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.
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.
I also thought of Bangladesh but Bangladesh is a pretty big country, it's impossible to think they only export 35B. That being said my first guess was Bhutan which is much, much smaller than 35B so what do I know
Thanks for the advice! I blame my inexperience for that one. The relative sizes of economies aren't set in my brain yet, especially for the bigger countries. 35B on its is still pretty meaningless to me on its own right now.
I have a rough heuristic for 4 categories:
<$1B: Island nation or city state
~10B: Small country
~50-100B: Medium country
~200B - 400B: Major power
> 400B: Probably 5 eyes, Russia, China, etc and it's pretty easy to identify who is who based on the exports
A pretty good deal is to check the proportion of refined petroleum vs crude petrol exports. If they mostly export crude, they're likely a neo-colony; OTOH most small economies that export refined petroleum will be countries that nationalized their oil resources at some point, or decolonized in some other way. If you have good world history knowledge that can help a ton.
Went with Vietnam first, then just guessed all the countries around it since the distance shown was 300 km. I also thought about Bangladesh, but then decided that Bangladesh didn't have much of a semiconductor industry