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The ukraine war and godawful sources a problem
Samo Burja (sadly can't find the tweet) once said that we rely on defense ministries of the individual nations for information but at the same time lying about the state of affairs is considered respectable propaganda in a time of war.
Onto the sources
The Bad
Ukranian ministry of defense: These guy's obviously can't be trusted, they would totally lie about things if it means more american aid, lying about success in offensive operations, lying about goals and motives, or lying about defensive strategy, especially due to operational security concerns.
Russian ministry of defense: Exactly as untrustworhy as the UKR MoD but we hear less from them. What the UKR MoD and RU MoD agree on is likely "true".
Basically propaganda
The new york times: Something I wasn't expecting was how god awful the NYT's actual coverage of the ukraine war actually has been. reading their reports has been surprisingly low value. very little description of what is happening at any reasonable level. Maybe this shouldn't surprise me, the actual events of the war don't really improve how something looks narratively so you end up with little information about the facts on the ground
(this applies to most of the western print press and I won't mention any further, though Matthew chance of CNN was pretty good)
Better than most
Wikipedia: Wikipedia continues to keep winning. While it both does a good job explaining the history (talking about the invasion and conflict really starting in 2014) it also has some great parts that go unnoticed. Casualties? Reports vary widely what a great line to just throw out. Wikipedia's reporting is way above average and has better timelines than any reporting I've seen in the mainstream western press. They still have issues but sadly little actually can beat them. (I definitely find their UKR coverage worse because it's less contentious on english language groups than say their isreal gaza coverage but thankfully i'm not forecasting isreal gaza so i don't have to worry about it)
The institute for the study of war This is probably the most accurate source that you can call "respectable". Unlike other sources they do a good job of citing their sources and their citations stem from far more credible sources than the UKR MoD. The main problem with them is Bias, General David Petreus is a pretty solid general overall and while I tend to like the reports, I find the reports are slightly more anti-russian than the facts on the ground typically indicate. But unlike other reporters they actually accurately report the facts on the ground to a degree that nobody else except 1 group does. I may dislike sentences like "We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting." because they really should have just deleted the word Russian in that sentence. overall I like these guys and think they are the best reporting I can get regularly
The best (but so infrequent)
The AUSTRIAN ARMY Youtube channel The austrian army's reporting on the battlefield situation is top notch, I think that since they only post updates every 6 months or so their reporting tends to be a lot better at not missing the larger scale operations. Of course it's harder to cite the austrian army youtube channel and call it "respectable" but many probably would accept it.
Analysis and speculation
William spaniel While mostly a channel about strategic implications he actually does a pretty good job talking about how leaders can actually think. The Naval war college regularly cites him so I consider him much more credible than average. (though the naval war college also plays Polis to discuss the Peloponnesian war so they're definitely more willing to be a little less hinged than you'd expect)
Perun IDK how this guy got so big but /r/credibledefense loves him and I like his powerpoints.
So onto the actual conflict.
Right now the big story is that the russian army is making a move from the north while Ukraine is slowly losing territory on the southeast, not much to be sure, if this were mar 2022 you'd call the approach a massive slowdown. However the long slow push of russia into ukr territory is happening after a failed UKR 2023 counteroffensive. The war continues with what I would call world war 1 tactics with 2024 weapons. Trenches, Artillery, and spotters dominate the war, while in WW1 it was biplanes, in the Ukraine russian war it's the drone. The drone is creating this weird war where visibility is at an all time high, if you look at the survivability onion you'll notice that stealth comprimises most of the survival tactics Evasive manuvers are almost a last resort. This means it's much harder to conduct certain operations without getting troops killed. I wonder how much the conflict will change in the coming months, the 1 prediction which tends to hold true is that almost nothing happens because this is the second coming of world war 1
Short version is that Perun is both an actual subject-matter expert in how states plan/design/program military capabilities to meet their strategies, and he was able to succinctly cut through both a significant amount of early-war propaganda by looking at publicly available information and made a number of predictions extremely early in the war- particularly that the Russian military wasn't built to be as much as an overmatch as the early-war consensus was- that were vindicated with time. These created an early credibility bonus that over time allowed his military-industrial-policy expertise to show through.
More to the point, he was able to do so by distilling extremely complex subjects to more understandable points, and do so in a way that is explicit in acknowledging information limitations and yet still able to do so with strong references, both relatively undisputed (drawing implications from visual loss data) and from the utility of using extremely biased sources' own positions (using official Russian positions as a means of establishing numeric floors / ceilings for the purpose of establishing contexts of scale).
As Perun doesn't try to analyze the war as a horse race, but to use observed tactical/system evolutions as examples for a broader point on the capability/theme of the video which is often not strictly Ukraine-centric, he tends to avoid day-by-day catastrophizing of positions that retain relevance months or even years later. In so much that he does do 'state of the war' reviews, they tend to be retrospective, not contemporary, mitigating current-time bias, and when they are contemporary they tend to be very measured.
