back in my map era, we're ukrainemaxxing right now
Declarations of the imminent doom of Ukraine are a news megathread specialty, and this is not what I am doing here - mostly because I'm convinced that whenever we do so, the war extends another three months to spite us. Ukraine has been in an essentially apocalyptic crisis for over a year now after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, unable to make any substantial progress and resigned to merely being a persistent nuisance (and arms market!) as NATO fights to the last Ukrainian. In this context, predicting a terminal point is difficult, as things seem to always be going so badly that it's hard to understand how and why they fight on. In every way, Ukraine is a truly shattered country, barely held together by the sheer combined force of Western hegemony. And that hegemony is weakening.
I therefore won't be giving any predictions of a timeframe for a Ukrainian defeat, but the coming presidency of Trump is a big question mark for the conflict. Trump has talked about how he wishes for the war to end and for a deal to be made with Putin, but Trump also tends to change his mind on an issue at least three or four times before actually making a decision, simply adopting the position of who talked to him last. And, of course, his ability to end the war might be curtailed by a military-industrial complex (and various intelligence agencies) that want to keep the money flowing.
The alignment of the US election with the accelerating rate of Russian gains is pretty interesting, with talk of both escalation and de-escalation coinciding - the former from Biden, and the latter from Trump. Russia very recently performed perhaps the single largest aerial attack of Ukraine of the entire war, striking targets across the whole country with missiles and drones from various platforms. In response, the US is talking about allowing Ukraine to hit long-range targets in Russia (but the strategic value of this, at this point, seems pretty minimal).
Additionally, Russia has made genuine progress in terms of land acquisition. We aren't talking about endless and meaningless battles over empty fields anymore. Some of the big Ukrainian strongholds that we've been spending the last couple years speculating over - Chasiv Yar, Kupiansk, Orikhiv - are now being approached and entered by Russian forces. The map is actually changing now, though it's hard to tell as Ukraine is so goddamn big.
Attrition has finally paid off for Russia. An entire generation of Ukrainians has been fed into the meat grinder. Recovery will take, at minimum, decades - more realistically, the country might be permanently ruined, until that global communist revolution comes around at least. And they could have just made a fucking deal a month into the war.
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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.
Like with Gaza, it's impossible (and not very useful) to know which side "controls" what territory, considering the nature of guerrilla warfare and Hezbollah's subterranean capabilities; the further Israel advances, the easier it is for Hezbollah to hit supply lines and set traps. Also like Gaza, Israel's own casualty numbers are unreliable to the point of not even having a superficial relationship to reality. An Israeli column 5000 strong could get 100% obliterated by a bunch of MOABs and they'd say "1 dead, 2 lightly injured"; an Israeli force of 10 could get all killed and they might tell the truth. It entirely depends on what breaches containment, what Hezbollah reports, and what they think they can release to manipulate the internal mood. So it's a frustratingly yet understandably opaque war compared to Russia-Ukraine.
Nonetheless, it's pretty clear to me that Hezbollah is winning fairly handily. The big battle right now is at Khiam, which seems like a mixture of a conventional battle akin to Bakhmut, and a guerrilla battle like in Gaza. Like with locations in Gaza, Hezbollah isn't really "defending" the city as much as it's using it as a way to attrit Israeli forces, as far as I can tell, but that quasi-defense still seems pretty strong. Hezbollah appears to be a hybrid army, you can't quite compare them to Hamas nor a fully conventional army. There's been a degree of advances all along the border that have over time been repulsed, reinforced, repulsed again, etc, but nothing so far that looks like it could convincingly lead to a meaningful Hezbollah tactical defeat at any location. Israel is maybe 25% of the way to Tyre, for instance.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has continued to put steady pressure on Israel via drone and missiles, with no detected diminishing of capability (strengthening, even). Haifa and its surrounding environment is hit pretty regularly, and with a population of 300,000, forcing it to evacuate (either in an official manner or by people deciding to flee south of their own accord) would be a big event. Hezbollah has demonstrated that it is capable of hitting basically anywhere it wants inside the country as Israeli air defense continues to degrade, but has (very intelligently) focussed on hitting military targets instead of civilian ones, whereas Israel is doing the opposite. It's obvious that Hezbollah is holding back its most devastating barrages for key later moments, as we know they have enough missiles to make civilian life inside Israel very unpleasant if they decide to start firing.
All ceasefire news is total bunk and should not be paid any attention to. They are replicating the Gaza strategy of being constantly two weeks away from signing a deal but never actually doing it in order to invent a false reality and make their actions seem a little more palatable. Israel will be defeated by force and forced to retreat. There will be no ceasefire until every Zionist is south of the border AND outside of Gaza, or until there is no more Israel for there to be a border with.