Well, Iran and their allies' response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren't talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don't really know where to look right now.
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 Iraq! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
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.
The Kursk offensive doesn't change the fundamental situation along the main front but it's really embarrassing for Russia to get its nose bloodied like this, especially as the image of Ukraine as a bloodied nation on its last legs was really starting to sink in. Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later. Domestically it's a major setback for the United Russia govt which erodes confidence they had won back after the disastrous first months of the war.
Really just feels like this war is going nowhere fast.
With what equipment, from what factory? The West can talk about support all they want, but the material reality of a crumbling industrial base doesn't care.
Why are we assuming Russia wants to end the war sooner? Like, I keep seeing people act as it's some great failure for the war to drag on, but I just don't get it - the strategic goal Russia has set for itself is demilitarizing Ukraine, and the longer the war drags on, the more equipment is destroyed (and that can't keep being replenished forever, since Western countries have already given a lot of what they could and their efforts to push the "industrialize" button
have amounted to fuck all, while conversely Russia's military industry is doing very well), and more importantly (and gruesomely, but war is hell for a reason), the more Ukrainians die, ensuring less of a capacity to resist in the future.
The whole "fast war good" is an entirely Western conception, and nothing at all to do with the Soviet/Russian attritional way of war. We have two very good case studies disputing the "fast war good" standpoint - WW2, and the US invasion of Iraq. In WW2, towards the end there were Nazi plans to carry on a guerilla resistance after their defeat, which amounted to very little in reality - because by that point, most of the able-bodied (and sufficiently radicalized) men who could become insurgents were either dead or captured, so there was essentially no-one left to be a brave resistance fighter. In contrast, bandit and partisan groups kept troubling the Soviets in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine until the 50s and early 60s, because there actually was a manpower pool (and Western support) for such groups to draw from.
So, a slow, grueling war certainly isn't nice to fight, but it ensured the enemy is actually defeated for good (well, that didn't quite work out in Germany's case, since a lot of those captured soldiers were captured by the Allies - who proceeded to release them, including many who were on trial for war crimes, and basically re-activate the Wehrmacht under a new name in the name of anti-communism - which I guess shows the war should have been even more grueling, with the Soviets fighting through all of Germany and ensuring such trickery doesn't happen, but that wasn't necessarily a viable option).
Iraq, on the other hand, demonstrates the other extreme - an incredibly rapid and bloodless (for the invaders, anyway) war, one which Western military commentators insist perfectly illustrates the superiority of NATO doctrine over the Soviet one. This narrative works, of course, only if you pretend history ends with the fall of Baghdad, and completely ignore the years of brutal counter-insurgency that followed. Now, could these things that happened after one another, perhaps be... connected? Could it be that the Coalition's rapid victory, in fact completely failed to "demilitarize" Iraq - and that, combined with the later mismanagement by the occupying administration, ensured an insurgency that had a large pool of resources and disgruntled men to draw from?
If Russia had won the war quickly, with most of the Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitaries still intact instead of rotting in trenches across the country, they'd have had a brutal insurgency on their hands - one which Western countries would have a great time supporting. Instead, they now get to watch Ukraine feed its population and millions of dollars worth of Western equipment into the meat grinder. It's a brutal outlook, yes, but it's clearly militarily effective, if morally dubious.
Lightning war/shock and awe/whatever you wanna call it is a western concept for sure but that doesn't mean Russia wouldn't have preferred to finish this quickly. The first month of the war was very obviously an attempt to quickly take out the Ukrainian govt and replace it - which failed because they heavily under-estimated the amount of resilience the Ukrainian state and military has built since 2014. Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn't their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).
like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022
I'm gonna post it again!
Russia's raid against Kiev was both a low-probability stab at ending the war immediately, as well as a pinning maneuver that held a large Ukrainian force immobilized and covered Russia's two other campaigns in the south and east. If the Russians had expected the Kiev column to work on its own, why would they have bothered with the other two prongs of their attack?
Conversely, if it gives a huge strategic advantage and there's a chance it could end the whole war instantly, why not do it? (In fact, as we now know, if not for Boris Johnson personally visiting Zelensky and swearing that NATO would give everything to ensure a Ukrainian victory, a peace deal would have been signed in April 2022)
This way of thinking betrays an undialectical understanding of why actors act, where they do things for 'a' reason rather than because the set of reasons to do it outweighs the set of reasons not to do it. Then, if the action fails to achieve 'the' reason, it is a failure as a whole: the actor must be foolish or have made a mistake, and any advantage gained was an accident, or it's even asserted that because of the apparent failure they cannot have gained any advantage! Western commentators are unable to go beyond this - frankly, they're unable to grasp that their enemies act for reasons rather than just an innate urge to do evil - but it's useless as a way of analysing the world, especially when it comes to questions such as why the US even started this war in the first place.
I've seen people argue that the US miscalculated, that the war has been a failure because neither the Ukrainian military nor the sanctions have put a dent in Russia's performance, but actually destroying Russia and breaking it open for the neoliberals to feast on was only the most favorable possible outcome.
Even if the capital-R 'Reason' of destroying Russia had only a slim chance of success and, as we can see, has failed, the other reasons to start the war still far outweighed the reasons not to.
Unironically, playing any competitive game at a high level is helpful to internalize this. Chess, poker, many adversarial video games all have this concept in common, where most of the game you are not trying to do the winning move but are trying to narrow down and worsen the enemy's options while improving your own. See also, the concept of positive and negative Expected Value.
this is cope sorry.
You know you're right, how could I have been fooled by the well known Russian cope-mongers at the Marine Corps Gazette
I'm at the point where I think US foreign policy is just controlled chaos. I first heard that in reference to Syria years ago but it seems to make sense at large with how many places the US is trying to destabilize at once. If the empire can't have something then it will be burned to ash.