Analysis and images of the parades is all over the internet and in the last megathread; for the China-India stuff I recommend this article, as well as the Tricontinental in general.
Image is from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net’s comment in the last megathread.
Last week was the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, and on such an occasion, China put on quite an impressive military parade, especially in comparison to the rather drab and corporate parade that the USA recently had. In attendance were many world leaders, including Putin, Kim Jong Un, and a very happy-looking Lukashenko.
This took place shortly after the SCO summit in Tianjin, in which Modi was notably in attendance. That one of the world’s most powerful fascists was in attendance in China near the anniversary of the World Antifascist War is obviously pretty ironic. Regardless, the mood was still relatively positive; for example, Xi announced the acceleration of the creation of the SCO development bank, and Indian-Chinese relations are once again in the thaw cycle of their long-term cyclical pattern, with direct flights resumed and links expanded. The fact that there is this much projected optimism from China about a Global South which is being increasingly tariffed, infiltrated, starved, looted, bombed, invaded, and massacred in the hundreds of thousands by rabid imperialist dogs is perhaps a little tone-deaf, but buoying up the SCO is better than doing nothing at all, I suppose.
Any astute Geopolitics Understander can tell you that this is certainly not India joining the side of the Global South, but instead a move somewhat forced upon them as they seek to balance both sides for their own gain. As Trump amps up pressure on India via tariffs, it is natural that India would seek leverage, and there is much that India gains: industrial development, increased intra-regional trade, and scientific knowledge from a China which has, in numerous fields, now pulled ahead of the USA. India is also facing numerous internal crises, ranging from run-of-the-mill capitalist incompetence and corruption, to worsening conditions for farmers, to the ravaging impacts of climate change, and increasing their links with China is a way to vent off a little of that pressure and protect Modi’s regime.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel'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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Like… Top Gun but for drones? Who gives a shit about making drone pilots better, isn’t the point supposed to be that they’re expendable?
Waste of resources. The strategy for using them is more important than the skill of the pilot.
I’m not sure what you mean? The drones themselves are expendable, but we’re a long way from fully autonomous AI-controlled ones - they still need human pilots, and those guys’ skills are very important.
The scale of your drone operations is capped not so much by the number of drones you have available (which could be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands), but by the number of pilots (who you’ll definitely not have anywhere near as many of) - drone teams actually have a very low rate of fire, and it obviously takes some time to actually fly drones out to where they need to be (as the closer the drone team is to the battlefield, the more at risk they are of being discovered by an enemy drone team and being taken out). So you want to make your shots count - if you miss, or hit the target sub-optimally, or are shot down, by the time you can get another drone out there, you may well have missed your chance.
Additionally, whoever you’re targeting isn’t just going to sit there - they’ll try to take your drone down. Just flying in a straight line towards the target is an easy way to get shot down, so you want to avoid that - for example, there’s been some footage of what are essentially drone ambushes, where the drone is lying in wait somewhere next to a road, until a vehicle passes by, at which point the drone goes up and flies at the vehicle from behind, often before anyone riding on it can react and try to shoot it down. And one of the other emerging counter-drone measures is actually… just other drones - skillful flying is very much still important.
We don’t need to armchair-general this one - we can simply observe that Russia and Ukraine, the two countries actually deeply involved in drone warfare, and China, which is closely watching the conflict and taking notes, all value drone operator skill immensely, and are constantly working to improve their tactics.
edit: I guess I took so long to write my response that the comment was edited in the meantime, classic me
Strategy doesn’t just exist in some abstract void - it has to be carried out by people. And obviously those people need to have the necessary skills to accomplish what the strategy requires from them. I still don’t get how pilot skill is somehow irrelevant to strategy.
A drone pilot doesn’t need to be doing loop the loops and barrel rolls. They fly to a target in a straight line from a launch site determined by people at the strategy layer and point the drone at a target upon reaching it. Waiting to ambush isn’t particularly special either.
There is very little to teach here beyond the basic controls and the pilot adjusting to the input lag that occurs at long range. This isn’t Top Gun shit it’s just doing some basic training with drones whereas before there wasn’t any.
But… this just straight up isn’t true? Like, come on, this is literally the most documented war ever fought (
), we can just… look at actual footage. See the video posted above, and some more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1kejqxx/a_ukrainian_drone_with_fiberoptic_control_pursued/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/16fv4b8/the_ukrainian_drone_operator_maneuvers_to_avoid_a/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1bmgsc5/72_mech_brigade_black_zaporozhians_destroy_a/
Here’s a drone flying in a straight-ish line being shot down:
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1951948928254927119
Here’s one getting shot down while flying at a vehicle, and another not getting shot down - in both cases the drone approaches from the side and does some light maneuvering:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1lc9uhw/ukrainian_troops_shoot_down_a_russian_fiberoptic/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1ml0772/gopro_footage_shows_a_ukrainian_riding_in_the/
Here’s a drone ambush:
https://x.com/prestonstew_/status/1925279303584845843
Also, “determined by people at the strategy layer” is a completely ridiculous notion - targets aren’t known well in advance, drones are constantly flying around observing and finding targets - the battlefield in the Ukraine war is actually incredibly sparse, while a lot of comparisons have been made to WW1 due to the slow-moving nature of the conflict, the structure of the front here is radically different from the incredibly densely packed and continuous frontline in France back then. There’s lots of gaps, and there aren’t massive troop concentrations marching in kilometer-long lines - rather, small units, literally single vehicles and a couple of guys riding on them, driving around small county roads. There’s no way to see all those in advance and target them, and by the time your drone gets to the location they’ll be gone.
We may perhaps be talking past another and thinking about different kinds of drone warfare. The kinds of strikes carried out on cities, by drones like the Shahed/Geran, do not have pilots at all - they’re precision-guided munitions, with their target coordinates input before the strike and then no further manual input, just automatic guidance. That’s an area where skill does indeed not matter (well, you need guys to figure out the coordinates, but that’s a separate area, more related to intelligence-gathering, and their involvement ends before the drones fly away), and you can just launch all the drones you have at once if you want. But in this exercise, “the drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones” - which is a completely different thing, a completely different kind of drone meant for different missions.
The former conduct missions closer to strategic bombing in concept, and are indeed just pointed at the target - the latter are meant more so for striking individual enemy concentrations (and sometimes just straight-up individual soldiers), closer to the tactical bombing and CAS roles, but much more finely-grained. And that fine grain requires pilots, with skills.
All of these videos of drone shootdowns are either of drones that do not know they’re being shot at or drones that have been spotted and are in a chase scenario that forces them to fly straight anyway.
In the cases where they do not know they’re being attacked, the first time these pilots even know their drone is under attack is when they’re spiralling out of control. There is nothing those operators could have done differently besides flying at different altitudes or launching from a different site, they can not fly defensively against something they don’t even see attacking them.
In the cases where the situation has developed into a chase, that’s just a situation that happens. They can either give up or fly straight at them and hope to catch up. They have limited flight time and have to try despite the less than ideal circumstances.
Better operators doesn’t really improve either of these scenarios.
I’m really not impressed by these “he flew through a doorway” videos that are supposed to be skilled. My mum can do this with a quadcopter, it’s not difficult or skillful in the slightest. Everyone can do it with an hour of flight time.