Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine, though we will switch next week to a new country.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly (biweekly?) update is here.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
So I just saw this comment under a lib Youtube video:
Could someone more versed in history tell me how much of this is true and what it means?
It's not actually clear that Stalin was the one who pushed to support Israel. He wasn't a dictator, so it's possible that he was outvoted on this or that he was ambivalent and the primary support came from others. All the western evidence that Stalin supports it is literally "he was 1984 big brother so the USSR never could have changed it's policy without him making the decision". https://hexbear.net/comment/4113012
That comment is also completely untrue, the position of the CPSU on Zionism was always negative, until they supported the creation of Israel (possibly for pragmatic reasons - hoping for a socialist state, possibly because they were moved by the Holocaust). It was considered a form of bourgeois nationalism both under Lenin and under Stalin, long before the establishment of Israel. Also, the developing world didn't need to be exposed to the USSR's "exported" "propaganda" to add "anti-Zionism to their anticolonial vocabulary", people in the third world are capable of observation and reasoning to determine that Zionism is colonialism.
Extremely
comment, as expected of YouTube.
HEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY ITS ME MOM IM SMART AND COOL AND FAMOUS
Stalin initially thought Israel would be a communist/socialist state, which wasn't insane as it sounds considering Labor Zionism was most popular then and David Ben Gurion call himself a socialist. He also just wanted to wreck the British's colonial position in the Middle East. So he supported Israel and quietly authorized weapon deliveries via Czechoslovakia. At this point, Israel didn't have any friends in the west, who still considered the Zionists anti-british terrorist separatists, so these Czech weapons were critical for them in the 1948 war and the USSR recognized Israel immediately after independence was declared.
However relations began to deteriorate almost immediately after that. Stalin had the Jewish anti-fascist committee arrested a year before he died and the Israeli starting attacking all their Arab neighbors too. The USSR didn't want to sacrifice it's relationship with the new socialist aligned Arab states like Nasser's Egypt, so by the time of the Suez Crisis relations with Israel had gone from friendly to neutral to supporting the Arabs. By 1955 the Egyptians were getting their own Czech arms deliveries, and by this point the Soviets probably judged that a warm relationship with the Arab states was more important. The soviets were still trying to play both sides until the 1967 war, but after Israel attacked they severed diplomatic relations with them. (Not yom Kippur like the comment claims)
The Soviets also hated the Aliya, because they had millions of Jews living within the USSR now all trying to emigrate away and causing trouble for the authorities when they were told no. By the time of Brezhnev this was a big problem and yes the Soviets tried to oppose it in ways that were problematic to say the least.
I think a large part of the Soviet opposition to the Aliya was they saw it as an unfriendly country taking millions of educated professionals from the USSR. Many Jewish Soviets never had any intention of going to Israel and diverted to the US at various travel connections. They'd get off the plane from the USSR, throw their ticket to Israel in the trash, and get on a plane for the US. Israel actually changed it's immigration procedures several times to try to filter out people from the USSR who they suspected were using the Aliya as an excuse to defect from the USSR to the west.
not a history nerd but afaik USSR initially supported Israel because it saw a pro-Soviet Socialist Israel being possible.
they went back on it pretty quick though, it occurred before Brezhnev. Rise of Nasserism and stuff.
The anti-Zionist policy of the USSR did result in some level of antisemitism but it wasn't the state policy at top level. I don't know how much of can really be attributed to the state policy compared to existing sentiment.
"they don't actually believe anything, they're just ~~russian~~ Soviet bots!"