Bulletins and News Discussion from November 18th to November 24th, 2024 - Could It Soon Be Azover? - COTW: Ukraine

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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Even the English press is engaging in bizarre conspiracy brain over those telecommunications cables that broke in the Baltic a few days ago. This is from the Financial Times, print edition so can't link it unfortunately.
Investigators seeking to explain two severed data cables in the Baltic Sea are scrutinising the movements of a Chinese bulk carrier, the second such probe in recent months amid rising concerns in Europe over potential acts of sabotage.
Yi Peng 3, a Chinese registered vessel that was travelling from the Russian port of Ust-Luga to Port Said in Egypt, passed close to both the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German cables around the time each was custom on Sunday and Monday, according to data provided by maritime tracking group Marine Traffic. Sweden is investigating both incidents, and is examining what role the Yi Peng 3 might have played, according to people familiar with the probe.
Ah yes, everybody knows the secret to Western hegemony is a communication cable between Sweden and Lithuania, the two major players of NATO and strategic masterminds of the strategy of Chinese containment.
- It's interesting that media everywhere is pushing this same conspiracy brain stuff.
  
  Yes, and cause journalists are in the same WhatsApp/telegram groups, which are also probably filled with feds
  
  Amazing how We$$tern journalists think of themselves as brave warriors for truth when they’re just a collection of clowns and dupes either knowingly or unknowingly doing stenography work for the US State Department
  
  Plenty of them know, despite their occassional protests when they're caught. The Intergrity Initiative and Institue for Statecraft scandals here in the UK (quick recap: NGO's, which actually get most of their funding from UK/US governments and intelligence, supposedly countering Russian disinfo overplayed their hand and got caught interferring in the electrion by getting their journalist network to push anti-Corbyn smears before doing it themselves too) scratched the surface of a much deeper and murkier removedprivate finance-media orchestration full of dodgy payroll to 'journalists' across British and European media and a load of non-existant 'think tanks' and charities registered to abandoned buildings and random, unoccupied, residential homes. When members of the UK and EU Parliments called for investigations into these groups, they mysteriously found themselves as the targets of online smears and hostile press attention. The EU, partly due to their distate for being targeted by the Brits, took the situation a little more seriously, although ultimately nothing was done. Here in the UK, the mea-culpa was merely a long line of Guardian and 'centre left' broadsheet journalist lining up to write op-eds about how that money was just resting in their account and how unfair it was that an Integrity Initiative social media intern getting too clickhappy with anti-Corbyn stuff had allowed the evil Russia to portray all the money, contacts, and free scoops they'd been handed as somehow dodgy.

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