this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of the USS Abraham Lincoln arriving at Thailand, looking worn after a very long deployment to the Arabian Sea.


My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preambleTo start briefly with Iran, there's been two significant developments over the last week. First is that Iran is now beginning to put into practice its policy that allows preemptive strikes - a policy which was authorized by the previous Khamenei a while before his death but has so far gone unused - to strike at Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan without a corresponding American aggression immediately beforehand. The second development is that Iran is now taking a firmer stand against the US Navy in the waters of the Arabian Sea, beginning by testing anti-ship ballistic missiles against the US fleet - so far without confirmed hits as of me writing this sentence - as it is obviously disadvantageous for Iran to simply not do anything against the blockade even with US logistics under strain. The US has attempted to dissuade these new strikes by striking Iranian oil tankers, to which Iran has responded by striking oil tankers aligned with the West. This is very much not a shooting war that the US wants to get into as oil stockpiles continue to decline and diesel prices are at all-time highs (though if adjusted for inflation, we still have a little more time before we hit absolute highs). The overall picture is of an Iran growing in confidence.

There's also been some encouraging news out of Yemen, where Ansarallah has been conducting a ground offensive weaken the enemy occupation of the western coast, including some breathtakingly precise drone-drop operations combined with using recon drones to guide ballistic missiles at enemy formations. As far as I'm aware, the blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb to Saudi tankers has been very successful, although stopping Saudi tankers from heading north towards Suez has been understandably trickier. I suppose if push comes to shove, they can continue to strike the very immobile coastal oil facilities rather than trying to hit moving ships at a great distance.

The news out of Russia/Ukraine has been quite miserable for particularly Ukrainian civilians over the past month or two, with Ukrainian strikes on Russian civilian logistics and warehouses being met with much greater Russian responses on Ukrainian civilian logistics and warehouses. Ukrainian ports are now effectively blockaded, making exporting agricultural products in the same quantities as before essentially impossible, and within the cities including Kiev, food suppliers are scrambling to find smaller warehouses to place goods in so that they aren't as easily destroyed like the larger warehouses have been. I find it sincerely upsetting that the war has progressed to this point, though it's always worth noting that, first, Ukraine had a few opportunities to sign pretty good negotiating terms with Russia; and second, in comparison, Western wars begin at the step of making a conflict about hurting civilians, even to the extent of it being a detriment to strategic goals by not solely hitting military targets (most famously in Gaza, but also e.g. during Obama's term by bombing weddings and hospitals).

I will confess to not being as up-to-date on the situation in Europe, and especially Germany, in regards to the Ukraine War as I would like, but as a general statement, nothing I've seen over the last few years has demonstrated to me that Europe is capable of fielding a conventional force which would provide a formidable, let alone existential, threat to Russia at this stage. There's been lots of embarrassing stories about European missile, drone, and shell production being well below standards in both quality and quantity. My thoughts are now that I think the age of the US/NATO posing an existential conventional threat to China, Russia, and probably Iran (and perhaps others like the DPRK?) is now conclusively over, with Western bases proven to be indefensible with existing missile defence programs, their logistics very vulnerable to disruption, and their aircraft not being safe to use over airspace at least as well-protected as Iran's. The US can still do cataclysmic, nation-destroying damage to smaller, less defended countries like those in Latin America and Africa, but for the anti-US squad in Eurasia, the vast majority of the threat from the US is now a combination of financial/debt offensives and covert intelligence. We still have a long way to go on both those fronts, however - a minimum of a decade or two, I believe, even with Trump's inadvertently anti-imperialist accelerationism.

Lastly for this preamble, the annual SCO summit took place on September 1st in Bishkek, with the leaders of China, Russia, Iran, India, Türkiye, Pakistan, and others in attendance. A lot of the usual statements were made: down with hegemonies, down with militarising space, down with unilateral sanctions, up with local currency exchanges, up with cooperation, up with peace, etc etc. The big proclamation this time around was the Bishkek Declaration, which reiterated all those points I just mentioned. Overall, it's one of those documents where the content is mostly cool and indirectly jabs a lot at the US, but I find that paper is a generally ineffective barrier of protection against bombs and missiles, which is a pretty major avenue of... let's say, "international communication" in the current day. And I would like to see some real contenders to the World Bank and IMF taking shape soon if we're gonna truly start fighting hegemonism, but I digress.


Last week's thread is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


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[–] trompete@hexbear.net 59 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

I was told only in the south and east were Russian speakers the majority, but the recent story about them being unable to stop the children in Kiev from speaking Russian with each other, and shit like this where seemingly everybody in the government speaks Russian unless they're in front of a microphone makes me think that those statistics were cooked.

[–] supafuzz@hexbear.net 45 points 10 hours ago

when your nationalist project definitely isn't fake

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 42 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

They speak russian with Ukrainian slang words in Kiev. Russian is also spoken everywhere in the country.

