For the map brained, can you find the landing site for Luna-25?

The exact coordinates of the main landing site at the Boguslavsky crater are 69.32°S, 43.32°E.

To find roughly where the landing site is, first you need to locate the very distinctive looking Tycho crater (Тихо), and just below that is the Clavius crater (Клавии). From there, keep moving to the right until you see the Boguslavsky crater (Богуславский):

For comparison, here are all the other landed moon missions so far:

Their browser has live livestream audio translator from English to Russian (ok, about 15 seconds delay, but still more impressive than anything I’ve seen) and almost instantaneous audio translation for regular youtube videos.

I only wish they have a reverse Russian/other languages to English translator - good if you just want to listen to the audio in the background.

Geopolitics Special Edition: the Moon

As you may know, the race is on for India vs Russia to be the first country to land on the lunar south pole, an unusually challenging site on the moon with treacherous terrains and craters stretching thousands of kms.

Fun facts about their predecessors

This will be India’s third attempt with their moon missions. The last mission, Chandrayaan-2 (which means “mooncraft” in Sanskrit), was launched in September 2019 but due to a software glitch, the Vikram Lander veered off course and crashed. However, the orbiter stayed on the moon’s orbit and in April 2021, with an optical camera (OHRC) with the highest resolution mapping the moon’s surface to date, was able to send back a photo of Apollo 11’s Eagle descent stage. The Americans did land on the moon. Checkmate conspiracy theorists.

Meanwhile, the last time Russia conducted a moon mission (Luna-24, which means “moon” in Russian) was in… 1976! It was actually the Soviet Union, and this will be post-Soviet Russia’s first attempt at a moon mission, practically a reboot of the space industry. Did you know that Luna-24 was the third time the Soviet Union carried back soil samples from the moon and was the first to discovered water in the regolith (moon soil)? The scientific findings were published in 1978 and almost nobody noticed.

Who will be the first to land on the lunar south pole

So, you have India aiming to have its first successful moon landing mission, and Russia who hasn’t been back to the moon in 47 years. And what makes this race particularly interesting is that both not only target the lunar south pole as their landing sites, but apparently also had their mission timeframe coinciding closely (merely a week apart) and will land relatively close to one another:

With India’s Chandrayaan-3 (Чандраян-3) targeting an error within 500m, and Russia’s Luna-25 (Луна-25) with a 3 km error.

Actually, both missions had been delayed by a year. Chandrayaan-3 was supposed to launch back in August 2022, but was delayed due to COVID lockdown affecting several projects. Meanwhile, Luna-25 was supposed to launch in October-November 2022, but the war in Ukraine caused several European collaborations to be ceased, forcing Roskosmos to reproduce the components indigenously.

India’s Chandrayaan-3 was launched several weeks ago, on July 14, entered Moon’s orbit on August 5, and is expected to land on August 22-23. Owing to its larger payload (3800kg vs Luna-25’s 1750kg), its journey will take slightly longer than the Russian’s.

Once landed, if successful, the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover, both solar powered, will have about 1 lunar day (14.5 Earth days) to conduct its scientific missions. They are not designed to survive the cold and harsh night on the moon.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Luna-25 is a lander only without a rover, but is equipped with a plutonium-based radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that will provide heat and power throughout the night, and is expected to last for about 1 year.

The Luna-25 was launched on August 10, and is expected to land on August 17-19 21-22 (updated dates):

Just less than 24 hours earlier, on August 16 11:57 MSK, Luna-25 switched on the propulsion system of its automatic station. The first activation was performed by a corrective braking engine that lasted 243 seconds. And the second - the soft landing engines, lasted 76 seconds. At 12:03 MSK, Luna-25 has entered the moon’s orbit.

All systems are functioning normally, communication is stable. From here, at a height of 100km lunar orbit, Luna-25 will spend the next 3 days making 36 orbits around the moon.

Which means that over the next 48 hours few days, the most critical stage will happen - will a soft landing take place successfully?

If so, then Russia will claim the first landing spot on the moon’s south pole. If not, then the Indians will have their shot immediately after on August 22-23. The race is on for a nail-biting finish.

Just want to say that I enjoyed every single one of your stories.

Is it mostly for religious/spiritual people?

I am in two minds about this:

Dems winning = Biden starting fights with everyone else on the planet (Trump also wanted to but he’s too scared to pull the trigger) = higher chance of everyone dying in a nuclear apocalypse

GOP winning = far worse ghoulish policies against minorities and stripping of civil rights in the country = higher chance of dying from deranged conservative government policy

Maybe Russia will fall for the Star Wars nonsense again like the USSR did.

Nationalism is simply the inevitable outcome for any country that has been colonized by a foreign imperialist power.

It is a very potent weapon, that can be harnessed for chauvinist purpose (as in European imperialism where the concept was first originated) or for anti-colonial struggle (nearly all of the post-war decolonization and independence movements had strong component of nationalism - from the Chinese communists and nationalists fending off Japanese invaders in the early 20th century, all the way to today’s West Africa’s struggle against their French colonizers).

Without nationalism, your state will be quickly disintegrate into dozens of provincial authorities and constant civil war between various warlord factions. Like it or not, national consciousness is what holds the state together when it comes to resisting foreign colonial powers.

Nobody tells him what air defense systems are.

