Or would they have already signaled to the world that they have them?
The ground launched hypersonics is what Im referring to and sorry I misread some of this, my comment is in reference to Iran.
Iran has this technology, so it is possible they have transferred it to Ansarallah. Russia doesn’t provide high tech missiles to even their strong official allies like Syria so I doubt they are providing anything like this to Yemen.
Ansarallah does seem to be holding back, hitting ships that break the embargo with 1-2 strikes and then backing off and not causing deaths or sinking.
even still, Ansarallah are doing a blockade in support of Palestine. They aren't going to fire on a US carrier group just because they have the capability to sink a boat. usa would nuke them, even if they didn't use nukes the repercussions to Yemen would be horrific and wouldn't suit Yemini interests or Palestinian interests.
Putin will take it like the cuck he is. No response other than words and diplomatic actions.
this is what most of us thought on Feb 21st too
"No using US weapons against pre-2014 Russia" is a pretty arbitrary red line. If he was going to pick a red line to stand his ground on, it would have been "no foreign military aid to Ukraine" from the beginning of the war.
I believe the only true red line is "no NATO troops attacking Russian soldiers".
Except that NATO troops are 100% on ground in Ukraine fighting against Russia.
These mythical US weapons are not magicaly going to cause any significant amount of damage if they even manage to hit the targets. The US doesn't have hypersonic missiles. Shadow Strike, Tomahawk, whatever German/French shit they use, unless they target the Kremlin and manage to hit Putin drinking his morning coffee, this is just provocation and I expect nothing will happen.
Lets say Ukraine somehow manages to hit one of their bomber bases, so what they destroy a couple Tu-22s or whatever? Who literaly gives a shit as if that will change the course of the war?
The Moskva remains on the bottom of the sea for 2 years now, NAFO idiots were all claiming this would be the end of the black sea fleet... remember the last couple of fishing boats, sorry "frigates" the Russians lost due to a few drone attacks? Same thing, at first embarrassment, then later everything continues according to the inevitable course of the war.
The Russians talk about red lines but they understand the war is over for some time now. There are real things that could cause escalation IMO things like actual NATO troop deployment to the front not some trench on the Belarus border, maybe a chemical/nuclear false flag etc.
Western wunderwaffen are not it despite Russian speeches.
I think Russia would start with a strike on an illegal american occupation base in Syria or Iraq to prove they weren't bluffing. They would for sure do large strikes across Ukraine to limit any further strikes into Russia. Maybe they'd intentionally target the nuclear reactor between lviv and kiev or maybe just near it as a way to clarify the situation for ukraine as well as europe.
Russia moves S300s back into Syria.
They won't giver the khinzhals
Maybe it would trigger some secret deal with China that would allow military imports? I doubt it though.