this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 26th to February 1st, 2026 - A Powerless Ukraine
(hexbear.net)
Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine's three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they're far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren't shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn't really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I'm pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It's also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine's power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody's sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I'm not holding my breath.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
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 Israel's 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.
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So can we finally admit and discuss the fact on this platform that thousands of people died at minimum, and that something significant happened, or are the Iranian government figures also fake news now? Sorry, don't want to engage in any "irresponsible posting", so I just thought I'd ask ahead.
Vague-posting lol. I am one of the people who said you were irresponsible, but that was you using 2 data points of likes (or maybe it was views? I can't remember) on Pahlavi propaganda on social media from somewhere before and after the blackout to argue that he was popular with an huge amount of Iran. It was shit methodology. You post very good stuff often, but you're not immune to mistakes and that was one. Calling it irresponsible was an adult way to engage with it, and it was not a way to call you inherently evil or unintelligent or something. Just something that you posted without the care and knowledge that you often have.
Lmao that’s what this is about?
Well I at least recognize the phrasing from that discussion. Could be wrong, though.
The propaganda line was that 30k+ people were killed by the government.
At no point did you repeat this claim, and thus at no point did anyone argue against this.
In truth, I was one of the people who argued against the sources you used on Pahlavi's popularity in Iran - and I was speculating from how many people could have died from a single event in a single area (30 people) - and that got me to tens of thousands. I acknowledged how inaccurate that methodology would be, and people rightfully joked that I was deriving numbers with a similar methodology to the Xinjiang propagandists.
I don't want to create psychological pressure for you. I just want us to be mindful of our sources and make a note of where our info is coming from.
In my case I was clear when I am speculating, when my source is western, when my source is otherwise.
I'm seeing people claim up to 50k were killed. They never posted anything about Palestine. We know what it looks like when tens of thousands of people are killed. We'd be seeing unlimited leaks of corpses.
I thought the irresponsible posting you were accused of was related to you suggesting that essentially every person in Iran was watching Pahlavis social media content because his analytics dropped after Iran turned off the Internet
It was something to the effect of almost the entire population being on Instagram AND watching Pahlavi daily, including the babies, toddlers, the elderly.
But there was a few million below Iran's total population figures, which would preclude the implication that the entire IRGC, the army, the Ayatollah himself were also among the people tuning into Pahlavi on Instagram.
Those civilians were killed by the Mossad terrorists. Just like happened on the Maidan, the insurrectionists killed protesters to try and pin it on the government. This is nothing new, we already knew that that happened, and Iran itself already said that it was happening.
It's not a rhetorical defeat to admit that the Iranian government killed dissenting civilians, even if the dissent was escalated on behalf of the Zionist entity. That's the nature of any state under threat by any faction.
Absolutely, some of the civilian dead were not at the hands of the state, but rather external forces. But unless I'm misreading hyperbole (as is easy for me to do) this comes across like cope if anything.
There's no way to know if the Iranian state killed any civilians, but if so it was because they were caught in a situation that was entirely fabricated by Mossad and they are the ones responsible for those deaths.