Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine’s three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they’re far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren’t shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn’t really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I’m pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It’s also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine’s power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody’s sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I’m not holding my breath.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
The strong effort post what they can, the weak suffer what slop they must. DM me to feature effort posts and good threads in the newsmega/newscomm here (including your own).
@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net and @QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net on at the buzzer with corruption and contradictions in China. They continue this topic in this subthread this week.
@MelianPretext@lemmygrad.ml on the message of Maduro’s kidnapping to leaders in the Global South: “…that there are also no true consequences to breaches of [the taboo against the personalization of geopolitics] against them and their loved ones.”
@CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net on peace agreement/ceasefire between the SDF and STG in Syria
@MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net is one step closer to earning their Hexbear-Tom Clancy branded aviator sunglasses and ball cap this week, continuing their excellent logistical analyses of US materiel getting moved towards Iran in one post after another after another, and a bonus procedural on missile loadout sleuthing.
Previous posts of the week:
2025: Oct 27 | Nov 3 | Nov 10 | Nov 17 | Nov 24 | Dec 1 | Dec 8 | Dec 15 | Dec 22 | Dec 29
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US is tightening the sanctions on Cuba.
https://x.com/i/status/2017025377177129445
Long live the Cuban Revolution!
So last Friday we saw a general strike in Minneapolis - the first such action in the US in 80 years. This Friday?
has assessed there is the opportunity for a nationwide one-day general strike. Branches across the country are going to be mobilized based on the lessons from last week to immediately massify this call. Shit’s going down.
Wonder what the libs will do when they actually have to do something.
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I don’t know if it will translate into a mass nationwide general strike, probably not. However, there were already pretty large protests last Friday in solidarity and they will likely be bigger this week.
PSL seems to be following a mass line strategy of amplifying calls for shutdowns by other organizations (last weeks shutdown was originally called by clergy and unions, the student groups are calling for it this week) and building them up to the level of a full general strike. No doubt they will be able to accomplish this again in the Twin Cities area, solidarity protests in other cities will grow.
I don’t think its a bad idea to push for this even though it likely won’t be a “successful” nationwide shutdown, because that is what these will eventually build to.
Yeah. This sounds like the only thing that’s going to work. Practice. Repeat. Make it grow locally and get larger and longer, along with the support networks, and spread to other areas organically (not without encouragement, but without trying to push it on everyone, everywhere, all at once, and feeling like the result is a failure). It’d be great if we were ready to do it on a dime, but it just ain’t gonna happen.
Good to note this is scientific marxism. There is no amount of reading to help a person organize a general strike. Sometimes you must learn by doing, even if failure might be likely, that failure will likely bring important insights towards a future success. It is the necessary second half of theory and practice, or the phrasing I prefer: Action & Reflection.
ice dipshits tried to force their way into the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis to abduct people https://www.ecuavisa.com/mundo/agentes-ice-ingresar-consulado-ecuador-minneapolis-eeuu-20260127-0074.html
NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE/DAY OF ACTION CALLED BY SOMALI AND BLACK STUDENT UNIONS IN MINNESOTA FOR FRIDAY
I can’t give a source for this part (I guess this is a bit of a leak) but PSL is helping organize at least 200 high school walkouts across the country. Everyone please look into this call to action and organize like crazy this week. We are at a point that hasn’t existed since 2020 where concessions (and perhaps more) can truly be won.
Alex Pretti’s coworkers taking a moment of silence in his memory this morning.
https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3mdedbdxcoc2g
Really feel for bro on the left
If ICE get injured slipping on ice then they’d likely get treated here, right?
China’s bamboo industry thrives as eco-friendly plastic alternative
CPC continues to show how ready they are to accommodate the global green wave, while continuing development of the productive forces at home.
Bamboo is just built different
Bamboo and mushrooms are the future, if we have have a future
Algae as well. Yum algae.
The damned Victorians spread dozens of pretty dangerous plants (giant hogweed! It doesn’t even look much fancier than regular, non-skin-hating, hogweed, it’s just big!) around as ornamentals for their silly gardens, and yet not one of them managed to naturalise bamboo…
Naturalizing bamboo is like trying to tame a hurricane. The shit is too powerful in places where there are no pandas.
Ok hear me out
British pandas
American pandas
African pandas
Pandas on the moon
Stop me if I’m going too far but I’ve got more ideas
Trump/US is now focusing on Cuba, they have been trying to pressure and block any nation from sending aid or money to Cuba. It seems like China ignored that and continued to send aid. Venezuelan Ships have been blocked, and Trump is trying to pressure Mexico.
France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-ban-officials-us-video-tools-zoom-teams-visio/
Mexico will maintain oil shipments to Cuba: Sheinbaum - Tiempo
Article
President Claudia Sheinbaum clarified that PEMEX decided to halt oil shipments due to contract issues; however, humanitarian aid will continue as Mexico has been providing it for years.
During her morning press conference, the president clarified that the confusion arose after the publication of a news article that misinterpreted a supposed suspension. “I never said it had been suspended,” she emphasized.
He explained that, on the one hand, Petróleos Mexicanos maintains commercial contracts with the Cuban government, where delivery times and volumes are determined according to the contractual terms. On the other hand, he explained that Mexico also sends fuel as humanitarian aid, as it does with other countries facing energy emergencies or crises.
Sheinbaum emphasized that humanitarian aid to Cuba continues, and that Mexican foreign policy is governed by historical principles of sovereignty, solidarity, and non-intervention. “Mexico has always stood in solidarity with the peoples of the world, and these are sovereign decisions,” she stated.
