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.
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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.
German state media reports: Iranian revolutionary guards will be classified as a terror organization "like Hamas" by the EU. France has given up the opposition on this matter in the EU parliament. Additional sanctions will be placed on Iran.
German article: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/eu-aussenminister-iran-100.html
Essentially positions on nuclear negotiations and the ballistic missile arsenal of Iran remain frozen, leading to contradictory positions on Iran in the middle east.
At the moment, as far as I know, EU nations have no massive military presence in the middle east, so the majority of fighting against the newly classified terrorists would be done by the US and Israel with diplomatic/economic/symbolic support. Maybe we can also view the EU trade deal with India in this context, giving India an alternative market to Iran/Central Asia in case of prolonged war.
Also EU support against Iran can be viewed as an attempt to improve US-EU relations, which got a little worse recently.
The US aircraft carrier is in the Arabian Gulf and combat ready. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/29/how-does-us-military-build-up-off-iran-compare-to-the-june-2025-strikes
The concept of "terrorism" is complete gibberish. If it meant anything at all (dubious) it was supposed to refer to non-state actors. If they're just going to start declaring official branches of national armed forces to be "terrorists" then the term has lost whatever meaning they were pretending it had. Now it's officially just "designated bad guys" with no technical meaning at all.
It's been a farce. If you want a sort of sad laugh check the NATOpedia list of designated terrorist orgs and ctrl+f Israel.
It's that by design. There's been decades of propaganda conditioning people to hear "terrorist" and think "evil for evil sake with no real deeper motivation". Then they label whichever enemy of the week as a terrorist and let the conditioning do the rest.
Kinda similar to what was done with communist/socialist, most people just associate it with "bad guys" without any deeper understanding. You ask them to define either term & you'll get all sorts of answers
The design was to create a special category of outlaws to whom international law doesn't apply. A "terrorist" was distinguished from regular armed forces specifically by being irregular and operating outside of any nation's laws. Anything could be done to them because they didn't exist within the framework of the so-called Rules Based International Order.
This had the benefit of protecting regular armed forces that regularly use terror tactics to achieve their aims. Anytime anyone tried to argue that the IOF or ICE were terrorists, smug liberals could loftily explain that "terrorist" only applies to non-state actors.
If they're going to start designating regular armed forces as "terrorists" it defeats the whole purpose and undermines the value of the label. I think this comes from the old order collapsing, now there's no function for the label as it was designed. They have no need to designate groups as outlaws because there is no law.
So they're gonna ethnically cleanse Persia and fail to actually dismantle the organisation they declared terrorists in the first place?
It's just the EU shifting its bureaucratic laserbeam away from Russia, since they've discovered their grand scheme of instigating American intervention in Ukraine (or whatever the fuck) has failed.
Now they're trying to entice the US with diplomatic consent (as if they ever had the ability to withdraw it) for more military strikes.
"Après vous, Monsieur Trump, zee IRGC are zo juizy et plomp!"
so they are as bad as people that attend protest in minneapolis ? seems kinda harsh ..