junebug2 [she/her, comrade/them]

SMO is Special Military Operation, which is what the war is called by Russia. This is partially a reflection of Russian military law (peacetime units have all the stuff but not all the infantry, and the ability to mobilize roughly scales with the threat) and jokingly pushing back on the media always saying “full scale invasion”. In real life, i say “the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War” as often as i can.

Do the Nazis have a plan? Probably not a good one. That said, the negotiator in Istanbul was associated with the Zelensky government, and he was assassinated by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Could they actually get the President? Maybe not, but at this point the Nazi militias have been integrated into the security services, so they might have inside information.

Way back in 2022, the official case for war included demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. Prior to the war, Ukraine had the second largest armed forces in Europe (after Russia), with over 500,000 men in the field. NATO/ the West is light on infantry and heavy on planes, spies, and bombs. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they have a large army.

For a decade up to the war, ethnic tensions in Ukraine were rising with CIA backing, and it explicitly targeted Russian speakers. The reality on the ground is that two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, formerly of Ukraine, are mostly Russian speaking. The language was banned in school and then in public, and there was regular artillery shelling of civilian centers. The Azov and other militias built up their influence there, not during this war. It’s less about Russia having a plan for after the war, and more that the security threat of Ukraine comes from how influential violently anti-Russian neo-Nazis are within the state. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they are ideologically anti-Russian.

Russia has tried several Nazi militia members taken as prisoners of war. i think they intend to kill or imprison as many as they can get, purely because it’s a material threat to their state. If the Ukrainian military is defeated and neo-Nazi hierarchy remains, NATO will support Ukrainian veterans becoming a decades-long terror threat

These are good questions, and i’ll try to answer them as best i can as a certified SMO-watcher since spring ‘22. Russia is broadly prosecuting the war as gently as possible. War remains a horrific sacrifice of human life, but Russia has almost totally avoided striking major civilian infrastructure, let alone civilians. The only major incident i can think of is the TV broadcast station in Kiev. They constantly attack power switching stations, but not power plants. Ukraine has almost no functional transformers or switching stations, and many parts of the country have 16 hour rotating blackouts. Russia did not strike heat and electrical generation until this last winter. Now, why is this? Some people say it’s a combination of optics and the sense of fraternity between Russians and Ukrainians. More cynically, you could say they want to keep a state around to negotiate with and don’t want to further encourage the formation of Ukrainian ISIS.

Many NATO military theorists really only understand manuever and big arrows on a map. Attrition, that is the exchange of matériel until one side can’t continue, is seen as a failure or defeat state. Any NATO general caught in such a “trap” would try and force some kind of breakout to regain initiative. It would be disingenuous to say all Western military planners are incapable of understanding other ways of warfare, but the journalists and analysts definitely do not. The Western commentariat have created an alternate reality, where Russia promised to win the war in three weeks, but the map lines have actually barely moved because of NATO. In warfare between people of roughly equal or similar capacity, you cannot fight or breakout beyond small, well-planned actions of combined arms. Taking terrain would involve sacrificing personnel and equipment for almost nothing. There are individual tree lines and villages that have seen excess of ten thousand casualties in Eastern Ukraine. This chipping away strategy is a reflection of a lot of new technological developments in war, but the end result is a slow and grinding conflict.

This leads into your next questions, why would anyone want a slow and grinding war? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Zelensky is not freely governing his country, and there are significant Banderite neo-Nazi factions in Parliament, industry, and especially the military. The Azov Nazis and their ilk would assassinate Zelensky, and really any President, who tried to settle for peace. They nearly negotiated peace in Istanbul in ‘22, but Ukraine shot their own negotiator. For all that Russia is a reactionary shithole that hates queer people, they sincerely meant “de-nazification” as a major war aim. Until the people who actively want millions of Ukrainians to die in a bid for ethno-nationalist glory do not have money, guns, or influence, the war will continue. For better and mostly for worse, this means the war will continue for the foreseeable future. A decapitation strike like you’re imagining wouldn’t be aimed at Zelensky or many MPs, but at milita commanders and fascist propagandists. These people are embedded into society, and have moved themselves into the back lines or blocking positions to escape death at the frontline.