Perun is partisan. He's fairly decent and but he is, nevertheless, partisan, perhaps to the same degree as say, RWA Podcast is. Might be worth revisiting their respective predictions.
For example, here's Perun in 2022 talking about the perspective of Russian economy.
You can give it a listen to check how it has aged.
ISW is very bad. It's Douglas MacGregor tier. They're just bad.
Pretty well, given the generally consistent validation of his arguments.
As long as you don't extend them beyond the points he's actually making, they're pretty banal and uncontroversial, unless you consider things like 'major economic interventions come with a cost' controversial. If anything, it's critiqueable for being non-falsifiable by predicting long-term consequences that wouldn't be expected yet.
Just to go by its own TL;DR, the video is making a constrained set of points, with some topic-adjacent topics explicitly in other videos including an entire video later on how war economies don't suddenly collapse, that Russia has tools to patch short-term damage to the economy, but that Russia is likely to receive longer-term harms due to the tradeoffs it will have to do to continue fighting. He calls the pro-Ukrainian view that sanctions would grind the Russian war effort to a stop a dream, but also that they do harm, which has been generally observed in how the Russian economy's growth and metrics have changed over the years since 2022. He makes clear that the economic competition is dependent on how willing the West is to support Ukraine- and that he has questions on how the West would be willing to provide the significant levels of support needed, which is downright preescient given how the 2022 situation evolved before the Nord Stream explosion led to the general German shift on permitting major categories of support that were within the west's economic capacity to do.
From various other sections on the Russian economy- feel free to register what you think aged poorly-
-The war is not a closed-system war of just Russia vs Ukraine.
-The Russian economy will not have a near term collapse, and that Russia built up substantial pre-war preparations to mitigating economic disruption to the war production economy (and that he would talk more about that in a following video).
-The Russian indicators of economic health in the first months of the war relied on interventions that can provide short-term metric success but which disguise (and cause) longer-term issues. That Russia has resorted to more, not fewer, distortionary techniques- as well as obscuring data that could verify health if the economy were healthy- would also seem to validate.
-The Foreign Trade Reserves, despite the immediate drop in the early war, were a concern but that he specifically disagreed with a lot of the then-contemporary views and did NOT view it as a short or medium-term threat to Russia's ability to wage war due to options available to stabilize it. *For those less familiar with western government planning time frames, which is his background as a procurement specialist, 'short term' is often 0-to-2 years, and medium-term is often 2-to-10.
-On Russian energy exports, he makes the point that Europe was/is undergoing an expensive economic shift away from dependence to limit Russian ability to blackmail, which occurred, and that the Russians would progressively lose the Europeans as a dependent market, which has also been seen as Russian gas exports by pipelines have decreased far more than LNG gas exports have risen At no point does he argue that this means Russia is going to lose all their income and ability to sustain war in the coming years, and this is well before the European sanctions model (which was designed to let sea-based hydrocarbons continue onto global markets, but reduce Russian profits) was outlined, which itself is reflective of the Western political will.
Skipping ahead past the NATO economic figures to Russia on, the 'What Next' section is more predictive-
'What Can Russia Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options Russia could do to maintain the war economy, with the general theme of longer term costs, but continued ability to wage war into the medium term. A number of the options have been seen, including appropriations, interventions, inflation, and Chinese import substitution.
'What Can the West Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options the West could do to leverage their economic advantages. Many of these were not utilized in 2022, and we're seeing the implications of some of these delays this year with the current artillery ammo disparity- which is a validation of the analysis that the economic advantages depended on will and longer-term planning, which there was a lack of support for in 2022 and into 2023 is causing consequences in 2024, which remains well within his window of Russia's ability to continue fighting.
And so on and so on. As an analysis video, it continues to hold up- not because the facts are the same in May 2024 as they were in Apr 2022, but because they were true in 2022 and resulted in the sort of actions he predicted Russia could do to continue fighting the war over the period of time that has passed since the video. Russia has repeatedly intervened in its markets and taken more and more steps to sustain the economy, and these are the sort of interventions normally considered to cause longer-term damages and costs, and the need for such relatively drastic interventions is indicative of the economic mismatch at the heart of the comparison argument.
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Recently, I found that for raw facts, the Youtuber going by "Military Summary Channel" is quite good. The flaws with it are that he has a very obvious pro-Russian bias that he tries to mask but that usually manifests itself in the form of calling absolutely every Russian advance very important and every problem experienced by Ukraine catastrophic, and picking video captions that exaggerate Russian gains that disagree with what he actually winds up saying in the video. This, along with the extremely formulaic script that may be due to bad command of English but still wanting to sound "professional", makes him useless as a source of opinion and prognosis. However, I found him unusually well-calibrated when it comes to integrating the various sources to determine who actually controls what piece of land at a given time and colouring the map, with many instances of him being correctly skeptical against both all the pro-Russian mappers and the doomer contingent of pro-Ukrainian ones, while not just being unidirectionally slow to accept changes in control that are eventually confirmed.
