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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The death tolls on Iran are all over the place with some reaching 36000 or so by media outlets. Are people just uncritically accepting these figures?
it's radio free asia math. the real figure is probably somewhere around 10000 dead which is still extremely bad for a mostly 2 day event (for comparison the 12 day war casualties were around 1000). people forgot their own history and threw themselves behind a dynasty with two kings who had to be installed by foreign intervention thrice, the US and israel, and they paid the protestors by either getting them killed or killing them directly.
i would make an effort post if i was literate enough, but in short the israeli mercenaries used the predictable reaction of the p*gs to get the most amount of people possible killed, i guess to justify a foreign intervention to both foreign nations as well as the people inside the country. the participation this time was even less than before, and the crown prince promised he had 50000 people in the armed forces ready to defect, which did not happen at all. i guess the plan changed from internal regime collapse to maximum death at some point when they realised Reza Pahlavi is full of shit, but i don't know when.
some of the tactics were burning places that the people were fleeing to, firing into police in order for them to shoot back into the crowd, or straight up shooting into the crowd directly or stabbing people, which later the propaganda machine would blame on plainclothes agents of the regime itself or the claim that the government freed convicts from prison to stab people. i guess this is the new cinema Rex instead 100 times worse.
Yes, they just read the headlines.
They don't realize these are WW2 battle KIA figures
If those are meant to be figures for an event that largely transpired over two days, those numbers actually significantly outpace the Holocaust.
Iran is at war, even if they did kill 30,000 people it will be justified domestically as a wartime emergency measure. It's probably closer to 10k as western propaganda has been really aggressive recently
What do you base this on?
For reference: in 1956 Budapest 2500 rebels were killed in action, and it was the Red Army coming with tanks. It was almost 2 weeks of fighting.
According to Danish state media, it's at least 30.000 as well. Seems to be mostly people with an ideological reason to believe them who accept them, but I've also given up on almost everything to do with Iran, aside from asking if they think American bombs will help.
confirmation bias is a helluva drug
I wonder what these people think American intervention will do. Other than increasing that figure and making the lives of the survivors worse.
Our unfortunate collateral casualties that couldn't be avoided, their murderous state terrorism
American intervention is good to them cause evil iranian gov is the one responsible for all deaths, they'll blame any death cause by any us bombing on the current iranian gov cause they "forced our hand" lol
Presuming all the accusations are true, U.S. intervention in such cases just turns into, "That's not how you mass murder people; THIS is how you mass murder people! (Proceeds to carpet bomb and shit.)" So it still doesn't seem like much of an argument.
It pretty much amounts to that. It's not an argument at all but these people don't really care about that tbh as long as the government they don't like is ousted.
Country under a severe water crisis. This will be really bad
they're about to bomb Iran they're going to claim every woman in Iran was killed before they relay anything remotely resembling the truth
My friends diaspora parents have already been led to believe those numbers are true, and that IRGC is not releasing names of the dead - so that if bombs drop they can actually blame their deaths on the bombings.
If you can read between the lines: the US is already preparing to blame Iran for any civilian deaths they cause.
I think one of the worst parts about all this is the extent that some parts of the diaspora are being conned into cartoonish analyses and calling for war against their own people.
It's like gusanos calling for bombs on Venezuela, except with Iran: 1. there's more Zionist propaganda mixed in, 2. they're literally right next to a lot of the recent examples of exactly what it would lead to, 3. they've already been down that road themselves when the US/Brits replaced Mossadegh with the Shah - who was so shitty he caused the revolution which produced the current govt.
I truly hope a stronger effort is made to counter all the western propaganda for the diaspora, it's pretty tragic and I can't imagine the regret after realizing you provided the support and pretext for the destruction of your own people/nation.
All my Iranian friends have been posting this shit on their social media, parroting the numbers and everything. I don't even have the energy to argue with them be because I know it's just going to turn into agency discourse or whatever, because arguments with those kind of people just turn into "You don't know, I have family in X" every damn time.
Why does no one bring up supporting Saddam's war crimes, including the usage of the infamous chemical weapons?
Atleast 100 million died imo
😔
they just be lying
They keep changing the damn numbers. Especially on that goof troop site reddit. One place its 20 000 other is 40 000 which is it
The speed of these numbers is faster than the Russia/Ukraine war. Who has a functional brain and is able to believe that Iran can prevent the release of evidence of what amounts a full-scale war against the citizenry? But trust us bro, the evidence totally exists and we've seen it!
It's faster than the first few months of the Gaza genocide
Yes I've noticed a bunch of people silent about Palestine and some well-meaning liberals keep posting it. I've seen numbers over 50000.