Image is sourced from this Economist article.
Most of the information in this preamble is from the Cradle; notably here, here, here, and here.
The features of an effective American war (proxy or otherwise) is that it is a) against opponents with much less military power than you; b) with very low American losses; c) with victories you can visibly show off from time to time to justify involvement, and d) with a profit margin beyond merely giving money to military corporations. The war against Yemen was none of those; airplanes tumbled off aircraft carriers, and the navy complained of the hardest fighting conditions in decades. Conquering Yemen for its resources was inconceivable given the terrain, lack of good intelligence, and the strength of Ansarallah, and all that seemed to be visibly harmed were empty patches of desert and civilians.
Apparently, the ceasefire last month merely stipulated that they stop attacking merchant vessels in the Red Sea; it said nothing about attacking Israel. Therefore, Yemen is absolutely free to create a new blockade of Israel by just striking their airports and seaports, and all Israel can seem to do is try and bomb them in retaliation, a futile strategy which has failed to produce a military or political change in Yemen for the last decade when many other countries have tried it. And if America directly attacks them in response to attacks on Israel, the ceasefire is off, and expensive equipment will continue to be lost.
Across the strait from Yemen is an interesting array of countries. Egypt’s position in this war is well-known, and Somalia is under a kind of US occupation under the guise of fighting terrorism (Trump withdrew most troops, but they were then sent back under Biden). The other three are Sudan, Djibouti, and Eritrea. All three are increasingly being drawn into the anti-imperialist camp, as they cooperate with Iran, Russia, and/or China. Sudan is undergoing a civil war, but the rebels fighting the government are famously backed by the UAE. Djibouti has refused to allow themselves to be a launchpad for US strikes on Yemen.
Eritrea has a fascinating history of flip-flopping between West and East over the past few decades, but has, since 2020, sided with the East. It was one of the five countries to oppose the 2022 UN resolution condemning Russia’s war with Ukraine. Eritrea sends two thirds of its exports to China, and Iran has reportedly supplied them with military equipment. If a stronger link could be reforged, then Iran would have significantly less trouble sending military technology to Ansarallah, and to other friendly groups throughout the region.
Naturally, the lidless eye of the imperial core is shifting its gaze onto Eritrea. Meanwhile, Ethiopia - a country that has experienced frequent conflict with Eritrea - is part of BRICS+ and their economy is increasingly reliant on China (as is most countries’ economies nowadays). If a permanent resolution between the two could be created, it would be a victory for themselves and the Resistance, and a defeat for America, which thrives on conflict and destabilization.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
I don’t follow international affairs stuff much closely and I’m for sure not a tactics and battles type of nerd. I don’t really get the whole concept.
On the mainstream news I am always hearing that Russia has killed 10 or 20 people by bombing Ukraine.
I don’t mean to sound heartless about deaths of anyone but is that the best they can do? Or are they slow walking the whole situation? Why haven’t they decisively won yet, or else given up? Can’t they capture or kill the top guys or take their families ransom or something?
Russia has been going incredibly methodically and slowly for this entire war, outside of their opening weeks bluff to force the Istanbul negotiations (where Ukraine Nazis killed its own negotiator who agreed to peace btw). They have been very light handed with the Ukrainian regime and left intact much of their infrastructure. Their goal is to minimize civilian casualties as well as damage to the infrastructure of captured territories, but also to minimize their own losses in personnel.
Russia’s civilian casualty : militant casualty ratio in this conflict is probably better than any conflict the USA has ever perpetrated. 30,000 civilian casualties : 700-900,000 militants, or around 1 civilian per 25 - 30 soldiers. They are fighting a conventional war, not an asymmetrical one.
For reference, in Vietnam the ratio was the other way around. With something like 3 million civilians killed and only 500,000 or so soldiers killed
These are good questions, and i’ll try to answer them as best i can as a certified SMO-watcher since spring ‘22. Russia is broadly prosecuting the war as gently as possible. War remains a horrific sacrifice of human life, but Russia has almost totally avoided striking major civilian infrastructure, let alone civilians. The only major incident i can think of is the TV broadcast station in Kiev. They constantly attack power switching stations, but not power plants. Ukraine has almost no functional transformers or switching stations, and many parts of the country have 16 hour rotating blackouts. Russia did not strike heat and electrical generation until this last winter. Now, why is this? Some people say it’s a combination of optics and the sense of fraternity between Russians and Ukrainians. More cynically, you could say they want to keep a state around to negotiate with and don’t want to further encourage the formation of Ukrainian ISIS.
Many NATO military theorists really only understand manuever and big arrows on a map. Attrition, that is the exchange of matériel until one side can’t continue, is seen as a failure or defeat state. Any NATO general caught in such a “trap” would try and force some kind of breakout to regain initiative. It would be disingenuous to say all Western military planners are incapable of understanding other ways of warfare, but the journalists and analysts definitely do not. The Western commentariat have created an alternate reality, where Russia promised to win the war in three weeks, but the map lines have actually barely moved because of NATO. In warfare between people of roughly equal or similar capacity, you cannot fight or breakout beyond small, well-planned actions of combined arms. Taking terrain would involve sacrificing personnel and equipment for almost nothing. There are individual tree lines and villages that have seen excess of ten thousand casualties in Eastern Ukraine. This chipping away strategy is a reflection of a lot of new technological developments in war, but the end result is a slow and grinding conflict.