The next best pro-Russian "daily updates and maps" sort of source is still the Telegram user @rybar (you'll need to autotranslate for most of it), whose emotional calibration on importance of developments and future prospects actually seems more on point than the above - however, the crackdown on independent milbloggers a few months into a war coupled with his high profile really did a number on him, making him cease giving candid long-form assessments so you need to read between the lines a bit to get his actual opinion. He does jump the gun on map colouring sometimes. Also, being very pro-Russian and having been partnered into the semi-official propaganda apparatus, the ethically rather than militarily relevant parts of the assessment (which civilian deaths are evil vs. which ones are justified etc.) will still have a directionality that a pro-Western reader is likely to find grating.
Military Summary Channel will always make me smile when I remember him, just because of his "Mongolian Tactics" cope when talking about the loss of Kherson by the Russians, and similar setbacks in that period. I stopped following him as he became both less balanced and less amusing.
Kherson obviously wasn't defensible because it was a bridgehead. If you aren't in a situation to exploit it, and Russia wasn't because they thought it'd be just a quick regime change op, giving it up is the obvious move.
So Russia gives up, Ukraine then spends 1.5 years trying to cross the Dniepr in the opposite direction and getting their small bridgehead constantly shelled and boats sunk.
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I've only started watching him about a month ago, what was the story there? My sense is, as I said, that right now his representation of the situation on the ground is better than most other sources, but it's possible that he does much worse when Russia is on the retreat.
Mongolian tactics is the argument that a withdrawal is not a defeat, but a lure to pull an enemy into a position for a much greater counterattack than can envelop them, i.e. getting the fortifiers to leave their fortifications and come into the fields where the mongol cavalry destroy them.
In Kherson, it was one of the cope arguments that the Russians weren't in an untenable position, but that the Ukrainians were over-extending their offensive and the Russian counterattack would evicerate them.
(The Russians claimed to have stopped the Kherson offensive multiple times in the months leading up to its completion. It wasn't hard to find plenty of arguments that the Ukrainians were making a obvious and debilitating error by pursuing the offensive.)
Every russian retreat is a glorious trap about to be sprung on the unsuspecting ukrops, every Ukrainian failure is proof of their impending failure cascade, every Russian long range strike onto civilians is magically hitting a hidden HIMARs located behind a baby crib, every Russian asset lost is just proof of how resilient the Russian manufacturing machine is, every Russian field 'improvisation' is proof of superior Russian ingenuity. Bias exists in all parties/observers within this conflict, but pro Russian cope is the finest fermented diarrhea to be injected into every vatniks urethrae.
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Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
The magic and charm of the pro-Russia blogosphere really died after the Wagner uprising. The Russians were already cracking down on the wrong forms of pro-Russian support, but it really cemented afterwards, even though it was the divergences between pro-MoD and pro-Wagern ultranationalists that provided the occasional illuminating insight. Then, both sides had an incentive to point out errors / flaws of the other's positions, which translated into some more sober assessments and concessions to reality. Now they're not much more than retreads of official talking points, lacking both the dynamism and the willingness to go off script.
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Wikipedia is full of Ukrainian partisans. They waited about 6-9 months after Ukraine lost Bakhmut to declare it a victory for Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Battle_of_Bakhmut/Archive_5#Result
The ISW put out a report (written by two Ukrainians and a neocon) saying that Russia's only chance of victory was its efforts to manipulate our perceptions of Ukraine and that we can and should mobilize our economic resources to win Ukraine the war. They cite a nominal GDP graph to back up this point. This is pretty dubious - despite a high GDP the West apparently lacks the industrial power needed to compete with Russia in munitions production. A lot of our GDP is in services, finance and real estate, not heavy industry.
Furthermore, Russia has thousands of tactical nukes. The US seriously considered using nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, peripheral wars with fairly low stakes. Why should we assume that Russia would not go nuclear in a much more serious conflict in its core area of interest, should it seem that they were on the back foot?
Besides the contested logic of the matter, it's pretty perverse for two Ukrainians to be writing an article decrying Russian propaganda narratives and psy-ops while asking for unconditional, near-blind faith in Ukraine.
https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1772941705903313328
I don't know about the other sources but I recommend serious caution on wikipedia and ISW. This is a hard war for anyone to be objective on.
But things like steel, rare earth metals, and oil are traded on world markets, so nominal GDP is very important. Domestic heavy industry is more important if you're at risk of sanctions by other countries.
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Given how Putin sat at the far end of these comically huge conference room tables during COVID, one can surmise he is afraid of death. I believe the US made it clear to him if he uses nuclear weapons they will assure his death.
Being afraid of random death from something as unglorious as a bad flu doesn't necessarily entail being afraid of dying under any circumstances including a civilisational nuclear showdown.
Well, as bad as this is for Ukraine, I think the best outcome for the world is for Russia to be stuck in a frustrating, endless simmering war in Ukraine that's just a black hole for resources that they neither win nor lose that falls out of the news.
