Image: one of our POW camps filled with captured soldiers of the Christmas regime.
Season's greetings, fellow godless communists. I'm here to disseminate orders from our Supreme Communist Dictator as we once again find ourselves fighting against the very concept of Christmas. As a reminder, by the end of our five-year plan, we plan to be in a position to attack and dethrone God, but this intermediate step is required to fulfil this directive. Our forces in the field have made significant, if gradual, progress since you received your mission update last year. It has been difficult, but we have developed a series of defensive lines to prepare for a counteroffensive out of Lapland that will try and reach the Gulf of Bothnia in an attempt to cut the land bridge that we have set up across Scandinavia.
Currently, we foresee a few major threats. General Santa Clauswitz has been developing many tools in his workshop, including artillery-launched snowballs, barbed tinsel, and reinforced gingerbread armor plating for his tanks and infantry carriers. President Frostyy has made the following public statement: "The socialists who wish to destroy us have no idea what their defenses are about to face. Democracy will always defeat autocracy. Christmas will always triumph over X-mas. The leaders of the axis facing us are all on the naughty list and will be tried for crimes against festivity once this war is over."
Delusional as this may be, the next couple days will be the most dangerous as they stage their counteroffensive, and we need everybody to pitch in and get into defensive positions. We expect this to be the last major push that they will make before collapse. Please report any Christmas trees, mistletoe, or general symbology of the Christmas regime to your superiors.
Over and out.
The weekly update is here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Finland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Has there been an alternative assessment of Israeli losses in Gaza? Their self-reported numbers sound low, but I haven't seen any published figures from Hamas/Hezbollah. Is anyone tracking this? Is there any indication that Israel can or can not sustain this level of losses indefinitely? Mercouris downplayed the RPG/tank videos early on saying "Israel has many thousands of tanks", but how many experienced tank crews do they have to operate them?
Gaza is, last time I checked, reporting somewhere in the realm of 700-800 vehicles damaged+destroyed (obviously, hard to tell if you're doing hit-and-run guerilla attacks and don't wanna stick around to see if they're totally knocked out or still operational). This isn't a terribly helpful figure of course, unless we know the typical makeup of an Israeli brigade and how many vehicles each one has. Israel almost certainly does have thousands of vehicles, but as you say, not thousands of tanks. Unsure to what degree a tank operator trained on a Merkava can operate an Abrams, so idk if the US can just keep tanks flowing in indefinitely, though troop losses might decide events before those thoughts are entertained.
It's not as if the Resistance has to knock every single vehicle out anyway, as NATO doctrine says that once a quarter to a third of a brigade has been knocked out, it's not longer effective at carrying out tasks. My uneducated vibe is that the Israeli losses are not sustainable, especially when including the potential of Hezbollah which is probably close to an order of magnitude stronger than Hamas in several ways (and many times stronger in terms of missile capacity and strength). Time estimates on how long a conflict will last are always hilarious so I won't really bother to guess aside to say that we probably still have several months left before the current situation appreciably ends.
Mercouris needs to check his numbers, they "officially" have 1750 "combat ready" tanks, but I doubt they have more than 1200 in total, probably far less than that considering the decades of wear and maintenance issues, plus the ones they've lost during this conflict
each tank is 150% combat ready
Shoigu put Ukrainian losses at: 383,000 casualties (killed and wounded), 14,000 armored vehicles and tanks, 553 jets + helicopters, 8500 artillery or MLRS systems.
When adjusted for per capita per month, IDF is taking heavier losses than Ukraine over the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War (divide all the Ukraine numbers above by 22 months then 6 times the population, divide all the Israeli losses by 2.5 months)
Adjusted to apples-to-apples comparisons, IDF losses are looking very unsustainable considering even Ukraine can’t sustain this indefinitely.
2901 Ukraine casualties/month/per capita adjusted compared to 1540 Israeli casualties/month
106 Ukraine armored vehicle losses/month/per capita adjusted compared to 200 Israeli armored vehicle losses
The Electronic Intifada (Dec 20, 2023) - Israel is lying about the number of its casualties in Gaza:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFpS_yrLXHY
Hint: Israel only report 15% of casualties.