Image is of one of the six salvos of the Oreshnik missile striking Ukraine.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that appears to split into six groups of six submunitions as it strikes its target, giving it the appearance of a hazel flower. It can travel at ten times the speed of sound, and cannot be intercepted by any known Western air defense system, and thus Russia can strike and conventionally destroy any target anywhere in Europe within 20 minutes. Two weeks ago, Russia used the Oreshnik to strike the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine, particularly its underground facilities, in which ballistic missiles are produced.
Despite the destruction caused by the missile, and its demonstration of Russian missile supremacy over the imperial core, various warmongering Western countries have advocated for further reprisals against Russia, with Ukraine authorized by the US to continue strikes. Additionally, the recent upsurge of the fighting in Syria is no doubt connected to trying to stretch Russia thin, as well as attempting to isolate Hezbollah and Palestine from Iran; how successful this will have ended up being will depend on the outcome of the Russia and Syrian counteroffensive. Looking at recent military history, it will take many months for the Russians and Syrians to retake a city that was lost in about 48 hours.
Even in the worst case scenario for Hezbollah, it's notable that Ansarallah has had major success despite being physically cut off from the rest of the Resistance and under a blockade, and it has defeated the US Navy in its attempts to open up the strait. Israel has confirmed now that their army cannot even make significant territorial gains versus a post-Nasrallah, post-pager terrorist attack Hezbollah holding back its missile strike capabilities. In 2006, it also could not defeat a much less well-armed Hezbollah and was forced to retreat from Lebanon.
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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.
A few months ago I thought it was surprising how stable Syria is considering the shitty economic situation. Things turn around fast :|
Similar case with Bangladesh as well, when this year started, I thought how solid Bangladesh appeared.
What's next? Egypt? They've an extremely repressive 'dictator', who unlike Syria and to lesser extent Bangladesh is backed by the west. But their economy is not doing so great and the Government hasn't provided any solutions.
A successful revolt in Egypt would honestly make up for the loss of Syria ten fold, Egypt remains the greatest threat to Israeli expansionism
outside the US or India, I'm not sure any country doing a socialist revolution would be a bigger win for the world than Egypt
Egypt isn't getting a socialist government if the current one falls.
Trust me, I would love to be wrong here, and maybe I'm not up to date on the current situation in Egypt, but my understanding is that the Muslim Brotherhood is still probably the most likely to take over should Sisi be overthrown. Maybe we get some officers coup from within the Egyptian military, but I'm skeptical that it would look anything like Nasser.
No, I don't really think you're wrong. Just hoping.
The Muslim brotherhood is aligned with the syrian rebels, people kind of need to grow up.
the cool zone is so close we can almost taste it
France.
I agree that France is probably a top 5, but I don't think it beats Egypt or Japan. It gets top spot in Europe though.
It's genuinely remarkable that a country that remained relatively stable for a decade (at least, as stable as a country undergoing a civil war can be judged to be) then collapsed in a week. In retrospect there will have been a dozen signs, but nobody could have predicted the timescale. Rven if in October 2024 you were told "The Syrian government will one day collapse - what year do you think this will be?" I would have guessed like, early 2030s maybe.
It does give me hope that the situation in Israel can be made similarly unstable, and apparently a majority of Israelis believe that they have lost to Hezbollah which is encouraging despite us knowing that unless Hezbollah gets back into the fight, Israel will eventually annex South Lebanon under the guise of a "ceasefire".
Egypt is unpredictable to me; it's conventional wisdom that repression + bad economic conditions = revolution, but this equation only holds for the enemies of the US because they provide the agents and funding to topple the governments.
Popular protests never topple governments - it's actually a big part of why the US does colour revolutions, because it generates the idea that protests can topple governments when it was actually covert activity by the West that provided the impetus, which means that movements in the developed and developing world are inspired by them and do not become as militant, which means they can be more easily destroyed by pro-West government forces.
I mean to be certain an Egyptian collapse wouldn't surprise anyone.
there are weeks where decades happen, and decades where nothing ever happens
If Egypt gets involved in a proxy war in Somalia it very well could happen
Venezuela based on how bad things are going, maybe Pakistan as a treat.