Image depicts a destroyed Saudi pipeline pumping station.
My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
If last week has had a geopolitical main character, it was Ansarallah in Yemen. In under 24 hours, they managed to seize a very large amount of territory to their west from Saudi-backed mercenary groups. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers fled, thousands more were captured, and hundreds of combat vehicles and all sorts of military equipment and ammunition are now in Ansarallah’s hands. The entire Red Sea coast of Yemen is now under their control, as well as some of the islands in and around the Bab el-Mandab, which is the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which then goes on to connect to the Arabian Sea.
While Ansarallah had a pretty good grip on the Red Sea beforehand and could blockade it to the extent that traffic through the Red Sea plummeted in 2024 and 2025 and remain subdued to this day, it is now capable of much more direct control. And the strait is considerably narrower than Hormuz, meaning there is little hope for any covert operations like those of which the US regularly tries and fails to do over there. The only alternatives for the enemies of Ansarallah both now and in the future are the route all the way around Africa, which becomes even less attractive than usual as fuel prices rise into daily record highs, or the newly inaugurated Northern Sea Route under the firm control of Russia.
While Ansarallah is likely to continue their territorial acquisitions to an extent - with Marib looking like an obvious target - how things will continue from this point seems likely to be increasingly diplomatic. Yemen was once divided between North Yemen (which is, really, western Yemen) and South Yemen (which is, really, eastern Yemen), and this division reflects several genuine historical differences between the populations. Ansarallah has repeatedly stated that they have no intention to militarily occupy the south, and indeed, they ended this most recent offensive at approximately the historical border. Nonetheless, the government in once-South Yemen’s capital of Aden is considered the sole internationally recognized government of Yemen, which doesn’t sound sustainable for the future, so we’ll just have to see how the situation develops geopolitically from here, even if it’s unlikely to be militarily in the case of the southern and eastern territories.
While all this has been going on, Ansarallah was additionally applying major pressure on Saudi Arabia itself, by bombing their military airfields and, even more critically, their oil transportation and production facilities. These strikes were mostly limited to the port facilities in e.g. Yanbu and Jazan, and the Western air interceptor famine has meant that these strikes were mostly unopposed and caused substantial losses. However, Ansarallah has now destroyed some pumping stations for the East-West pipeline that spans Saudi Arabia, bypassing Hormuz for some (but not all) of Saudi Arabia’s oil production to the tune of around 4 million barrels per day, which is, in a happy numerical coincidence, about 4% of pre-2026 oil production. I’ve seen several wildly varying estimates for how long it might take to repair the stations, with some saying a few days and others stating at least a month; the damage does look pretty gnarly on the images. Of course, it might not really matter, because Ansarallah can easily just fire another missile at a station once it’s repaired, unless and until the Saudis give in to Ansarallah’s demands and end the war.
Last week’s thread 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 the Zionists’ 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:
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.
Uzbek socialist Aziz Hakimov sentenced to over 4 years in prison for opposing rehabilitation of anti-soviet counter revolutionaries
spoiler
In Uzbekistan, a local journalist with socialist views, Aziz Hakimov, was sentenced to 4 years and 2 months in prison under the charge of “inciting hatred” for his statements against the process of rehabilitating figures from the Basmachi movement of 1918-1944, who fought against Soviet power with weapons, attempting to restore power to mullahs, wealthy individuals, and feudal lords.
The basis for the charges was his statement: “From a legal perspective, Uzbekistan is currently preparing to immortalize the memory of cruel murderers and terrorists. The Basmachi detachments were a very primitive analogue of ISIS* and other newly formed terrorist organizations.”
In addition, Aziz Hakimov condemned the initiative of the parliamentary party “Milliy Tiklanish” to ban Soviet symbolism and communist ideology in Uzbekistan, even though the Communist Party had been abolished by the authorities in 1994. He was also charged with publishing Soviet posters from the period of the Great Patriotic War, but he was acquitted on this charge.
The trial itself was held behind closed doors, and the case files are classified. It is clear that this verdict is a result of the process of rehabilitation and glorification in the Central Asian republics and the South Caucasus of figures from bourgeois-nationalist movements, collaborationist formations that fought in the ranks of the Nazi Wehrmacht and Muslim SS units, who are now presented as participants in the “struggle for national liberation.”
This same pattern can be seen in the sentencing of four young people with communist views in Azerbaijan to prison terms. At the beginning of August, in a Baku court, Ibrahim Asadli and Abdulla Ibrahimli were sentenced to two years in prison, while Elchin Bayramly and Mehman Zeynalov were sentenced to one and a half years for simply displaying the flags of the USSR and the Azerbaijan SSR. “Evidence” of their guilt also included Marxist literature and discs with video recordings of Soviet leaders that were seized during searches. Previously, Saleh Samedov, the head of the Council of Elders of the Imishli region, was sentenced for using a Soviet flag during the celebration of May 9th. These repressions are not surprising in light of President Ilham Aliyev’s statement that Azerbaijan was a “colony” of the Soviet Union.
It is clear that these trials and prison sentences for supporters of socialism are intended to intimidate those who oppose anti-social reforms, privatization, and the commercialization of education and healthcare, as well as those who openly condemn the process of rehabilitating Basmachi and Nazi collaborators in countries that are members of the Organization of Turkic States. This is also a logical consequence of the mass renaming campaigns aimed at decommunization, and the constant initiatives of individual deputies and entire parties in the parliaments of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan to ban communist ideology.
We demand the immediate release of Aziz Hakimov, Azerbaijani communists, and all bloggers and journalists in the republics that are members of the Organization of Turkic States who have been sentenced to prison terms for their views.
I thought the USSR was viewed most positively In Central Asia
There’s lots of online media where travelers talk to old folks that describe their lives in the USSR as being overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps, now that a whole generation has lived without socialism and the capitalists have had time to fully develop their civil society institutions, it’s time for the bourgeoisie to finally rewrite history.
the population that actually experienced socialism, yes. however, the régimes generally don’t care about their population, and younger people are sadly much more indoctrinated into right-wing views.
A lot of the younger generation are going in the Ukraine direction- Pan-turanism, religious fundamentalism, pro-west thought.
Especially since minorities are shrinking in those places.
It’s almost as though, as opposed to imperial capitalist policies, the Soviets maintained a purposefully diverse and ethnic minority centered policy structure that, when removed, did not lead to a flourishing of “suppressed minority cultures under socialist doctrine” but subsuming of them into globally marketed ideology.
Tbf a lot of the diversity came from the various deportation around WW2.
And then economic migration (like the virgin soil campaign). But yeah the Soviet Union did fund massive cultural programs, established alphabets for rural dialects and ignored minorities, etc…
After the fall, they were one of the first programs cut and led to the minorities switching to Russian and migranting away.
And I was thinking of visiting…
I guess I’ll have to go with my dummy phone and keep quiet. In a just world China would condemn these moves, as they have weight to pull here.
Tajikistan and Kirghizistan are a bit better in that regard and have beautiful soviet mosaics (sadly deteriorating) all over the place.