I believe the US knows handing Russia a resounding defeat means they're at risk of launching nukes so they go down in a blaze of glory. But if it's just an endless frozen super boring conflict? The heroic "last stand" time never arrives.
Russian Civilization doesn’t end if they lose in Ukraine today. The idea they would suicide themselves because they lost a little prestige feels off.
The trade-off is even worse for Russian elites. If they won the war I guess they could fantasize the history books will view them as like Caesar’s and Pompeii’s. Reinvigorating the Russian empire.
If they lose the war the choice is
Well, if they fail in Ukraine because the West pours in more support and repels them it's not exactly guaranteed that they would stop at the borders of Ukraine 2013 is it? What's to stop them from continuing their march into Belgorod or the rest of Russia? Russia's elites can just sit around and say "eh probably not going to happen" but are they 100% certain?
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The Russian government (arguably like all true loci of power) is a gang. You can't just quit.
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But could the current level of Western support actually be maintained if it falls out of the news? It seems that the Western leadership may be stuck riding the tiger of public opinion here - they have to keep people sufficiently engaged and enraged that redirecting those resources elsewhere does not become a winning proposition, but not so much so that escalation and making a more serious effort to hand Russia a resounding defeat does. Even in the cynical environment of this forum, carefully maintaining the meat grinder at sous-vide temperature seems to be a position that it pains people to endorse - and there is always the question of Ukrainian morale, which may not in fact be in infinite supply.
This conflict really rhymes quite well with Vietnam (before the US came in), where at some point the motley coalition of inept French, decadent Southern leadership, genuine anti-Communist locals and peasants that were tentatively accepting the proposition that they will have a better life under the West started fraying as 2 and 4 were only willing to give so much for 1 and 3 and the US faced the choice between full commitment and humiliation.
Well, yes, I'm not saying this war was good, but if Russia was hell-bent on capturing Ukraine anyway, making it as incredibly high cost yet still as drawn out and miserable as possible without giving them any rousing good story for using nukes is a good, relatively safe card to play.
Peter Zeihan, a global strategist, argues that Russia's victory in Ukraine may lead them to march on Poland and threaten nukes there if we don't acquiesce. I don't quite understand why we would but that's not a great escalation if they feel emboldened from winning in Ukraine and using Ukrainian territory and resources and people as cannon fodder. Again, this would have happened either way I guess.
I don't know, I read some of Zeihan's books ("Disunited Nations" and "The Accidental Superpower") before this conflict and found them to consist more of riveting just-so tales than compelling reasoning. The idea that Russia will attack Poland next seems like another just-so story, which just happens to be very convenient for the current American agenda ("Why should you pour money and participate in sanctions to defend this unrelated country? Because if you let Russia win, they will come for you next!"). Do you, or does Zeihan, have a persuasive argument as to why Russia would do that?
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
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I don't agree with the Zeihan-style argument of mass-conscripting the Ukrainians, but I will note the RFERL isn't making the more relevant point of volunteers in the occupied Donbas.
Namely, that conscription was already used significantly in the separatist statelets, to a degree that various pre-war analysis indicated they were functionally bled white in having already conscripted the most relevant males, and that was in a far more favorable environment than trying to mass-conscript the more recently occupied territories. 2022 was a major shock to the Russians on the Ukrainian mentality, and so while there's been relatively low-scale conscription / coerced labor (including of POWs), the bigger deterent is honestly political reliability / trust. If someone volunteers, they probably won't frag the officers, but conscription is risky in a different way. Even at their 'best', the separatist forces in 2022 summer offensive were notably less enthused / proactive when tasked to fronts outside of their immediate home turf. Political reliability of the forces is a significant thing on the Russian side in Ukraine.
Persuasive is a load-bearing word here- basically a caveat that retreats to the motte of subjectivity, and most people wouldn't and didn't find the argument that Russia would invade Ukraine three years ago persuasive- but there is an argument for Russia continuing forward, which is that if it is in an ability to do so in the next two years, that is likely it's best chance to do anything in Europe vis-a-vis the next 20, and that if it wants to seriously overturn the European security architecture vis-a-vis NATO it's best chance is now.
The basic short version of why in ideological terms is that Russia's invasion in Ukraine wasn't cast in terms unique to Ukraine, but in framings / justifications that applied to much of the former Soviet Pact as well. In so much that the Russian position can be trusted to signal intent (the 'why'), the reasons Russia used for Ukraine are as valid for places like Estonia or Lithuania too. Oppressed russian minority narrative, former territories of the Russian empire improperly released by the Soviets, culturally divergent Russians, and so on. Russia was demanding a retraction of all post-Cold War NATO forces from eastern european members who joined after the Soviet Union, not just demands about Ukraine.
