We in Kyiv follow many different news sources to keep up with what is happening. You readers receive the detail-level reports that Bob Homans and his colleague Bogdan compile every day.
I regularly watch three milbloggers.
Denys Davidov describes the previous day’s activities and attempts to analyze their significance. His maps showing action on the battlefield are very detailed. He is honest about what he can and can't show, and what he knows and does not. He offers his opinion about political decisions Ukraine is making. He was appropriately critical when Zelensky bit the hand that feeds him by taking Poland to court over the export of grain. For those who need a daily rush of adrenaline, his Telegram channel shows explosions and Russian corpses.
Reporting from Ukraine provides more succinct reports the day's activity, about half as long as Denys. This reporter often has the best footage.
The Russian Dude is a quirky personality. As I recently wrote, the feature I like best is his analysis of Russian propaganda. It is apparently a shoestring operation. The chyron invariably misinterprets Ukrainian names such as Bakhmut.
I also occasionally watch bloggers who support Russia, among them Col. Douglas MacGregor, Gonzalo Lira, Thomas Röper and Patrick Lancaster. I recommend you do likewise, just to contrast the tone of their presentations and the accuracy of their predictions with the above. I hope you will conclude, as I do, that contemporary Russian propaganda is as wildly inaccurate as Soviet propaganda was. But you don't know unless you look.
Other bloggers offer a wider perspective.
Mike Ryan, of Futura Doctrina, I introduce below. He is a student of warfare with interesting long-term perspectives.
Lawrence and Sam Freedman, of Comment is Freed, has two major foci – the war in Ukraine and British politics. Lawrence is an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London
Edward Slavsquat lives in and reports from Moscow. He is understandably circumspect in his war reporting but provides very useful insights into life and politics in Russia. He provides links to Russian milbloggers, Russian dissenters and others who add different perspectives.
The Unz Review is my go-to for an articulate expression of the pro-Russian perspective. These guys are wrong. Figuring out how to express that they are wrong is a good exercise. Another good question is what motivates them. Is is just hatred of Biden - understandable enough - or are they on Putin’s payroll one way or another?
I follow the newspapers.
Whereas the bloggers above publish in the morning, newspapers usually do so in the afternoon. These different schedules mean that half the time the newspapers will have more recent news.
The Kyiv Post has useful articles every day.
Babel is an online Ukrainian publication that usually has several good articles.
Republic World is an Indian publication. It has lots of good articles, from a different perspective.
Yahoo News is biased, but aren't they all? It seems to offer a pretty good overview of what the mainstream media in the United States is presenting.
I subscribe to the Washington Times, just to get a feel of what print journalism has to offer these days.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are predictable and paywalled. I read them when one of my subscribers downloads and forwards an article.
I spend an hour or so every morning with this stuff. Now to present a link the Mike Ryan's piece this morning, convincing me once again that I'm getting my money's worth for the $5/month cost of my subscription. Let me know if you have trouble getting past the paywall and I'll figure something out.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone. Now here's Mike.
Russia has had centuries to develop their propaganda chops along with the ruthless treatment of their enemies. It is rather startling to see substackers who are good on filtering through the official bullshit on covid (VST, Paul Alexander, Celia Farber, John Day, Jeff Childers, etc.) get totally snookered by Putin Propaganda. Some very well may be on the Putin Payroll. Paul Alexander routinely refers to Zelensky as the "penis piano player" President of Ukraine based on a comedy routine he did in his previous television career. What does that make Putin? The Pregozhin-murdering, politician poisoning, child-stealing, country-destroying genocidal maniac who wants a totally strategically and economically useless Crimea back in his crumbling Soviet empire or else he'll take his marbles and blow up the world? After appeasing Putin what is their next move? Where is their sense of proportionality? And why take Russia's numbers and map lines at face value when you can see through the official stories the US government puts out on everything from Lahaina to Covid to child re-gendering.
Here's another bit of history which people - although probably not in
Ukraine - have forgotten about, apparently:
"In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher). The most detailed demographic studies estimate the death toll at 3.9 million. Historians agree that, as with other genocides, the precise number will never be known. Through a study of the Holodomor (which has been referred to as the Great Famine), students can come to understand that the Holodomor is an example of how prejudice and a desire to dominate and control a particular ethnic group can lead to the misuse of power, mass oppression, and genocide.
Ukraine Before the Holodomor
Beginning in the 18th century, Ukrainian territories were divided between the Austrian and Russian Empires. In the aftermath of World War I and the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in February 1917, Ukraine set up a provisional government, declaring itself the independent Ukrainian People's Republic in January 1918. The Ukrainian People's Republic fought the Bolshevik Red Army for three years (1918-1921) but lost its fight for independence. The bulk of Ukrainian territory was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, or USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and by 1922 Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). Then the USSR sanctioned the requisition of all surplus agricultural products from the rural population, resulting in economic collapse. Discontent among the farmers forced Lenin to halt the requisitions and bring in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March of 1921. The NEP was intended to provide greater economic freedom and permit private enterprise, mainly for independent farms and small businesses. Beginning in 1923, the Soviet authorities also pursued a policy of indigenization, which in the Ukrainian SSR took the form of Ukrainization, a policy of national and cultural liberalization that promoted Ukrainian language use in education, mass media, and government. The goal for the introduction of both NEP and Ukrainization was to increase support for the Soviet regime in Ukraine.
Causes of the Holodomor
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Feeling threatened by Ukraine's strengthening cultural autonomy, Stalin took measures to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and the Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elites to prevent them from seeking independence for Ukraine. To prevent "Ukrainian national counterrevolution," Stalin initiated mass-scale political repressions through widespread intimidation, arrests, and imprisonment. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and Ukrainian Communist Party functionaries who had supported pro-Ukrainian policies were executed by the Soviet regime. At the same time, Stalin decreed the First Five Year Plan, which included the collectivization of agriculture, effectively ending the NEP. Collectivization gave the Soviet state direct control over Ukraine's rich agricultural resources and allowed the state to control the supply of grain for export. Grain exports would be used to fund the USSR's transformation into an industrial power. The majority of rural Ukrainians, who were independent small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted collectivization. They were forced to surrender their land, livestock and farming tools, and work on government collective farms (kolhosps) as laborers. Historians have recorded about 4,000 local rebellions against collectivization, taxation, terror, and violence by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. The Soviet secret police (GPU) and the Red Army ruthlessly suppressed these protests. Tens of thousands of farmers were arrested for participating in anti-Soviet activities, shot, or deported to labor camps. The wealthy and successful farmers who opposed collectivization were labeled "kulaks" by Soviet propaganda ("kulak" literally means "a fist"). They were declared enemies of the state, to be eliminated as a class. The elimination of the so-called "kulaks" was an integral part of collectivization. It served three purposes: as a warning to those who opposed collectivization, as a means to transfer confiscated land to the collective farms, and as a means to eliminate village leadership. Thus, the secret police and the militia brutally stripped "kulaks" not only of their lands but also their homes and personal belongings, systematically deporting them to the far regions of the USSR or executing them. These mass repressions, along with manipulation of state-controlled grain purchases and collectivization through the destruction of Ukrainian rural community life, set the stage for the total terror – a terror by hunger, the Holodomor." https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/neil-oliver-and-justin-trudeau-both