Finally, he reiterated that any decision related to Pemex contracts responds to technical and commercial criteria, while humanitarian assistance is maintained based on specific requests and needs.
Tulsi gabbard has been investigating 2020 election fraud, with the expectation that trump will issue executive orders before the next election.
I would guess an EO to ban mail in voting is probably on the way. Or ordering ice to monitor voting places.
I’m sure our institutions will save us. Lol.
The US Navy has posted pictures of them loading the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Delbert D. Black with munitions. This ship is currently in the Red Sea. Through the process of elimination and publicly available documents, we can work out exactly what they loaded into the ship’s Mk 41 VLS, instead of random guesses.
The picture:
First, there’s the size of this canister. It’s height means that it must be a MK 14 or MK 21 canister, it’s too tall otherwise. While some of the names of the munitions are outdated here, MK 14 is still for the Tomahawk. MK 21 is used with the SM-6 and SM-3 variants of missiles. So we know now that it’s one of those three.
To narrow it down further, we can look at the NALC (Navy Ammunition Logistics) code, which is the same as the DODIC (Department of Defense Identification Code ). The NALC is unblurred in the original photograph: 3544. If we look that up on the Hazard Classification of Us Military Explosives and Munitions “Yellow Book” (publicly available, it’s even an app), DODIC 3544 = TOMAHAWK, BLK IV, RGM-109E. Known as the Tactical Tomahawk, a land attack cruise missile with a two way datalink capable of re-targeting in flight to hit stationary, mobile, or pop up targets, and loitering over an area.
So a US Navy destroyer is currently in the Red Sea armed with advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles. Something that you could probably guess, but it’s always good to double check instead of guessing. SM-6 is 6400-6425, SM-3 is 6201.
I hope this is higher quality information than some clickbait twitter/telegram account going “look at big missile loaded on ship, strikes imminent” or something along those lines.
https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/2016380234354847744
Last week the Iranian government disclosed that 2,427 civilians and members of the security services and 690 insurgents were killed in the “riots” earlier this month, which recontextualizes what actually occurred - and explains the push to “manifest” a new Iranian government. Allow me to explain some insurgency theory. A “conventional” insurgency, as we saw in Vietnam, basically follows five phases per Galula:
- Creation of the insurgent party
- Cooption of all other opposition groups
- Guerilla war
- Conventional war
- Final overthrow of the government
This is the standard model of revolution by insurgency as used by the East Asian communist movements - China, Vietnam, et cetera. Critically, it involves the parallel creation of a communist state at the same time as the extant state is destroyed - the insurgent leaders will arrive at the abandoned government palace, sit down at the former El Presidente’s desk, and can immediately set about governing the country in an orderly way through the apparatus of the Party that is now spread root and stem through society at large. There is, however, an alternative method if you just want to seize power and don’t care so much about governing anything. Galula refers to it as the “bourgeois-nationalist shortcut” method, and it’s quite simple - the insurgent party replaces the years of boring organization and coalition-building in Phases 1 and 2 with a few weeks of MASS TERRORISM.
more
If the target state falters and fails to crush the insurrectionists during this critical stage, the insurgents will be able to rapidly organize a guerilla army using their newfound notoriety and political power and proceed to go about fighting the revolutionary war and eventually overthrowing the government. There won’t be a state apparatus left afterwards to let the revolutionaries govern anything, but generally the kind of people who use these methods don’t really care about little things like that.
There is a critical drawback to this model, however - if the state doesn’t buckle and cracks down effectively during the key terrorism phase, the insurgency is doomed. Unlike the communist model, in this phase the insurgency isn’t a broad-based social movement that can withstand official sanctions - it’s a plot involving a few hundred heavily-armed maniacs who can simply be killed by the police.
So how does this tie into Iran? Well, earlier this month organic protests about economic issues were hijacked by heavily-armed insurgents who proclaimed their general opposition to the government, fought running gun battles with police, caused a shocking amount of property damage, and attempted to organize public support for their movement via an intense social media push - all of this with some success! Then the Iranian government cracked down hard and the insurrection collapsed. All of this ties exactly into the model of a bourgeois-nationalist “terrorist insurgency” which was defeated during its period of maximum vulnerability - the terrorism phase itself - by a robust and agile state opponent. It also explains the sudden and massive push in the West to recognize the insurgency as a rival Iranian government almost immediately - all of this was very clearly orchestrated by Western interests (read: Mossad), and this insurrection had the clear aim of either overthrowing the Iranian government outright or starting a civil war in Iran. The people pushing to change the Iranian flag emoji on this website (which remains as the pre-1979 flag to this day) absolutely knew what their intended end-state was. The key thing to realize is that the bourgeois-nationalist insurgency method does not require a large network and mass popular support. It requires a few hundred - or even a few dozen - hard men with guns, and a capable PR team capable of getting people behind the insurgents so as to build a mass movement and support for guerilla war overnight. This is what Mossad et al. was trying to do in Iran earlier this month, and that was in all likelihood the actual extent of their remaining attack network in the country after much of it was dismantled during and after the Twelve Days’ War.
Actor Giancarlo Esposito called for a “revolution” in the U.S., citing rising political tensions fueled by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in Minneapolis. At the Sundance Film Festival, the “Breaking Bad” actor told Variety that powerful, wealthy, older white men are suppressing the American people, creating civil unrest, and inciting hatred.
Nouri al-Maliki is likely to again become Iraq’s prime minister. He also recently issued a strong statement on Syria:
"Syria is now a country under Turkish and Israeli rule, and the government consists of terrorists who used to be imprisoned in Iraq.
Do you really believe these terrorists can properly govern an ethnically and religiously diverse country like Syria?"
Flat circle
