Image is of Ansarallah military spokesman Yahya Saree delivering a statement/speech.
The ceasefire appears to be at least temporarily over, with an exchange of fire between (what appears to be) predominantly Iran and the entity, though as always I expect we’ll find increasing evidence of direct US involvement.
The chain of events was as follows, in spoilers below for those who haven’t been keeping up:
chain of events summary
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A while ago, Iran warned the occupation entity that if they strike Beirut (with particular emphasis on its southern suburbs, which is an area where Hezbollah officials/structures are concentrated as I understand it) then they will directly strike the north of Occupied Palestine, turning the area into a military zone, and encouraged settlers to leave to avoid civilian casualties.
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This warning was grudging accepted by the entity, who ordinarily has a policy called the Daniyeh Doctrine, in which they murder civilians en masse by bombing apartment buildings and houses in enemy cities in order to pressure the military forces they are battling to give into conditions they ordinarily would not be obliged to accept, because the Zionist ground campaigns are usually fairly ineffective at achieving goals on medium to long timescales. While removing their ability to bomb Beirut didn’t halt the Daniyeh Doctrine entirely (they could and did hit other places), their distinct inability to strike the capital when they ordinarily could do that freely was a big source of discontentment in both the civilian population and the military.
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As Hezbollah increasingly attrited the Zionist offensive forces, the attractiveness of bombing Beirut in retaliation increased regardless of the consequences, and of course the Zionists do still want to do anything they can to attack and weaken Iran directly and are much worse at hiding this than even the US. This resentment culminated on June 7th, where the Zionists conducted an airstrike on Beirut on a Hezbollah HQ.
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Iran immediately said that this constituted a break in the ceasefire, and Khamenei put Iran back on a full war footing. Within 6 hours of the strike on Beirut, Iranian missiles were flying towards the northern occupied territories, in what they regarded as merely a warning shot. Western media was obviously fairly dismissive of this; 182% interception rates and all that jazz, but we have several videos of missiles hitting targets.
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Trump publicly warned the Zionists to not respond, which many sensible people immediately diagnosed as kayfabe, and Iran obviously remained on guard against a counterattack. This came a few hours later from Zionist drones and stand-off strikes from aircraft likely in Iraqi airspace, just like in the initial phase of the war months ago. These hit sites in western and central Iran, including a petrochemical facility, but also with some interceptions.
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Iran then responded to this counterattack with a yet bigger warning shot into the occupied territories. Ansarallah also joined in with strikes on the Zionists, and they additionally announced that the Red Sea is now closed to all vessels linked directly to the entity. Certain accounts have said that the Bab el Mandab is now actually under full blockade, but this is not clearly substantiated as of me writing this at about 2pm BST, June 8th. There’s been a lot of “considering closing” and “threatening to close” and “moving to close” the Red Sea over the ceasefire period that hasn’t materialized, so I don’t want to get out over my skis.
Worth noting that according to Yves over at Naked Capitalism (a fairly reliable and left-leaning, but not communist, website), we’re now about a month or so away from reaching “tank bottom”. This is largely because commercial demand destruction has not sufficiently occurred due to oil price market manipulations keeping it low, and also because there have been basically no government policies in the US like widespread work-from-home orders. So, soon the shortages will be of the literal oil molecules not being available and not just the price signal. So there’s an increasing anxiety in the US to get this conflict over before the economy really starts to crash in the latter half of the year, one way or another. As a deal seems only increasingly unlikely given US stubborness and inability to accept battlefield realities, a return to military strikes as we’ve seen appears the only way forward, despite almost catastrophic munitions shortages.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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:
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.
I’ll believe Ukrainian army collapse when I see it. People have been predicting it for years. Drones totally changed the battlefield and as long as women, the elderly, etc can continue piloting drones from apartments and malls in Kiev and Lviv they can really make gains painful and slow for Russia and continue to prevent any massive changes in geographic holdings. It’s not like a traditional war where the collapse of the army means units are no longer physically present to block, fire upon, etc and otherwise stop the enemy from entering an area. Now danger can and does come from hundreds of kilometers away piloted by people who may be a further 500 kilometers away and with no warning meaning big open movements are impossible if you value your men and equipment not being blown to bits. This means its easy to get pinned down and gains are measured in near trench warfare terms a lot of the time.
I think this grinding war can continue for years more at this pace as both sides are dug in. As long as the Europeans continue to supply Ukraine with funds and arms.
