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.
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/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/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.
I realized something about libs. They deeply unconsciously believe that no one should ever be harmed or inconvenienced for anything they didn't personally and deliberately do, and that it's never acceptable to harm or inconvenience anyone in pursuit of some large scale goal, with no awareness or interest in material conditions and realities.
They'll never support any serious action because some bystanders will get hurt and to them that makes taking any action unthinkable (as long as the bystanders pass the albedo test)
On the other hand when something bad happens to non- it is just a statistic. Whether or not that statistic is deemed unfortunate or not depends on how the bad thing affects
Americans see the Berlin Wall as sort of the ultimate symbol of “communist evil”. My friend has an older kid in school, and she in the history lesson about the Cold War, apparently the only thing they said about the GDR was about the Berlin Wall and how bad it was and how many people were killed trying to climb over it. And in the movie Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks’ character rides in a train over the Wall and in those few seconds, he just happens to see GDR soldiers shoot someone next to it.
In the decades of the Wall’s existence, about 140 people were killed trying to climb it. There have been individual months where the US military has killed more innocent civilians in the Middle East than that. Mention this to Americans and they’ll just shrug their shoulders and not want to think about it at all.