Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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News from Ukraine: continued bombing is destroying the electricity grid, forcing rolling blackouts
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0dmwjnmp4mo
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-is-winning-the-energy-war-and-plunging-ukraine-into-darkness/
I don't fully understand why it's taken so long for the Ukrainian electricity grid to collapse. I understand there was some excess capacity (Soviet Ukraine was much more heavily industrialized than modern Ukraine). Presumably the Russians had to grind through the Patriots and other air defences before they could destroy the electricity grid. Ukraine seems to be reliant upon imports from Europe and small-scale production, gas and renewables. It's still summer right now and so the situation is only dire not catastrophic. Metallurgical companies downsizing, not people freezing.
It seems that Ukraine is getting pushed out of towns nobody has ever heard of like Vovchansk and Chasiv Yar. On pro-Ukrainian twitter, Julian Ropcke seems to be dooming while War Monitor and Ilia Ponomarenko are still going strong. Pro-Russian twitter is pretty reliably pro-Russian.
The NYT is posting about Ukrainian war crimes, possibly indicating that enthusiasm is cooling. Then again, there are different factions within the elite, it's not monolithic as Biden shows us: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-killings-us.html
It was less about the Russian's ability to hit targets and more about what they were targeting.
https://www.ft.com/content/4d583259-7565-4cbc-972e-ea77f4a76175
Went for distribution early which could be repaired relatively quickly, now they are targeting generation itself which will take years to fix.
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Power plants are surprisingly hard to destroy and for all the early smugness about vulnerabilities in Ukrainian rolling stock and transformers leading to total collapse early on, the internal logistics for Ukraine are simply robust enough to withstand missile strikes. Saturation attacks to overwhelm air defense still must hit something valuable, and the hardening of soviet legacy infrastructure built to communist standards (cheap, hardy, not reliable) means the energy grid does not suffer that much.
It really has to be emphasized that aerial bombardments of built up environs is really difficult. The US has made it look easy, but standoff weapons have terrible Circular Error of Probability and can never reliably hit a single specific target, and scoring only five to twelve hits per target is pretty poor.
As for specific towns falling, this is to be expected and will happen more going forward. Chasiv Yar was expected to fall back in April following Adviivka, and the Ukrainian defense is shockingly bad for such an obvious attack vector. The Russians should aim to capture Kramatorsk to achieve their highwater mark in the 2014 war, but resources wasted at Vovchansk are surprisingly high. After Ukraine fumbled their much vaunted 2023 counteroffensive, enthusiasm has definitely fallen. NYT has covered Ukrainian failures before, and will continue to do so because the Ukrainians are only victims of Russian aggression, not a protected class which can do no wrong. White on white violence holds no value for journos, even if the whites are slavs.
How about that the NYT is a paper of record and generally maintains at least some journalistic standards? This isn’t HuffPost here. Ukrainians being white, and factually whiter than Russians, isn’t the reason for their bad behavior being covered. It’s that NYT is a high-quality paper.
The Ukrainians have done shitty things, thats not the point being disputed. The point is that highlighting the NYtimes coverage of the war crimes does not signify a cultural change, for the NYtimes has always covered Ukrainian atrocities in observably consistent measure.
This coverage only happens though because whites, even slavs, are not a protected class. NYT consistently downplays islamist and black violence and fully supports every progressive cause uncritically. To call it a paper of record is to give credence to its framing of the current cultural mileau, and THAT is the objectionable aspect of trying to use NYT for consensus building.
The NYT was pretty willing to talk about Palestinian violence. As I recall they were critical of CHAZ(which honestly sounds like a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and ill advised toupee at an RV show, but I digress).
I don't think talking about protected classes is the right framing for the NYT specifically. The NYT maintains a certain level of journalistic standards which causes them to engage in a certain amount of warranted both-sidesism that flies in the face of their biases.
The inconvenience of material reality is something the NYT is forced to report on against their will. Wherever possible the NYT will ignore their progressive pets and try to shift blame away from the protected classes. In every article where muslim migrants commit crime there is an addendum about how migrants in aggregate are net beneficiaries, or how in black crime there also exist white criminals. Calling it the paper of record gives succour to the false pretence of evenhandedness that the journos are maintaining against their will. Look at their coverage of anything involving muslims, migrants or blacks and it is filled with exculpatory statements meant to deflect attention away from perpetrators and signify the problem ultimately lies with the enemy of the day.
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