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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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