Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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/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/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.
can you imagine the shitstorm if this had happened? Israel would obviously have instantly blamed Hamas or Hezbollah regardless of whether it was remotely plausible and it would have been the Israeli hospital massacre all over again
Yep they would absolutely lie about it regardless of evidence. It would get muddied and come down to "we'll do an investigation later" while the media perpetuates "we just don't know" narratives.
At the end of the day it's just a telegram message repeating something seen on tv, probably Channel 12 but I couldn't be sure.
All this breaking news shit is extremely all over the place and unattributed. You should take it with a pinch of salt. I do filter out unreliable stuff as best I can but a couple of things have been wrong in the last 2 weeks. The OSINT groups in particular are all hives of chinese whispers. Be careful repeating content without verifying or hedging that it's uncertain breaking news, I generally just assume the regular gang here knows that at this point.
It's also basically a pain in the ass to double verify this stuff. Especially when some of it is genuinely unverifiable stuff coming out of Gaza sources.
Is Mayadeen or Sky News more reliable than a random person claiming to have a source somewhere? Nah not really, a lot of their information is from a random person with a source somewhere. But it's what we have.
Word, I appreciate that you linked those things here (I'm not on telegram so I have no idea what even comes out of that corner of the internet). Also understandable that the most breaking news will be hard to link to news sources until some time passes.
I personally avoid reading unattributed text and images of text just because it's so easy to fake that shit online, which is why I was curious about sources. But that particular reading habit of mine is probably not suited for the newest comments in a megathread like this
I'm not on telegram so I have no idea what even comes out of that corner of the internet
Virulent racism, fascism and hell, mostly. It's the least moderated online space I know of so it attracts exactly what you'd expect.
The problem is with this kind of info is that you're not ever going to get good sources for it. We get rumours from people on the ground laundered through 10 layers of translation and rewrites. Everyone puts their spin on it. Videos help prove certain things but they're not really that trustworthy either.