Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.

In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.

Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.

It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Okay, look, I got a little carried away. Monday’s update usually covers the preceding Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I went ahead and did all of last week. If people like a more weekly structure then I might try that instead, if not, then I’ll go back to the Mon-Wed-Fri schedule.

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.

    • cynesthesia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      1 year ago

      I really don’t understand why cluster weapons were fixated on as some kind of wunderweapon. challenger tanks, HIMARS, storm shadows, etc - those are all things that actually represent a new thing for the AFU and the conflict so they conceivably could make an impact. I think we are all skeptical of the ability of individual weapons systems to change the game, but the things I listed just now are actually new systems to the AFU. in contrast, I find it a bit silly to fixate on cluster munitions as some potential game changer because they have been used by both AFU and separatist/RF forces since the beginning of the invasion as well as back in 2014/15. we are living in the world where all parties use cluster munitions and this is what it looks like

      • Parzivus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        20·
        1 year ago

        All the western aid has to be spun as wunderwaffen, because otherwise the headlines are like “Ukraine receives a week’s worth of shells and a dozen tanks”

      • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        Do you have any evidence of the DPR/LPR using cluster munitions? I haven’t seen anything documented about that, sounds like more Ukro talking points like “Russia assassinated their own heroes” about Givi and Motorola. The Economist just wrote an article admitting it was the Ukrainian intel services

        • cynesthesia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          I’m presuming you mean 2014-15 DPR/LPR and not more recently when these military forces were more or less subsumed into the Russian military.

          https://web.archive.org/web/20161221121049/https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions

          yes its HRW but it’s 2014 HRW when no one gave a shit about this conflict and so ukrainian crimes weren’t so whitewashed. the second half of that article has specific incidents looked at by HRW people. Most of the documented cluster munition attacks were deemed by HRW probably from the Ukrainian government but a number were probably from separatists. see the section under Starobesheve.

          personally I find these accounts credible because non-state or sub-state actors fighting a resistance generally use whatever is available. both the smerch and uragan rocket systems were developed before the collapse of the USSR and none of the parties to the conflict (including America, which I consider party to the conflict in 2014) had/have signed prohibitions against use of cluster munitions.

          • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            Did you read the article? It’s pretty clearly pointing at Ukraine and the most evidence they have against the separatists is “While not conclusive, circumstances indicate that anti-government forces might also have been responsible for the use of cluster munitions, Human Rights Watch said.”

            If a western backed CIA group like HRW can’t even muster a condemnation of Russian proxies then it’s a big fat nothing. This is not evidence, this is western NGOs hedging their language so they don’t give their readers an aneurism.

            “It makes sense the separatists would use them” isn’t proof. They are counting on the reader’s negative view of Russia to do the work and “both sides” the clearly one sided situation of a government using cluster munitions on their own civilians

            • cynesthesia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              I did, did you? I specifically highlighted what was relevant but let me be more clear:

              On the morning on August 24, cluster munitions struck Starobesheve, a town about 35 kilometers southeast of Donetsk. At the time of the attack government forces appeared to be in control of most of the town. Employees at the town hospital, which received the injured, said that the attack had killed 3 civilians and injured 17.

              At the time of the August 24 attack, government and rebel forces were battling for control of the town, which had been controlled by Ukrainian government forces up to that point. One local resident told Human Rights Watch that rebel forces started pushing out the government forces on August 26 and 27. The pro-Russian rebels announced on August 26, two days after the cluster munitions attack, that they had established control of the town.

              The rocket tail section stuck in the ground in front of the local administration building shows that the rocket came from the southeast. With a maximum range of 70 kilometers and the Ukraine-Russia border 30 kilometers away, the cluster munitions could have been fired from Ukrainian territory southeast of Starobesheve, which was controlled by Ukrainian government forces at the time, or from Russian territory. The press center for the Ukrainian authorities’ counterterrorist operation claimed at the time that the cluster munitions had been fired from Russian territory. Human Rights Watch was not able to conclusively attribute responsibility for this attack.

              The timeline as described: before aug 24, ukraine controls the town. Aug 24 - cluster bombs hit the town. aug 26/27 fighting in the town, separatists saying they took control of the town aug 26. I don’t believe that ukrainians dropped cluster bombed a town they controlled. I especially don’t believe that ukraine would cluster bomb a town they control from the southeast (look at where Starobesheve is on a map).

              • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                6·
                1 year ago

                We can read the same thing and come to opposite conclusions because I have a stronger innate skepticism of the weasel words of the western NGOs. To me all I read here is “rocket could have come from Ukrainian government controlled territory or from Russia.”

                So it came from Ukrainian government controlled territory, just like the rocket yesterday at the market of Kostiantynivka, controlled by the Ukrainian government. They initially blamed Russia but further video evidence has shown the missile came from the Northwest.

                Ukraine hits their own civilians more often than Russia hits Ukrainian civilians. I do not find this article compelling as evidence in any way it’s just more western weasel words obscuring the obvious fascist culprits. Still no evidence whatsoever that DPR/LPR used cluster munitions