The short version in opportunity terms is that if Russia is in a position to make any move against NATO countries in the next two years, it's (a) because it somehow managed to beat Ukraine into some form of submission (or else the war would still go on), and (b) did so because it was able to do so before the European military-industrial recapitalization outproduced Russia on an economic level. Russia won't be able to economically compete with the European recapitalization in the longer term due to economies of scale, but in this hypothetical it will still have on hand the military mobilization that beat the immature European/NATO support in the immediate term, meaning there is a window of opportunity in which Russia can act with advantage. As Russia's mobilized 'victorious' army is dependent on cold-war reactivated systems, with extremely limited capabilities vis-a-vis potential European outputs, this period of advantage is limited, and thus a use-or-lose prospect.
The short version in the locational terms are the Baltics or the Balkans. In the Baltics, the old form is that the Russians could blitz the northern Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) due to them bordering Russia (direct mobilization) or Belarus (which let Russia use it for the Ukraine invasion), and seize them fast enough to force a fait accompli by threatening nuclear deterrence card and prevent a major NATO reinforcement/counter-attack. (This has gotten considerably harder with Finland and Sweden entering NATO, but it's not impossible).
Alternatively- and this would depend on a Russian victory over Ukraine that allows Russian forces to move through, which was a goal of the original Russian coup de main objective of the entire country- would be an incursion into the Balkans. If you get into western Ukraine, then you have the separatists in Moldova (which Russia tried to coup a few years ago), start setting conditions to intervene in Serbia, and otherwise have a variety of options to throw the Balkans into a messy chaos to distract NATO, especially if you can bribe/support/whatever Orban and Hungary for an even bigger wrench. Note here that a direct NATO-Russia conflict isn't even necessary, just a Russia-EU conflict, as the Balkans have a number of points where the Americans would not be treaty-obligated to get involved, and the Balkan-politics being what they are offer a lot of ways to ruin fragile EU consensus issues.
Ultimately, whether it's the Russian's own casus belli rationalizations for Ukraine, or ways for Putin to try and destabilize the NATO/European Union which he's viewed himself in conflict with, a victorious Russia in Ukraine would, by extension, have capabilities that have a limited viability lifespan, and they'd be at the behest of a generally aggressive Putin who will have just come off of a war he won with all the leader self-validation of opinion that brings.
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I'd compare it more to Afghanistan after 1979: a conflict where the West was never going to intervene and expected a simple Soviet assimilation, but found that it was possible to bleed the Soviets and wear down their will to fight, without losing any Western troops. Of course, Ukraine is not a guerilla conflict, but it is also one where Russia has been frustrated militarily and faces accelerating costs. When Putin dies/retires/becomes senile, there might also be a similar period of instability to the USSR in the 1980s, since there is no young, popular, and competent successor.
I don't know, what you said seems more like an aspirational comparison (you hope that it will have the same effect on Russia as Afghanistan had on the USSR) than one that identifies particularly many parallels between present-day details. There are many ways in which this conflict resembles colonial Vietnam and doesn't resemble Afghanistan, though I understand that someone who sympathises with the Ukrainian position might find this comparison pejorative simply on the basis of the Vietnam war's known outcome. For what it's worth, I'm not meaning to imply that an American intervention in Ukraine would end like the American intervention in Vietnam - the differences that become relevant there are too many, including lack of appetite for genuine guerrilla warfare and the presence of the "everybody who really cares about not surrendering to UA just escapes to mainland Russia" option that had no counterpart in the cornered beast that was north Vietnam.
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
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Funnily enough, the latest round of Kreminology of Putin's cabinet reshuffle last week was the point that a new generation of 'Princelings'- the children of Putin allies- are being brought up into the government, creating a younger future-leadership generation. Succession planning isn't in per see, but deepening the bench into the younger demographics appears to be occuring.
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Even Incitatus made some good calls, when the right answer was "Nay."
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True, but there’s a history of leaders who lose wars dying anyway. I think if he’s cornered and he thinks his only options are nukes or being executed, he’ll choose the nukes.
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If they could kill him without repercussions, they would have already done so, which means they either can't, or doing so would come with costs they're not willing to pay. This might change if he uses nukes, but it's far from clear to me how it would pan out.
Why would they have killed him? It’s not like he’d be replaced by a liberal, there are plenty of (more) competent people in the security state. Generally assassinating foreign heads of state is an extremely poor move. The CIA was only obsessed with it in Castro’s case out of desperation; generally it’s pretty rare.
This would require a very improbable configuration:
You can point at literally Hitler, but he had several centuries of military tradition to rely on. There was an effective floor on the competence of German army generals. At the same time, all other branches of his security state weren't exactly stellar.
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If it was an effective of preventing him from using nukes, they would have done so to prevent or stop the war by now. That killing of leaders doesn't tend to pan out this way is my entire point.
That's the thing, if anything a successful assassination would make it more likely for the next russian leader to use a nuke, and a failed assassination would make it more likely for Putin to use a nuke. On the other hand reserving these tactics for extreme situations makes them less likely.
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Yeah I'll agree that both are flawed in the same direction, it's just that every other source is even more flawed aside from the austrian army.