People have been wrong because they just didn’t expect Ukraine to simply feed every man in the country into the meat grinder (and, now that there’s talk of Europe kicking refugees back home, all the men outside of the country too! Europe wants to force Ukrainian refugees to return home to fight). The Ukrainian army should have collapsed - the fact that it didn’t has basically ensured severe demographic crisis and economic collapse post-war. It’s pretty easy to sustain a war for long if you just sacrifice the entire future existence of your country, but it might be a bit problematic once that future actually arrives and you have to start tackling questions like “oh, so who’s going to actually work in the economy?”. Kind of hard to accurately predict the behavior of someone like that.
They can’t, because that isn’t even close to how drones work. Typical FPV drones have ranges of at most 15-20km. This can be extended with signal relay systems, but radio-controlled drones are vulnerable to jamming anyway, which is why fiber-optics became a thing - and those bring you back down to 20km in the end (although there are experiments with longer wire spools). It seems like at most with some types being experimented with you can get to maybe 50-60 km, although there have been Ukrainian claims of strikes as far as 100-ish km away - but, even with that, you’re not flying shit from Kiev, and absolutely not from Lviv
Additionally, drones are pretty slow (by artillery & missile standards anyway), so even if you had a longer range, you’d still want your drone operators to be as close to the battlefield as safely possible, so they can quickly respond - if it takes you hours to actually fly the drone out, you can’t do much to stop an enemy movement because the movement will be complete by the time you get there.
You may be mixing up different types of drone here - the one-way attack Shahed/Geran style do have such ranges, but they’re not piloted - they operate more like missiles, having coordinated pre-programmed in and then being launched. So, not really good against moving targets, and even with some AI-powered targeting systems which there is ongoing research for, the speed problem still applies - you cannot use these for rapid responses against enemy movements on the ground, they are a tool for bombing static targets like enemy bases and infrastructure, not troops.
But anyways, what this means is that
isn’t really correct - drone operators are close to the frontline, and if it collapses, they’re at risk.
Except, there is a warning - as described above, FPV drones aren’t doing these long-range strikes, it’s a different style of drone altogether. And the long-range ones are slow and quite detectable - that’s why we can get such detailed maps of Russian strikes on Ukraine. They are still effective despite this, as they can just be launched in such large numbers as to overwhelm air defense systems - however, this is, again, against static targets - troops could be alerted that there’s a drone coming, and just… move.
Fortifications are meaningless without troops to man them - and, if there are now serious talks about sending refugees back to fight, as mentioned above (blatant violation of international law, btw), it doesn’t exactly bode well for that notion. And European supply is certainly key - the Ukrainian government pretty much wouldn’t be able to actually pay salaries without foreign money - but how long can it actually last for, given that there’s now countries demanding that the EU pay them for past support to Ukraine? European economies aren’t exactly doing well, and the coming oil crisis is hardly going to help.
Russia already has control of eastern Ukraine which was what they set out to achieve in the first place. At this point, they are just grinding every last bit of Ukrainian fighting capacity to dust so Ukraine will be unwilling and unable to have any leverage in eventual negotiations. Attrition is their bread and butter and they said from the beginning they will go as long as it takes.
People also way over estimate the ubiquity of drones. They are a nuisance but they are not able to halt an advance of tens of thousands let alone hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Drones added another dynamic element to modern war, but they are not able to win a war on their own.
The smaller ones probably pack about as much punch as a hand granade, like oh no! Lol
Is a flying piloted hand grenade not a big deal lol
I mean that sounds like enough
Russia could be doing a lot more to cut off that supply of arms into the country via collapsing all the train tunnels going west. They still haven’t done this and I cannot fathom why at this point beyond it being out of their capabilities for some technical reason I’m not understanding. Khinzals should seemingly do the trick. There’s no point in preserving the infrastructure of Lviv and western Ukraine, Russia will never hold it and never intends to.
they could collapse maritime trade at any point as well, but because of porkies interests - they can’t. such is life of a porky state
it’s still just a hybrid war, not a total war. Otherwise you would see a break.
It’s a total war for ukraine though. usa with chud energy of “we just blockade you lmao” managed to occupy venezuela, likely cuba in future and semi-folded iran, while russia is like oooh the law, the grain deals, how can this be, call the un, instead of just exploding any oil and gas in the state they are at war with.
