Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine's three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they're far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren't shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn't really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I'm pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It's also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine's power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody's sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I'm not holding my breath.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Liberals are expressing mountains of consternation over the arrest of Don Lemon due to him covering the church protest. Including Hasan Piker. However, they seem to be forgetting that freedom of expression of the protesters is no less important than freedom of the press. Literally exactly the same protections. FUCK Don Lemon for saying, "But I'm a member of the press; I was not protesting." And fuck people who are echoing that sentiment. Journalists are not above the rest of us.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
True but on the other hand it's a pretty clear FACE act violation and I would never have advised protestors to enter the church. Fact is protesting an abortion clinic is also freedom of expression but also harassment (and let's be honest this was an attempt to harass and pressure a guy, this guy unlike women seeking abortion deserves it but it is the same behavior) and that behavior is prohibited by the FACE act and the only reason that act hasn't been repealed likely is because it also included a provision to prevent the same kind of behavior used against abortion clinics against churches.
Supreme Court has long established there can be "limited" (whatever that means) time/place restrictions on freedom of speech expression for the public good. These people really should have protested outside his house instead or around the church rather than in it. Because they are almost certainly barring misconduct by the police or prosecutors going to be successfully convicted and sentenced to prison for this protest and I could have told every one of them before this that was the case because I'm well aware of the FACE act. If you want to take that risk and go to prison to interrupt one church service be my guest but protest leaders should have let people know what they were getting into. Lemon will likely walk because he can specifically claim he was not protesting and thus violating the FACE act but covering it as a journalist.
Journalists get time/place and behavior exceptions. It's long accepted that if an ordinary person receives classified information and then spreads it around that they have committed a crime. But if a journalist receives that same info and publishes it there's this idea of professional discretion by a trained professional exercising a specifically enumerated right for the public good (that journalist's judgement that publishing that information was more important than protecting it being given quite a bit of weight). The problem Lemon may run into is typically the people who get away with that kind of thing are part of larger, powerful liberal journalistic institutions so they're not just someone calling themselves a thing, they're employed to do that and recognized by others as having accreditation and judgement to be called a journalist.
good analysis -- no chance houses of worship are considered public fora.
They are, though. They literally invite anyone and everyone in off the street.
And even if they weren't, we should be supporting each other in this kind of action no matter how the state would initially like to interpret things. Precints may burn to the ground, and churches may not be able to finish their HoLy MiSSioN. We've got fascism to annihilate. All of that can wait. Especially where components of them are complicit in the fascism.
Churches better start putting "believers only" on their door or something, I guess.
For that matter, what if the guy just happened to let slip that he's an ICE agent during his sermon, or someone in the service was bored and on their phone and happened across the info, and it wound up being the people who were legitimately there initially to participate in it who started jeering and "disrupting"?
Nah, literally fuck all of that hogwash excuse for this repression, TBH. Disrupt a health clinic too, if there's a literal fascist pretending to be a doctor there.
Also, this bit:
is extremely weird given that even the liberal courts have ruled that there's not really such a thing as a "professional journalist" and that people on the street acting as journalists are, in effect, "real journalists". But even if you're right and there's some legalistic exception that's made for them, I call fucking bullshit: the state has no place whatsoever to decide who is and isn't legitimately a journalist.