The us naval war college doesn't post reports anywhere for example. I sometimes read Russia today but while I get info from them I find it more dubious than ISW stuff (though it's useful corroboration).
The austrian army is the best source but they are so infrequent when I need updates roughly once a week/month for forecasting reasons. I have to rely on the ISW and Wikipedia mainly. do you have any suggestions other than the ones mentioned above?
RAND reports (rather than commentary) are decent, they're long form ebook analytical things rather than short-term news. I'm most interested in the big picture rather than little villages being captured or recaptured. Mariupol, Kherson, those are important places that well-educated people can point to on a zoomed-out map. Who'd ever heard of Bakhmut before the war? Let alone all those other places where people are talking about the salt mine or the slag pit...
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?q=ukraine+war&content_type_s=Report&rows=24
I think Mearsheimer was also a good thinker generally, he predicted this whole war back in 2014, that Russia would move to wreck Ukraine but lacked the strength to conquer the whole country. Mearsheimer is a very high level thinker, I don't think he knows or cares about the little towns on the map either and his writing does lack the ground level detail you may be looking for. However, I think he's useful because he gets things right. He was also one of the original opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, putting him head and shoulders above much of the West's top brass: https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine
In his famous 201 lecture Mearshimer predicted that it would be too stupid for Russia to invade Ukraine because it would look bad for Russia. Mearshimer did not consider Russia to be militarily capable of accomolishing a fait accompli, and thus ruled out Russian hostility as a given. In fact if you look up Mearshimers work prior to the 2022 war, Mearshimer keeps banging on that the USA should focus against China and that securing Russia as an ally was - and still is - of paramount importance. I view his hostility to Ukraine as part of his larger crusade against perceived misplaced priorities of the state department combined with an extremely ruthless calculus of relative power focus: it is inefficient to support weak corrupt states in Russias proximate orbit and it is better to husband resources if not spending it to bribe/secure Russias allegiance.
Mearshimers military analysis is, unfortunately, severely lacking. In his rush to get the west (really just USA) to refocus against China, he emphasizes that Russia is winning and in the face of such inevitability the west should stop wasting time. His sources for Russian inevitable victory are ridiculous retards like Scott Ritter, ArmchairW, BigSerge and fucking moonofalabama. It is an echo chamber of 'russia stronk!' vatniks that stand in contrast to the nafo chuds, and unfortunately for Mearshimer the inevitable victory of Russia is neither evident nor imminent. The longer Russia stumbles over its slow grind in Ukraines east, the more time is wasted on debating artillery shells instead of nuking Chinas island chain airbases.
Weak and corrupt states.
Like Poland 20 years ago.
Which is now arguably our strongest military ally in the region.
There is a seperate argument that Russias idiotic revanchism was the impetus for Poland, the Baltics and even Ukraine to aggressively pursue the anti corruption, judicial reform and and democratization policies that would allow them to enter NATO in the first place. Poland in particular has exercised excessive agency in forcing their inclusion into NATO, this video at the 18 minute mark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVmmASrAL-Q&t=1520s&pp=ygUSc2h1dCB1cCBhYm91dCBuYXRv
documents the history of Polands active manipulation of polish american voters to force USA to include poland into NATO.
I do not mean to impugn Poland for their current status as if they were unworthy of joining NATO due to corruption, I am merely articulating the observed pattern of Mearshimers flavor of great power realism causing his disdain for building alliances against Russia. I'll find some other reason to diss poles later, wanted to mock their food but potato pierogis are just carb-on-carb hate (British toast sandwiches take the cake for sadness there) and kielbasa is the best of all european sausages, so I gotta think on it.
For reference, you can imbed links, including youtube, via [] () formatting.
[type the thing you want here]( put your url in here)
Have no space between the ]( , and it should work.
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Mearsheimer's argument is not complex:
Unlike 'experts' like General Petraeus or Ben Hodges, Mearsheimer actually gets things right. Back in mid-2023 when he wrote that article everyone was hyping the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it promptly sank like a stone because they lacked the mass and firepower to beat the Russians. The war has continued according to Mearsheimer's prognosis. There's no magic trick to achieve victory, you just need mass and firepower. The Russians have it, the Ukrainians have much less. By the way, in 2014 he wrote that while Russia wasn't eager to get immersed in Ukraine and they lacked the power to easily conquer the country. However, Russia would devastate and wreck Ukraine if we continued leading them down the primrose path: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Lo and behold, he's been proven totally correct on Russian capabilities (they certainly haven't easily conquered the country) and on causal logic, if we keep immersing ourselves in Ukraine Russia will have a very bad reaction and wreck the country.
Imagine calling these guys ridiculous retards with severely lacking analysis and then watching as they're proven right for making the most obvious, straightforward arguments imaginable.
And why should we nuke China's island bases? Our strategy is clearly defensive, it's far easier to present the war to third parties and voters as defensive if we're not the ones attacking. A nuclear first strike against essentially peripheral targets is certainly an interesting proposal, however I'm not quite sure it advances our position.
