re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Trent Telenko had a twitter thread about defending against drones and loitering munitions. Using missiles against drones swarms is not cost effective. He harkened back to the defense of Antwerp from V1 attacks, using belts of radar directed machine guns and autocannons.

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In another regional oddity, Iran is backing Christian Armenia in its conflict with Muslim Azerbaijan.

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Because Israel backs Azerbaijan.

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popular support will not falter until the people who have the least stake in seeing an opposition viewpoint see something tangible they cannot explain. If the ecosystem is tight enough, using denial as an ego defense might be sufficient to retain popular support.

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Good post and I agree. I think the use of nuclear threats to serve to keep the war and as many of its consequences from coming home to the Russian population. Russian propaganda is much different from old Soviet propaganda, which attempted to sell its communist vision of the future as superior to the West's vision, but this was vulnerable to increasingly available messages for Russians of relatively comfortable Western lives. Russian propaganda, OTOH, is intentionally bewildering, allowing multiple narratives to be mutually incoherent so that the end result for the media-consuming citizen is passivity and acquiescence.

This leads about half of the Russian population to have checked out from politics and from the war and they will presumably continue to do so until they see real symbols of the regime threatened (I think this is why the Kerch bridge attack was so threatening to Putin and why it was so critical for Russian media to portray it as functioning). The various degrees of martial law is something else that may challenge the regime's message. It's built to try to give a light touch to Moscow and other areas that are more visible, but it's the sort of thing that could change public opinion.

It’s almost like they’re using religion as an excuse to exert power over its people and only when it’s convenient for their political purposes.

Yes, I think Vexler is on the right track. I came by the perspective via Peter Pomerantsev (and anyone wanting to understand more background on modern propaganda should check out This is Not Propaganda), who is really good for understanding authoritarian propaganda.

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I saw that as well. It’s Interesting as to why and goes against Sharia law.

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What people need to understand about Iran is that it, like many countries in the region, are essentially run by the security apparatus. The security apparatus before the Iranian Revolution was retained in the aftermath, as SAVAK, the secret police and internal intelligence bureau was folded into SAVAMA, the new intelligence agency, virtually unchanged. That is a very key thing to note, as the country's foreign policy has never wavered, as the Shah himself was responsible for sending out Shia clerics to disparate parts of the Muslim world, including Musa al-Sadr, who went to Lebanon and was instrumental there in organizing the Southern Lebanese Shia into a cogent political entity. The real revolution that the Shah actually embraced was the retreat from political quietism on the part of the cleric class, of which he was on the losing side, as before the White Revolution, the cleric class was heavily invested in the feudalist structure of Iran. After those land reforms, many became more political. Khomeini's family was part of this land-owning class.

Regardless, the revolution never changed Iran's extra-territorial aims. The security of the state was always paramount, even above the principles of the Islamic Revolution. There are many things that you could argue Iran does that violate 'Sharia Law' broadly, but they do often publish self-justifications through Islamic interpretations, which is a feature that Shia clerics possess which Sunni clerics generally do not.

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Not that odd. Azerbaijan chose to become closer to Turkey after independence and had weapons supplied by Israel and Turkey. Part of greater Azerbaijan also exists inside Iran, which added to the bitterness on the part of the Iranians. There is a large Armenian population in Iran as well.

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Yes, and Azerbaijan and Iran have huge disputes about oil drilling rights in the Caspian Sea.

And Azeris and Turks consider themselves to be the same ethnic group. The languages are extremely similar, so that Turkish TV is popular in Azerbaijan.

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And Azeris and Turks consider themselves to be the same ethnic group. The languages are extremely similar, so that Turkish TV is popular in Azerbaijan.

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Azeris are a Turkic-speaking group, but they are also a good example of how little influence actual Arabs had in the Muslim world before the 20th century. The main cultural movement in West Asia was broadly defined as 'Turco-Persian' with its influence extending all the way from the Sahel to India. The Azeris who lived north of historic Azerbaijan, located in Iran, were 'Turkified' but converted to Shia Islam with the rest of the Safavids in the 15th century, in part to develop distance between the Ottomans and the Safavids, as the Ottomans practiced mainly the Hanafi fiqh of Sunni Islam. That conversion by Ismail the I essentially created the tension we saw played out during the Iranian Revolution, where the secular state and the religious state went head-to-head. That split also played out between Oghuz Turkic groups in Northern Iran and those that settled in Anatolia and elsewhere, including the Ottomans, who were a branch of the Oghuz.

10 Iranian instructors who advised Russian Forces on the use of kamikaze drones were liquidated in Ukraine, — The Jerusalem Post.

https://twitter.com/flash_news_ua/status/1583535064616697856?s=46&t=Is6qlpqLr9jE58E-9rjF1A

A short lived trip …