An image of the wildfires in Rhodes, taken on July 23rd, showing the flames and the plume of smoke.
Greece, in late July, faced a heatwave in which over 8 million people experienced temperatures about 41C, with some areas reaching above 45C - all in all, both the longest heatwave in Greek history, as well as some of the highest temperatures on record.
Due to these high temperatures, Greece was then struck by hundreds of wildfires this summer, affecting nearly 200,000 hectares. About half of the total burned area was in the north-east of Greece, in the Dadia national park near the city of Alexandropoulis - the single largest blaze that the EU has recorded. Other parts of the country were also struck, such as Attica, Magnesia, and islands like Corfu and particularly Rhodes; the last one prompted an evacuation of 20,000 people, the largest evacuation operation the island had ever seen. Of course, this is just one country of many that have been caught in the European wildfires this year, of which the total burned area approached 500,000 hectares - the only consolation is that this was less than last year.
Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkiye were impacted in early September by flooding caused by massive storms bringing a deluge of water - in Greece, this mainly impacted Thessaly, in the centre of Greece.
Luckily for Greece, despite being a very earthquake-prone country, they have experienced no significant quakes lately to round out the four (I hope I haven’t jinxed it) - though, of course, earlier this year, a major earthquake struck nearby Turkiye, killing 60,000 people and injuring 120,000.
The Country of the Week is Greece! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week’s update is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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/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
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.
Last week’s discussion post.
Hello from Damascus, Syria. Still working under my faithful Turkish VPN. Visited Aleppo and Homs in the last two days, which has to be the most traumatic experience of my life. What happened to this country is a tragedy, and honestly Bashar Al Assad despite all the Lion memes that we like, was responsible for a large portion of the crimes here. The scale of the destruction and suffering is just crazy, entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated from the fighting and the bombings. A relative of mine lives in an Aleppo suburb and I visited her while I was there. Her house is still half rubble, which she has “sectioned off” with rags and old wood, so that the kids don’t wander there. She lost one son who was out protesting the government in 2011/2012, and then got arrested and tortured to death by the government. Another son got drafted in the SAA and got wounded in the Aleppo battle in 2016, he still can barely walk and gets something like 30$ a month from the government as a pension. Her youngest son managed to escape to Germany via Turkey. Just pure despair from all angles. She made us delicious warak anab though. Full trip report coming next week when I’m back in Beirut, I need a few days to gather my thoughts first.
We should always remember to only critically support him, he is quite bad but so are his enemies. In fact, do you know anything about situation in opposition hel territories?
The Syrian civil war is one of the largest crimes of the 21st century, and every fucker who enabled and participated in that absolute clusterfuck is in part responsible for an immeasurable amount of suffering and death. The sheer scale of the destruction and the spillover into so many other parts of the Middle East is insane. It’s not like there was any easy “solution” or anything that could have realistically happened to stop the war sooner outside of like a massive outside intervention that honestly could have made things much worse, but god damn it’s insane the world kind of just let that happen. I can only hope the will of the Syrian people remains unbroken to live and rebuild. Hope you’re staying safe comrade, looking forward to that report.
There was a simple solution to preventing it. America, Israel and Turkey stops funding ISIS, and America never invades and destroys Iraq and creates ISIS. That simple. The war would never have even started without the jihadists
I think that’s a very simplistic take on this war. In the early days ISIS didn’t even exist in any meaningful sense, and the initial rebels were getting arms from the Gulf states as they scrambled to resist the massive crackdown by Assad to stop the street protests by the non-violent libs who all got killed. Many Syrian soldiers defected and set up local militias, local Syrian political groups acquired weapons and set up volunteer armies. It was a shitshow, with the “moderate Islamist” forces getting weapons form the Gulf, the defected Syrian soldiers/generals, and the FSA (which was a proxy for Turkish interference) all squabbled for leadership and support amongst the vast, broad tent of the opposition. The war absolutely started without any jihadists. Would it have lasted over a decade without them? No, probably not.
FSA and the “moderate rebels” were ISIS. Always were and the libs in the west were forced to accept this as the war went on and TFSA, FSA and all the rebel factions fought alongside ISIS, making coordinated pincer attacks with them.
Turkey, US, Israel and the Gulf States created the war by funding terrorist proxies. They simply could have not done that. This war is a story of 4 imperialists greedily pumping money into their fascist proxies so they could carve up Syria, dumping all their problem jihadists from Iraq/Turkey into Syria
The “vast broad tent of the opposition” was filled with fascists and I’m glad for one that it has been decimated
The opposition to Assad, at least at the start, was not fascist but yeah as the war dragged on and the “moderates” were eradicated because they had shitty weapons or refused to take up arms. This was absolutely a proxy war but there absolutely was legitimate opposition to Assad for very real reasons.
Nah, it was CIA from day 1 and most “moderates” fled the country or kept their head down. Maybe some impressionable fools got caught up in the fervor, but there were imperialist and fascist elements from the get-go pretty widespread in the opposition. Lots of foreign jihadists from Turkey and Iraq as well getting dumped in Idlib. Lots of Mossad influence and CIA, lots of imported guns and weaponry, lots of free-movement over borders that should have been watched a bit better.