One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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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 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.
In a story on the Ukraine - Russia front that was missed with everything going on in the Middle East, video has emerged of a Russian stealth 5th generation Su-57 fighter jet shooting down its own friendly partnered S-70 stealth drone at high altitude, after it lost control of the drone, to prevent technology from the drone falling into enemy hands. This occurred relatively deep inside Ukrainian territory, around the city of Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk Oblast. Videos emerged of some of the wreckage of the S-70 drone on the ground.
While it is obviously not good that Russia lost one of their handful of stealth partner drones, this incident reveals some key information and battlefield firsts. Russia, now with visual evidence, has become the first nation to deploy 5th generation stealth aircraft over highly contested enemy airspace. The stealth capabilities of the Su-57 are very real. It went undetected by Ukrainian air defence systems, including the US manufactured Patriot system, and the remaining Soviet/Russian S-300 systems Ukraine has, while over 20km inside Ukrainian airspace (when measured at the frontlines of the conflict, much further inside Ukraine if measured from 1991 borders) at high altitudes that these systems should have no issue covering. Western copium about the Su-57 not being a true 5th generation stealth aircraft, based off of images of outdated prototypes, has now been disproven by actual evidence.
This also really brings to the forefront two other realities: Ukraine's air defence is very degraded, and Russian commanders are confident that the Su-57s stealth capabilities are enough to carry out deep strikes without being detected with regards the current state of Ukrainian air defence. I have already talked about the stealth one two punch that the Su-57 offers with its stealth cruise missiles in the Kh-69 before, and how this enables Russia to effectively extend the range of these cruise missiles and strike deep inside Ukrainian territory. The most obvious example of this has been the strikes against energy infrastructure using the Kh-69 cruise missile.
Editing to say: Key takeaways from this? Ukraine should be very glad that Russia only have a handful of Su-57 aircraft and S-70 drones, if they had the same amount of these aircraft as the USA has F-22s, the aerial campaign against Ukraine would look very different. Secondly, Iran should be worried about their air defence capabilities against stealth aircraft. The backbone of Iran's air defence is the Russian S-300PMU2 system (NATO name: SA-20B), and locally produced variants of it. We already know that Israeli stealth aircraft in the US made F-35 can bypass the Syrian S-300PM (NATO name: SA-10B) air defence systems with some effort, but still with relative ease. With Iran currently having the most advanced S-300 systems, even more advanced than the S-300PMU (NATO name: SA-10C) systems Ukraine has, some might think that they would do better against stealth aircraft. But that is quite a gamble to take when a lot of the radar technology in the more advanced variant of the system Iran has is simply an evolution of older systems, systems which have now proven to be incapable of detecting both Russian and US made stealth aircraft. Iran ideally needs S-400 systems soon to adequately deter the stealth threat.
Jet nerds coping about the SU57 is so funny, "why doesn't Russia make one gazzilion of them it's a fake jet doesn't exist", like chill bro Russia doesn't need 1300 su57 and they just started making them
The US and Russia follow different philosophies for the respective development of F-35 and Su-57.
The F-35 was mostly built to make money, they have to start selling the products even when the product is not ready yet. Because the supply chain is spread across several investing countries, if the plane is stuck on a prototype mode for too long, then some factory in another country will not get their job order and the production of certain critical components will have to be placed on hold.
To ensure that profit can flow, they have to sell the planes first then fix later. This is why you get so many issues with the F-35s, because unlike the Cold War planes, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project was commissioned at a time when the USSR was no longer a threat and after the 1991 Gulf War when the US crushed the Iraqi military, politicians no longer saw a need to fund more weapons projects. So for the military industrial complex to survive, the F-35 became a grift project that tied the government into a spiral of endless spending that would end up costing trillions.
On the other hand, only a handful of Su-57 prototypes were built and rigorously tested to work out the kinks and defects, and only then did the project enter serial production phase as more or less a complete product. This is both because Russia is a poor country that cannot afford to build too many prototypes at once, and also because it actually has to work in order to carry out its intended military purposes, so unlike the US, they cannot afford to waste money building military equipments that have fundamental defects (corruption not withstanding).