Image is of Stepanakert, essentially the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is now a ghost city, and Azerbaijan has recently torn down the parliament building and various other important places. Sourced from this article.
Despite the predictions and assertions of various NATO-aligned commentators that Russia’s influence is waning, the opposite generally appears to be occurring. ASEAN has become more strongly aligned with Russia despite claims to the contrary. In Central Asia, there has been a propaganda push to declare that countries there are “emerging from Russia’s shadow”, while in reality, as Bhadrakumar analyzes, Russia’s significant economic growth and ongoing march towards victory in Ukraine is creating opportunities for further integration, not separation, and there are no major political shifts there in terms of Russian ties. And in Niger, Russian soldiers have now entered an airbase which once hosted American soldiers, now kicked out, and generally Russia’s diplomacy and economic deals (nuclear power plant construction, military equipment, grain shipments, etc) have accelerated in Africa.
Where Russia’s influence has actually seemed to decrease (outside of the West, of course) is in Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh’s remarkably rapid collapse in late 2023 demonstrated that Russia was not willing to escalate things in defense of Armenia to fend off Azerbaijan. One hundred thousand Armenians - most but not all of them in the region - fled in advance to avoid mass persecution, which received remarkably little attention by a West which calls itself overwhelmingly concerned with borders changing due to military action as in Ukraine. Since then, Armenia seems to be on some kind of self-annihilating bender, allured by the potential of Western military and economic deals. Armenia froze its membership in the CSTO due to its failure to protect them, and the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, visited the region in March. The West has offered up hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to Armenia and is helping them “modernize their military”; given the poor track record of Western military equipment in Ukraine, one wonders why they’re even bothering. RAND has advocated for a balancing act; America should, in their eyes, realize that they can’t entirely remove Russia’s influence but nonetheless should make inroads to protect Armenia from Azerbaijan (which is an interesting position given that Israel provided arms to Azerbaijan to help them take Nagorno-Karabakh).
A quick look at Armenia’s geographical position reveals the folly of trying to create some kind of Western outpost. With a hostile Azerbaijan to their east, a very unfriendly (albeit NATO member) Turkiye to their west, an ascendant Iran to their south, and Russia not far from the action, there is little hope of doing much more than causing a little chaos in the hopes it’ll momentarily distract Russia while it makes inroads most everywhere else on the planet. The political situation appears miserable for Pashinyan, but there isn’t really a popular alternative to take the reins. A truly cursed situation.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Armenia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
A pretty interesting book about Armenian Marxist Monte Melkonian is My Brother’s Road by Markar Melkonian, himself a Marxist journalist. Monte was a leader in the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) an anti-Turkish/NATO/Israel ML group based out of Lebanon and allied with the PFLP and probably the Soviets. The book is interesting because no one really knows anything about this very secret organization but goes pretty in depth of one of the top commanders who seemingly was involved with many of the conflicts in the middleast from the mid 70s onwards. He was involved in the 79 revolution in Iran and the Lebanese civil war and invasion by Israel. ASALA got started during the civil war as a kind of neighborhood defense thing in Beirut but they expanded their operations through the middle east and Europe. The group eventually splits and Hagop’s group carries hired assassinations while Monte’s group fights in the first karabahk war, where he ends getting killed. There’s a lot of great stories in this book though from blowing up Israeli tanks alongside the PFLP to getting arrested and the negotiation to get him released is we’re going to cancel your embassies if you don’t let Monte go, which they did.
ASALA is still around as sort of a boogie man but they haven’t done anything since the late 90s. The Turkish nationalists often insinuate that ASALA created the PKK, but to my knowledge I don’t think the two groups really worked together, but someone else my know more.
Markar also published a collection of his writings in The Wrong Train from the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent Soviet Armenian Republic and the transition to capitalist system but I’m a lazy butt and never finished it.
I don’t think Markar is a academic Marxist considering he never denounced his brother who basically was the like the old school Bolsheviks that were in Stalin’s group.
Some other famous Armenian Marxist are: The Mikoyan brothers. One is where MiG jets comes from and the other was a Bolshevik politician active from Lenin to Khrushchev and was a personal friend of Stalin from childhood. He was a negotiator during the cuban missile crisis and loved ice cream more than socialism according to Stalin.
There’s Bagramyan a marshal of the soviet union during the Great Patriotic War. He led the liberation of the Baltics
Simon “Kamo” Der-Petrosian was a main member of Stalins group and his biggest thing was the Yerevan Square Expropriation which was a heist that ended killing like a dozen Tsarist Pigs and stole millions. He eventually got caught, was sentenced to execution, feigned insanity and was freed during the revolution where his group was so brutal to spies even Lenin told him to chill.
Sergei Lavrov is a former Marxist and favorite RBF diplomat of the Russian Fed. In the Soviet days he spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka and is fluent in Sinhala. He’s more of a hardliner than Putin and was a cheerleader of the DPR and LPR basically from the onset.
I’m sure there’s many more especially from the Soviet Union but I’m just going off the top of my head. Marxism was extremely popular in the Armenian community since it was the capitalist faction of the Turks that engaged the genocide. The Armenian community was split between the dashnaks who were the pro revolution social Democrats and Marxists. There were some libs but most understood revolution. The Dashnaks were/are anti Soviet and tend to be pretty conservative nowadays. The Marxists don’t really exist in an organized fashion mostly fading away after the fall of the Soviet Union.