thank you comrade, i had thought those tarps by the shore might have covered ramps to the ship or something. now that you say it, i can see the prow is on the dock. definitely not a great place for a boat to be

the second image especially looks to me like the ship is lying on one side. what do you mean by split in two? is it the tarps at the right/ upper part of the images? i don’t want to disagree with your analysis, i just don’t see it

i said ONE billion, and i also said that relatively few deaths would be directly caused by disasters like wet-bulb events. As of AR6, the IPCC says that 3.3-3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. They also say that given the projected global emissions for 2030, it is “likely that warming will exceed 1.5 degrees C during the 21st century”. This is because political factors force the IPCC to consider scenarios where the world cuts all emissions right now. In reality, 2023 saw a peak in demand for coal.

Even if we don’t hit any tipping points in the next ten years, and if we can predict ocean behavior and the weather, 2023 was 1.35 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average. According to a report about climate change and insurance risk, more than 2 degrees of warming by 2050 is baked in by current policy, and that there is a roughly 90% chance of catastrophic warming between now and 2050. To be clear, they classify ‘catastrophic’ as 25% GDP loss and around 2 billion people dead. If global warming is limited to 2 degrees by 2050 then 800 million will die, and if it is limited to 1.5 with some overshoot 400 million will die.

There is a degree to which all reports are questionable, and unfortunately money for climate research, at least in USAmerica, is being cut right as our models start to diverge from baseline data. The actuaries who wrote the insurance paper aren’t more qualified than climate scientists. That said, it’s not like there’s any version of climate change extreme enough to make corporations and bourgeois governments change their spots. Is the AMOC going to turn off tomorrow? Are we going to see 8 degrees of a warming? i would say no. Everyone has to find their own signal to noise ratio with this sort of research, and i stand by my prediction.

It’s incredibly disheartening to say, but the fact of the matter is that no state of the world is permanent. Every moment of history has its massacre, and there are people with morality and clear eyes capable of calling it out. Vastly more will try and write their memoirs as tragically sympathetic but incapable. Still more will pretend it didn’t happen. Much like how communist parties were able to bring about the last famines of Russia and China, we hope to see the last of these massacres.

The rest of the world/ “West” doesn’t necessarily hate Palestinians specifically (though they clearly don’t view them as human). Rather, climate change means we will see one billion people dead by 2035 (i am not a scientist, but this is my prediction). Climate change will induce natural disasters and reductions in agricultural land. This will directly kill a relatively small number of people. Far more will become climate refugees, and many of them will flee towards the “West”.

The “West” wants Palestine to be the blueprint for concrete slum-hells, full of constant surveillance, starvation, and bombardment. They can then construct them along the southern edge of their area of influence to funnel climate refugees into. They also want a blueprint for unpersoning millions of people in the eyes of Joe Public. This will let them wash their hands of confronting any of the moral and practical crimes of unfettered capitalism and imperialism.

The “optimistic” take is that the above paragraph will objectively never come to pass. There is a point where people will snap back, and there is such a thing as too many people for high tech surveillance, and there is such a thing as too few concentration camp guards. Even if we have to watch as demons in human skin kill one billion of our comrades and siblings, the world will not end. There will be moments of joy and bird song and good food. There will also be roughly seven billion people left on Earth, and one billion people to avenge.

Our goal as socialists and communists, and i would say as humans, is to try and stop all that shit. If we can’t stop all of it, or even any of it, our goal is to prevent it happening again. Imperialism is self-defeating, capitalism will ultimately lead itself into crisis after crisis until it is destroyed, and there will need to be cockroach communists to try and provide mutual aid in the ashes. The fate of Cassandra was to have knowledge of future events while being unable to impact them. Cassandra did not have 150 years of theory and praxis from people trying to predict the future and change it.

Sorry if this is too long, but i agree with your outrage and i’ve been thinking about how to respond for a few days.