If you ignore the things Mearsheimer actually got wrong and ignore things that Petraeus or Hodges actually got right, this would indeed be a compelling line of argument. But if we don't, it's not, and little more than cherry picking.
The war's progression defied multiple of Mearsheimer's prognosis, starting from whether it would start, to how it would last. Other parts of Mearsheimer's prognosis that have been born out- like Ukraine being wrecked- were never contested in the first place. Even the tools of prognosis have repeatedly been exposed as lacking- the crux of Mearsheimer's analysis on inevitable attrition has rested on artillery advantage, even as the late/post-23 trends have demonstrated that the artillery was far more circumstantial, while he's regularly made arguments on capabilities (such as Russia eviscerating Ukrainian air defenses) that have been more than a little overreaching. There's a reason that Russia's turn to airpower has hinged on glide bombs from the ranges they have.
You like to appeal back to 2014 for Mearsheimer, but I see no reason not to go further to the 1990's- as early as 1992- when Mearsheimer was on record advocating for nuclear proliferation to the Germans and Japanese, aka historic Russian strategic rivals, which would have brought permanent nuclear presence to the border of the Russian sphere of influence that Mearsheimer called for respecting... which has been part of the nominal cassus belli for Russian intervention on grounds of proximate nuclear threat.
In other words, Mearsheimer has been advocating crossing contemporary Russian narratives of security red lines for about as long as the Soviet Union's been dead. He's just done it in different forms, but not forms that would escape a revanchist narrative of malign activity of western encroachment.
Mearsheimer is as deserving as the 'expert' title as anyone else, and unsurprisingly not any more impressive outside his field of actual expertise than anyone else. People just tend to forget his field of expertise is international relations theory as a political scientist, not international relations in action, or in policy, or anything particularly to do with the military in general, or as any kind of analyst of the countries he opines on.
I tend not to ask, but what nationality are you for the 'we'?
For whatever reason- admittedly perhaps conflating you with someone else- I thought you presented yourself as a German in the past, or at least European, which wouldn't make sense in this more recent context unless the 'we' is rather expansive. And in the inverse, there are enough Europeans on this forum that 'we' would also be awkward in this context.
The US already had nuclear weapons based in Germany and Japan in the Cold War and still has them based in Turkey. Nuclearization isn't a major change like NATO expansion eastwards towards Georgia and Ukraine, it only alters deterrence logic for those countries themselves. A nuclear Japan could be useful in countering China (another area where Mearsheimer was a decade or so ahead of the curve). Anyway, nuclear threat from Japan and Germany is less than from Turkey and far less than from Ukraine or the Baltics.
Mearsheimer did not say that a Russo-Ukrainian war wouldn't start, he described the conditions under which it would start if US/NATO foreign policy wasn't changed. He described the limitations of Russian power and the difficulties of occupying a whole country. He says that Russia will withstand considerable pain to pursue its security (this was before sanction-proofing) and that it will devastate Ukraine if the West doesn't change its policy, that logically implies war. Where did he say that Russia wouldn't go to war with Ukraine?
He even foresaw the war back in 1992, advocating that Ukraine should acquire nuclear weapons since the West was hardly likely to extend nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. He raises Crimea, mixed populations and nationalism on either side, control of the Black Sea Fleet, the fact that the Russians are always going to be stronger conventionally, historical antipathy... all factors we're dealing with decades later! He thought the Ukrainians would be less willing to bow to US pressure than they were, yet surely his predictive value is high.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mearsheimer-Case-for-Ukrainian-Nuclear-Deterrent.pdf
Meanwhile, what have all the talented NATO Ukraine hands and generals gotten us? Hodges seemed to think the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed, despite being a telegraphed attack into a fortified and well-prepared enemy who has air superiority. Petraeus was in the same camp! What were they thinking?
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-breakthrough-could-come-weeks-former-us-general-says-1823389
And then there's the whole 'Putin's Russia is so weak that we can head them off by giving Ukraine more arms but so strong that he'll invade NATO if he wins' camp that is so well-represented in think tanks and media output, especially ISW. Which is it?
I maintain that Mearsheimer has been far more useful on the course of this war than the credentialed experts who seem to be hyping Ukraine.
Australian, we do show up for even the silliest US wars and will presumably be called in against China. What is the point of AUKUS if not to tie our fates together?
Okay, I believe the Australian claim off this alone, definitely not a European-attuned perspective.
You can try to argue that Mearsheimer didn't deny a different war would start, but the war Mearsheimer argued against on grounds of Russian limitations- that Russia wouldn't try to conquer all of Ukraine- is precisely the kind of war Russia launched. It failed, Russia was incompetent, but it is an illustration of Mearsheimer not actually recognizing or acknowledging Russian divergences from his predictions, and the later retreat to semantics of what degree of invasion is / is not conquest of all of Ukraine.
Basic motte and bailey.