This leads into your next questions, why would anyone want a slow and grinding war? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Zelensky is not freely governing his country, and there are significant Banderite neo-Nazi factions in Parliament, industry, and especially the military. The Azov Nazis and their ilk would assassinate Zelensky, and really any President, who tried to settle for peace. They nearly negotiated peace in Istanbul in ‘22, but Ukraine shot their own negotiator. For all that Russia is a reactionary shithole that hates queer people, they sincerely meant “de-nazification” as a major war aim. Until the people who actively want millions of Ukrainians to die in a bid for ethno-nationalist glory do not have money, guns, or influence, the war will continue. For better and mostly for worse, this means the war will continue for the foreseeable future. A decapitation strike like you’re imagining wouldn’t be aimed at Zelensky or many MPs, but at milita commanders and fascist propagandists. These people are embedded into society, and have moved themselves into the back lines or blocking positions to escape death at the frontline.
what’s SMO?
Well that’s good. When I hear about the 10-20 casualties it always makes me think about the blitz and similar civilian-directed campaigns in comparison.
I guess it makes sense especially if you plan to govern in some consensual-type way after the conflict, and rather than have it as a subjugated zone.
If i was him, I don’t know what I’d do.
do they have a plan or are they just dumb fascists?
is it true that “de nazification” is a goal? My impression is this was a kind of after-the-fact tacked-on justification. Like US invading Iraq to help women. I mean, if you wanted to de-nazify Ukraine, would starting a war that places them in a prominent and crucial position really be the way to go about it? From what I can see nazis have only gained so far. What could Russia do in the event of a victory to de nazify? Do they have a list of nazis they are going to knock off? Re education camps? Seriously what. At this point it feels like getting back to baseline would be a good outcome.
SMO is Special Military Operation, which is what the war is called by Russia. This is partially a reflection of Russian military law (peacetime units have all the stuff but not all the infantry, and the ability to mobilize roughly scales with the threat) and jokingly pushing back on the media always saying “full scale invasion”. In real life, i say “the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War” as often as i can.
Do the Nazis have a plan? Probably not a good one. That said, the negotiator in Istanbul was associated with the Zelensky government, and he was assassinated by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Could they actually get the President? Maybe not, but at this point the Nazi militias have been integrated into the security services, so they might have inside information.
Way back in 2022, the official case for war included demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. Prior to the war, Ukraine had the second largest armed forces in Europe (after Russia), with over 500,000 men in the field. NATO/ the West is light on infantry and heavy on planes, spies, and bombs. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they have a large army.
For a decade up to the war, ethnic tensions in Ukraine were rising with CIA backing, and it explicitly targeted Russian speakers. The reality on the ground is that two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, formerly of Ukraine, are mostly Russian speaking. The language was banned in school and then in public, and there was regular artillery shelling of civilian centers. The Azov and other militias built up their influence there, not during this war. It’s less about Russia having a plan for after the war, and more that the security threat of Ukraine comes from how influential violently anti-Russian neo-Nazis are within the state. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they are ideologically anti-Russian.
Russia has tried several Nazi militia members taken as prisoners of war. i think they intend to kill or imprison as many as they can get, purely because it’s a material threat to their state. If the Ukrainian military is defeated and neo-Nazi hierarchy remains, NATO will support Ukrainian veterans becoming a decades-long terror threat
There is a large Russian minority on Ukraine, the nazis were going around random villages and murdering people like they are doing now in Syria. The Russians in Russia did not like that, but the Russian elites didn’t really care, so for 8 years they were begging Ukraine to stop and singed various accords to that purpose, all while Ukraine was armed to the teeth. Until it looked like they were going to do while out the few rebel militias and then do a more systematic ethnic cleansing. So the Russian regime had no choice but to do something or lose legitimacy at home.
So in this case denazification really is the goal, whatever they can get for that land in Ukraine or from the labor of the Russians there is worthless, when compared to the costs of acting.
The nazis are there to destabilize the region same as the ones in syria or the now deceased comprador regime in Afghanistan,
Russia has finally completed the task of grinding down Ukraine’s defenses, and I believe a big campaign to end the war by force is looming. It’s one reason why both sides are now negotiating, and Ukraine is engaging in flashy attacks.
Don’t forget that Ukraine is a sprawling country with a large population, and immense backing from the US and Europe. It’s kind of amazing that Russia has been able to handle this mostly on their own.
I think killing leadership is a Pandora’s box, especially given the high profile bombings deep in Russian territory that they were very clearly not prepared to defend themselves against.
what do you mean?
Ukraine has, probably through the help of NATO/US intelligence, the capability to target some of Russia’s most significant and expensive military assets with things like drones and sabotage. If the gloves come off because Zelensky gets got, Putin and basically all the high ranking officials in Russia could reasonably expect to be targeted in response.
What I’m saying is they appear to have an unspoken agreement not to do that currently because it’s in each person’s best interest.
Soo… they are slow walking it?
If there’s an unspoken agreement to not fight too hard, to not win, what’s the point?
I mean the war wouldn’t end just because you killed the other side’s leader, they have other people who can step in, so it’s not really about slow walking winning. But both Putin and Zelensky want an end to the war in which they don’t personally get blown up. So yes they’ll let a lot of other people die instead to let the war play out without risking their own lives.
Do you know how wars work?
not really that’s what I meant by “I don’t get the whole concept”
It depends on the type of war and it’s aims, but generally decapitation strikes and high level hostages don’t resolve them when it comes to two nation states fighting. Nation states are not feudal kingdoms built on a single house, they are complex states composed of millions of people and an entrenched bureaucracy and patronage system. They are ruled not by a king but by an amorphous council of the bourgeois political elite. If one person dies, then move onto the next.
It may create momentary chaos, but that’s not always a good thing. Zelenskyy is predictable, he often does bold maneuvers that are strategically bad but good for short term PR. He meddles with his generals’ plans. Killing Zelesnkyy would surely prompt a strong escalation from the west as well, which Russia is trying to avoid.
So all this to say, yes Russia is slow walking it. They are trying to walk the tightrope of ending the war in a reasonable timeframe vs. not pushing too hard and starting WW3 by scaring the euros