Only in the west do they actually speak Ukrainian natively. Since it was conquered by Poland and the Austrians for most of modern history.

In the South and East people do associate more with the Soviet Union and the Ukraine SSR or a vague notion of pan-russianism.

[–] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 33 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

People do speak Ukrainian natively elsewhere, it's that Western Ukraine only speaks Ukrainian, whereas the rest of the country is bilingual to varying degrees

Share of native Russian speakers by oblast in 2001:

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

No people in western Ukraine also speak russian as a second language and use it to communicate with people from other regions in Ukraine.

The more east you go the less “creole” russo-ukrainian language is spoken. Using western data which presents a sharp Ukrainian vs Russian dichotomy is actively harming your understanding of the situation on the ground.

[–] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 15 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I think you are putting words in my mouth. The graph I showed is only of native speakers, I already know that there's a lot of bilingualism and code-switching eg. speaking Ukrainian at home but Russian at work. I only brought up this graph because you claimed "only in the West is Ukrainian spoken natively", which isn't true: most Ukrainians in the south and some in the Donbass do, but public life has historically been conducted in Russian. Russian is also more prevalent in big cities anywhere: while Lviv Oblast on this map had only 3.8% native Russian speakers, the city of Lviv had closer to 10% at the time. In my other comment I showed a map of "creole Russo-Ukrainian" that shows lower percentages in the Donbass, implying a more purely Russian public life.

I've spent lots of time looking at ethnic and linguistic maps of the world in my spare time, curious to look beyond the political lines on a map. So I'm very aware of the ways linguistic maps can give the illusion of sharp language divisions.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 2 points 2 hours ago

You are simplifying something into flat categories which has a much more fluid politically tinted dynamic going on. What does it mean to speak Russian natively? There is such room for interpretation that many of these lean as far as possible towards "speaking Russian natively means you had to learn Ukranian in school" instead of taking into account: mutual intelligibility in some dialects, children being natively bilingual, Ukranian being first learned at home but Russian for all social occasions (where it would develop better).

This simplification into the map and percentage structure has little utility. Fuck them maps

[–] huf@hexbear.net 22 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

i think the middle of the country speaks some kind of transitional dialects somewhere between standard russian and standard ukrainian, or something.

[–] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 20 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Caveat that the map is from 2003

[–] huf@hexbear.net 15 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

so wait, the rest of the center is mostly russian? who actually speaks ukrainian natively in that country? the people of the west who used to be occupied by austria?

[–] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 26 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

Surzhyk is a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, not usually considered a language of its own, spoken mostly in the countryside. It was looked down upon as impure and "Russified" Ukrainian, but in recent years it has become associated with "patriotic" south-eastern Ukrainians learning the language and so has been given grace as "better than Russian".

As for statistics:

As of 2022, 81% of the population of Ukraine speak the Ukrainian language in their personal life, at the same time 34% speak Russian, meaning that a significant portion of Ukrainian residents constituting 19% of people speak both languages regularly.

[–] tocopherol@hexbear.net 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Where's the stat from? Not saying it's wrong or anything, just curious the source.

[–] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Tbh I just grabbed it off Wikipedia and now looking at the source (landline poll by Ukrainian professor with Canadian money and text full of nationalist prose) I believe these numbers are exaggerated, but I also don't think fully fantastical.

Russian Wikipedia, while still libbed, tends to use better sources, and they cite studies that looked at language use on the internet.

This one shows the ratio between mentions of speaking Ukrainian and Russian in profiles of Ukrainian users on Vkontakte (Russian Facebook), in 2015. Most of the country is bilingual, with exceptions being the Donbass, Crimea and far west.

This one shows predominance of either the Russian or Ukrainian word for "news" in Google Trends, in 2011, 2015, 2020 and 2024.

rant because my head hurtsThis one question is a nightmare because most data available is highly outdated and/or untrustworthy. After years of absorption of various polls and news articles, I can say this:

  • there has been a slow decline in Russian since the 1980s, starting in Western Ukraine, but Russian remained the language of mass media and business until recently;
  • outside Crimea and separatist-controlled parts of the Donbass, most Russian speakers held a "neither Putin nor Bandera" mentality, opposing the valorisation of the Banderites but saying Russia didn't represent their interests either and supporting the language status quo;
  • how language determines ethnic and national identity has been constantly changing and it's a big mess where you can't assume things about one based on the other, especially now;
  • there was a massive shift away from Russian to Ukrainian in all spheres of life at least from 2022 to 2024, as well as an inversion of attitudes towards Stepan Bandera

But even that last point may be outdated now: patriotic fervour is fading and support for the government is crumbling, which might very well be causing people to lose motivation and more often speak in "colloquial" Russian again. It would explain the sudden influx of stories like kids in Kiev/Kyjiv hearing more Russian than Ukrainian in some schools.

[–] huf@hexbear.net 12 points 11 hours ago