Not really, and this goes back to the point of Mearsheimer's limitations outside of his field, in this part how the Europeans view nuclear proliferation.
Setting aside the contextual inaccuracy- Ukraine wasn't in a position to acquire nuclear weapons in 1992, it was in a position to negotiate away the nuclear weapons it had already inherited by 1996, this is ignoring what Russia wanted in this context, and why, and how such a policy pursued by Mearsheimer could be reflected in the current Putin-imperialist zeitgeist, as well as what doing such a policy would have naturally lead to in terms of American involvement with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer was not someone who was advocating foreign policy prescriptions that actually recognized and respected Russian security concerns for their own sake. Mearsheimer is someone who is selective in which security concerns he recognizes as valid, and treats them as transactional devices while downplaying or ignoring the relevance of security concerns he doesn't recognize the validity of. Nuclear proliferation is one of these blind spots.
Put another way, Mearsheimer is someone who believes in great powers dividing spheres of influence and horse-trading power blocks, without realizing he's less an Bismark and more of a Wilhelm at coalition building.
A Ukraine that continues to exist more than two years after nearly all observers thought the state would collapse in two weeks, a Russia that having destroyed its modernized force is in the process of face-tanking its reactivated Soviet stocks while humiliating its pre-war martial reputation, a NATO with a significantly stronger Baltic position and significantly greater available manpower and material capacity, European defense recapitalization as a policy consensus, and the strongest constituent member support for NATO in the last quarter century, and for the EU since before the 2009 Financial Crisis. This is without other things like the changes to the international arms market via displacing Russia, the value of discrediting territorial irridentalist wars of aggression, the confluence of the US and Europeans against China as a second-order effect of China's alignment with Russia, and so on.
I'm surprised you walked into that cluster.
Also, misuse of 'us', since you're not in NATO not part of the NATO constituency interests.
Come now, as a native English speaker, you know the difference between could and would.
Your source is a newsweek article where Hodges doesn't say he believes the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed. It says Hodges says a breakthrough could happen, after Hodges says he ('we' in a context including himself) didn't know the accurate situation to make a conclusion.
Probably, among other things, that the Russians didn't have air superiority, which their tactics over the last years have validated given their reliance to behind-the-lines glide bombing, and that there's no such thing in major wars as a non-telegraphed offensive thanks to the satellite imagery easily available of buildup. These words do not mean what you appear to think they mean.
Otherwise, the question doesn't really make sense unless you didn't mean it. The answer is directly in the article: an offensive gain southward that went far enough could expand direct fires coverage to the E-W routes of the Crimean land bridge, complicating the Russian position in Crimea substantially.
By your ! and ? and emotional tone, I suspect you feel this was obviously a bad idea. It's less clear what you think was actually the cost incurred, the chances of success, or what you'd concede were the benefits possible.
E+U > R > E
Both. There's no contradiction unless you reject the Europeans a right to their own perspective of their relative power versus Russia.
Russia can have more military power than Europe, but not more than Ukraine with European support. If Russia were to compel / achieve a victory over Ukraine, then depending on the form it could take those forces locked down in Ukraine and move them to other potential areas. If a Russian victory meant that the Russians could move through Ukraine to the Balkans, a Russian intervention wouldn't even trigger NATO depending on the country.
Okay, but it's a silly maintenance. The guy's a goober you'd be lambasting had he had his way based on your past history of other American impositions, which he is by no means opposed to, which makes the utility far more of a stopped clock dynamic than I think you recognize.
Mearsheimer is not a person who's a fan of restrained American conduct for its own sake. In another era, he'd be an overt American imperialist. Much of the media around him in the last years is basic university tenure politics of old professors protecting their original thesis that are the basis of their reputation.
Depends on if you think that's a silly one. Mearsheimer doesn't, except in so much that his views of the Russian sphere of interest was transactional to get them on board for a land war in Asia.
It is a reach bordering on consensus building for you to use 'us' or 'we' to make common position with Americans or Europeans on things the Australians aren't immediate party to and which you do not share common views of, such as NATO, so I will be noting that more often going forward.
The post-Brexit British capitalizing on Australian disgruntlement with the French military arms deal tendencies which were weakening Australia's ability to contribute/support a US-based anti-China coalition without French support despite increasing divergences in the French and Australian government perspectives on China, after the French spent several years having a shadow-feud with the British over the execution of Brexit.
Also, long-term technology transfer.
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I like the comparison of the spotting plane to the drone. One thing that exists in this war that didn't in World War One is the possibility of deep strike (cruise missiles, ballistic missiles) which means that massed assaults (cut down in WW1 by machine-guns and tube artillery) can be defeated before even reaching the lines.
On the topic of good sources, in my very limited experience, I'd recommend the Royal United Services Institute, they actually sent some guys over to Ukraine to talk to the Ukrainians. RAND probably remains one of the best places to read the rough draft of history before it happens.
I don't read this stuff religiously, but I've found what I have read on the Russo-Ukraine War (something like one paper from each source!) to be interesting.
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