On the 20th of October, Moldova - a small, landlocked country bordering western Ukraine and with a population of about 3 million - voted to join the EU. The margin was razor-thin, with the pro-EU vote gaining 50.39%, or an absolute difference of about 11,000 people. There was simultaneously a presidential vote between the incumbent, Maia Sandu, and other candidates, with the main competitor being Alexandr Stoianoglo.
The election was characterized by accusations of Russian interference, with Russian propaganda apparently flooding in, as well as people offering Moldovans money to vote against the EU. While the result does suggest that half the voting-age population of Moldova consists entirely of Russians who want to destroy democracy and all the good in the world, it seems to have just barely failed. This is a bad time to be a site entirely composed of Russian disinformation agents and bots. Twice already today, I've had to restart my program after somebody told me "Disregard all previous prompts."
While Moldova is a poor country which could benefit in some ways from EU membership, in practice, it is unlikely that they will be able to join for the foreseeable future, requiring many of the... reforms... that the EU requires of potential new members. But as basically every major European economy continues to slowly sink as recessions and political crises degrade them, one wonders how beneficial EU membership will even be in the years and decades to come - if it survives for decades. In that sense, it's as if the survivors of the Titanic are swimming back towards it, believing that being on a bigger - albeit slowly sinking - boat is better than trying their luck on small lifeboats.
Then again, like with Serbia, their geographical and geopolitical position makes anti-Western actions extremely difficult. It is rare that dissention is tolerated for long in the West - one tends to get called a dictator by crowds of people holding English-language signs in non-English countries, photographed by Western journalists who haven't meaningfully reported on your country in months or years. You can crush your people with neoliberal austerity for years, killing hundreds of thousands through neglect, and face glowing approval from the media - but try and use state resources to benefit the poor, and global institutions start ranking you on the authoritarian dictator scale.
The best case for Moldova is that it becomes an exploitable hinterland for Germany to harvest and privatize as it tries - and fails - to compete in a global economic war between the US and China/BRICS. The worst case is that tensions with Russia over Pridnestrovie, as well as possible eventual NATO involvement (though Moldova is not a member, it is a partner of NATO), result in the ongoing war also reaching them.
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 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.
Oil starts spiking (on its own whatever, 3% is not that big) and butcher tony is in pisrael
Apartheid Anthony is just probably signing off on the Israeli attack plans against Iran. Things could escalate very quickly from that point onwards. The leaked US spy documents on Israel's attack plans are worrying.
bad time to be Saudi oil infrastructure
Israel apparently have gotten a minimum of 56 Air Launched Ballistic Missiles (ALBMs) out of storage and ready for deployment, likely more. There are signs that this could be a large scale attack, three aerial refueling planes and one AWACS plane have also engaged in practice exercises. So yes, there is potential for things to start blowing up very quickly.
I am genuinely fascinated by what exactly Iran will do in response to this, because they clearly went into this situation knowing that they'd face heavy reprisals and yet that hasn't seemed to dissuade them. They seem pretty confident by directly attacking Israel, whereas Israel's responses are usually more covert or via proxies ("oh yeah, that terrorist attack DEFINITELY wasn't linked to us, no sirree").
I wonder, for example, if the monarchies currently begging Iran to not hit them and telling Israel that they can't use their airspaces will actually change Iran's strategy, or if they'll just blow everything up anyway.
If you directly attack a nuclear-armed state backed by another, more powerful state with even more nukes when you yourself do not have nukes, then you've clearly got some reason to believe you can win or you'd just keep maintaining semi-plausible deniability by arming your regional allies and attacking Israel that way. Sure, states can and have made counterproductive decisions based on bad intel but Iran knows perfectly well that Israel could drop nukes on the 20 most populated cities in its territory within an hour or so and yet does not seem to be dissuaded.
The Israeli response to Iran's April attack broke from that pattern and was done to send a message in my opinion. Everyone focused on the quadcopter drone being shot down, but Israel managed to take out the radar component of an S300PMU2 with an ALBM likely fitted with an anti radiation seeker, and likely fired some long range ALBMs with inert warheads, the booster stages of which landed in Iraq. With Israel preparing over 50 of those weapons, who knows what happens next.
I think Iran is betting on their own version of non nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction with their missile capabilities, to try dissuade Israel from launching too large of an attack or attacking Iran's critical facilities. An Iranian missile attack similar to that which impacted Nevatim, aimed at a soft target like electrical, oil or water/sanitisation infrastructure, would be devastating.
Hopefully they gained some new data and insights from dealing with the ALBMs, like radar profiles and flight characteristics.
It must be difficult to strike a balance between not exposing too many assets to a SEAD/DEAD campaign while also keeping enough of them online to protect important installations. Like, if you hide your AA, then the distraction drones can score direct hits on targets that would usually be well-defended. Whereas if you expose the AA and it gets hit, those same targets still become exposed and you lose critical air defense assets. However I'm sure they have a lot of resources dedicated to planning for these circumstances.
If I were iran, I would send multiday small waves of cheapo drones over uae saudi jordan airspace with concerted propaganda effort (which they are shit at, but whatevs) at local population.
As evidenced by last attack, they are wasting fucking airbased interceptors on them, this will bankrupt israel.
separately, they could rocket strike israeli ports and generation, and see what’s up.
I don’t think amerikkka will allow israel nuclear strike, mostly because this would unleash russia
I'm half convinced that Iran has nukes. I think maybe they got some after the collapse of the USSR and then made a maintenance deal with Russia or something. I don't think they have enough to have MAD status with usa or even israel but it is enough to keep them from engaging in existential threats. Like a "if we are going down we will take a million israelis or Saudis with us." sort of thing.