Ukraine could go more all-in, but not much. They are certainly closer to total war footing. They could still escalate via dirty bombs with their nuclear material, terrorist attacks on oil/gas infrastructure in frenemy nations like Hungary and Slovakia (ie the Norstream gambit writ large) and lowering conscription ages to like 16 and conscripting women and elderly via their normal tactics of press ganging randoms into unmarked vans. But at that point, those are all self-defeating and self-destructive desperate actions that would result in a destroyed and ruined Ukraine either way.
I don’t think Iran is in any way semi-folded as of yet, unless you are just talking about the Pez administration in general being squishy losers afraid of winning. Luckily I think they are only a faction and not at all completely dominant, but they love mucking shit up and spreading confusion.
In general though, it is sad to see how non-seriously America’s enemies take America. It’s like there’s a serial killer going around with the no country for old men cattle gun killing nations in a line, and people are just acting like it’s business as usual and not doing anything about it. Looking the other way. Trying to cut deals with him.
Because everyone is a capitalist nation, thus they can’t resist america, not really. if the amerikkka is 5% popular with the nation, they’ll still cut deals with them (see egypt vs gazan gas field), because it makes porkies happy, and state serves the bourgeoisie.
ukraine role is to launch drones from imperial west until russia sells privatizes resources to them, they seem to be doing fine in that job
[phone rings]
“Is… is Nordstream 2 there?”
“Not in the way that you mean.”
Demilitarization. They’ve exhausted NATO’S collective equipment and ammo reserves and have forced the EU into a position where they could only fight a conventional war for maybe a few weeks before they run out of ammo and tanks themselves while Russia’s nationalized military industry can mobilize and increase output exponentially. They’re just letting the EU continue sending expensive munitions and equipment to Ukraine where it is promptly demolished. They know who they are dealing with and understand how to play the long game.
I’m actually owning you by making your logistics cheaper and more efficient and easier in a war of attrition. This logic doesn’t hold. At the start of the war Russia actually did attempt this kind of stuff a couple times, striking trucks and trains that were shipping arms. Threatening to destroy any arm shipments sent in by the west. Then they kind of just gave up and stopped for the next few years, allowing open movement of heavy military equipment like French and German tanks and self-propelled guns and artillery on trains from Poland and Romania.
Yeah, how effective were those train loads of leopards and M1’s? And where are they now?
Of course they denounced western arms shipments, but short of attacking western ships directly drawing an inevitable NATO response there wasn’t much they could do so they adapted.
If Russia is engaged in a war of attrition, these are won by imposing the highest logistical costs on your enemy as possible. They would have smuggled those things in disguised as civilian trucks one-at-a-time, spread out to different locations. NATO and the US military and intelligence sectors know how to covertly move in arms and goods, and all the nearby nations are compliant with it, but it’s expensive and time consuming to do that instead of loading it up on a train. One or two Khinzals and suddenly they have to spend billions more in moving those shitty Leopards to the front to get disabled by a couple FPV drones. There are chokepoints at mountain tunnels, where if you detonate deep enough and collapse it, it becomes extremely expensive if not impossible to excavate and repair, especially if you keep hitting the site when they try.
A war of attrition is actually a strategy targeting military fighting capacity directly. That includes but is not solely limited to logistical disruption. Which is a more economic strategy by making the war more expensive. If Russia just prevented Ukraine from moving stuff around without destroying said stuff then nothing really changes. Ukraine will just rebuild whichever channel and continue on. Russias stated aim of attrition is demilitarization. Meaning they want to destroy Ukraines fighting capacity entirely. We saw this play out during Ukraines first major counter offensive in the spring of 2024 where Russia forced Ukraine to expend the entire stockpile of weapons and munitions accumulated over the previous 2 years fighting through layered Russian defensive works just to end up back where they started. And then Russia rapidly advanced again elsewhere, up to Bakhmut before withdrawing and forcing Ukraine to do the same again and commit entire battalions. Ukrainian soldiers themselves describe a pattern where the Russians would take a town, then withdraw before the Ukrainians countered and when they advanced the Russians would hit them from every direction with artillery and retake the town again. And so on until Ukraine could no longer do so. This is attrition. Not blowing up a few tunnels and bridges.
The goal isn’t to prevent them from getting to the front line. It is to destroy them and allow the avenues to remain open so they send more in to destroy. The EU is having attrition done from it’s lack of access to cheap LNG.
You don’t block the choke point, you kill people as they funnel through it.