The Central Bank works for the IMF and the Western imperialists (seriously, not joking at all). Just fucking kill me already, I think Russia will go into recession in 2024.

Russia was appealing to their former WWII allies about the Four Ds: demilitarization, denazification, decentralization, and democratization that came out of the Potsdam Conference.

Russia was saying hey, former allies, don’t forget what we have all promised about Nazism. Why are you promoting, arming and supporting Nazi activity in our doorsteps?

As you will note, the words denazification and demilitarization were specifically chosen to remind the Western powers of their promises.

Start replying in Русский or 中文.

You’ve got it backwards. The far right elements were deliberately sowed to induce instability on Russia’s borders, and has been so since before and after the Cold War.

Check out Operation Bloodstone. Check out Operation AERODYNAMIC. Check out Prolog. These are all declassified information detailing their activities in Ukraine and the role in destabilizing Russia both externally and internally.

The reason is quite simple actually: Russia’s increasingly close relationship with the EU (especially Germany) as a raw material supplier will eventually pull the EU out of the US sphere. Energy sovereignty has always been a key issue for Europe. When Saddam tried to sell oil in euro, Iraq was immediately invaded. Then Russia began to sell gas in euro, setting the stage for Europe to gain its energy sovereignty.

Thus, Maidan had to happen. The war in Ukraine has to happen. Nordstream bombing had to happen. All to prevent the vassal states from defecting and undermining US hegemony in the region.

No matter who is in charge in Russia, a left wing government or a right wing government, they all have to face the same problem. Putin tried to appease to the West for nearly a decade, only to see the US keep sending military arms to Ukraine openly. If he had been an even bigger idiot he might even wait until Ukraine to be fully armed by NATO and by then it would have been a far worse humanitarian crisis. And then you’d be calling him an idiot for trying to appease the West and ignoring the military buildup in Ukraine.

What do you mean? Trump was the one who resumed arming the Azov after it was stopped during the Obama administration. They are all on the same page, and Trump is far from clean when it comes to Ukraine. The only reason for the opposition comes from the fact that they are now the opposition and the Dems are in charge. If the GOP wins it will still be the same, maybe less fanatical about it because Biden is dead set on setting the world on fire.

I don't believe sanctions are a reliable, sufficient method of collapsing major world powers.

The point is that they didn’t know that.

What they were seeing is that the two largest economic bodies teaming up together (US + EU) to unleash the most powerful economic sanctions ever seen on a country with a GDP smaller than Italy’s. It was supposed to be a show of force and a warning to the rest of the world about “this is why you don’t fuck with us Europeans or this will be the fate of your country! If we can collapse Russia with ease, we will collapse yours too”

It’s the economic sanctions. Cutting Russia off SWIFT and confiscating their foreign reserves were the equivalent of dropping financial nukes on the country - to blast them back to the 1990s poverty. Then they’d be able to move in and carve up Russia’s resources for themselves. They were fully conscious of what they were about to do to tens of millions of people in Russia.

The fact that Russia survived the nukes was an exception, not the rule. Most other countries would not survive that.

We don’t have to worry about Russia becoming “more powerful” because the only way they can achieve that under the current climate of unprecedented sanctions is by abandoning neoliberalism and adopting socialist policies. If they manage to overcome that, and that’s a big if, then they are already on their way towards socialism, so it doesn’t matter much to us leftists anyway.

Banning AfD for their fascism or for their purportedly anti-NATO stance?

It’s very simple: we are leftists whose only position in this war is to support whichever side that is more beneficial the survival of working class movements.

NATO/Ukraine winning means the resurgence and victory of fascism in Eastern Europe and Russia, it means replicating what Ukraine has done to its own people (banning socialist and communist parties, persecution and murder of labor activists, rise of violent fascist gangs, mass privatization of public utilities to foreign capitalists, and the inevitable neoliberal shock therapy being perpetrated in the region to impoverish the working class as if those countries haven’t suffered enough). Essentially, a repeat of post-Soviet Russia shock doctrine in the 1990s. The Western media literally have been salivating on the prospect of collapsing Russia’s economy with their “sanctions from hell” as though collective punishment is going to stop the war somehow.

As much as we criticize Russia for their problems, it is nowhere near as severe as the fascism problem in Ukraine today, which is being actively promoted and glorified by NATO and Western media. For one, the Communist Party of Russian Federation is still the second largest political party in the country, despite them not being as radical as we’d like them to be. Meanwhile, Ukraine is actively decommunizing the country to erase its own Soviet legacies.

On a higher level, though, we as Marxists see this as the ultimate clash between neoliberal finance capitalism (represented by the US) and industrial capitalism (represented by China). As followers of Marx’s thesis, we believe that industrial capitalism remains most viable path towards socialism. The Russia-Ukraine War is thus a proxy war between two systems: Ukraine representing the expansion of finance capital led by Washington into Russia to ultimately weaken the rise of China; and Russia which is resisting the encroachment of Western capitalism and is being increasingly pulled into the sphere of Chinese socialism.

To put it quite simply, we see that neoliberalism represents a dead end where fascism is the imminent outcome. Western imperialism winning will truly doom the Global South for they will be the first ones that will be sacrificed to the gods of free market as the global capitalist system crumbles from within.

This is how I remember as well. It’s like when Iran shot down their own airliner in early 2020, there were Twitter posts about shooting down American F-35 and then immediately deleted after the news came out.