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Notes -
I’m glad we can talk about this but I’d disagree on your assessment of the war at present. A few quick notes —
(1) It’s a little misleading to say that Germany has vowed to stop new aid. The article you helpfully reference explains what this means, namely that “future funding would no longer come from Germany's federal budget but from proceeds from frozen Russian assets.” While there’s still some wrangling to come here on fine details, this is a very large pot of money that help sustain Ukraine for the foreseeable future.
(2) I’m not yet fully sold on the wisdom of the Kursk campaign, as its success criteria are more strategic than operational, for example, in boosting Ukrainian morale, reassuring Western backers, or weakening Putin’s position. The reallocation of troops from the Donbas to Kursk will probably hasten the fall of Pokrovsk, which will be the most significant Ukrainian setback since Bakhmut, but unfortunately this had been on the cards for a while.
(3) I would disagree that the Ukrainians are losing the conflict through attrition. While the last 9 months have seen creeping Russian progress in the Donbas, the conflict is extremely unlikely to be settled via seizure of land or conventional military breakthrough. Instead it is likely to be resolved via collapse of political will or industrial-economic capacity. Ukraine has some disadvantages here (being a smaller country by population, for example), but also some notable advantages. On the political front, most Ukrainians see the conflict as a war of national survival, and on the industrial economic side, it has deep-pocketed allies in the West.
(4) Overall the picture for Ukraine is considerably better than it was 6 months ago, which is not to deny that it is still extremely challenging. The new mobilisation bill has been passed and has implemented and the previously precarious manpower shortages will likely start improving in the autumn as new mobiks enter the field. Russia’s much-feared summer offensive has taken territory but has not led to breakouts or encirclements. A Trump presidency now looks considerably less likely than it did even a couple of months ago, and there is a very good chance that a Harris White Housr would be even more hawkish on Russia than the Biden-Blinken administration. F-16s are now in service, with more to follow. Long-range missile and drone attacks on Russian energy and transport infrastructure have continued, and Ukraine announced just this week that it had successfully tested its first ballistic missile. Meanwhile the Russian economy looks increasingly fragile, with central bank interest rates at 18%, their highest for two years, and signup bonuses for new recruits are approaching eye-watering levels.
None of which is to say it’ll be plain sailing. For example, I still think there’s a very real (though still <10%) chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons as a last resort strategy. However, I’m considerably more optimistic than you.
Yes, in regards to the frozen German aid, there's still a substantial amount of aid in the pipeline, plus the frozen Russian funds. (Good reminder to other countries not to store assets in Germany, BTW). Nevertheless, this is a clear signal that European aid has limits. The impetus for this change in policy was apparently revelations that the NordStream pipeline was blown up by Ukrainians after a night of drinking, which seems as likely as anything I guess.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/08/15/nord-stream-pipelines-ukrainian-saboteurs-volodymyr-zelensk/
In terms of who is winning the war of attrition I have to confess I am going off vibes mostly. I'll refrain from making specific predictions given that people far more knowledgeable than me have made such fools of themselves trying. The propaganda efforts on both sides are real which makes real information tough to obtain.
I will say this. Now that the war has gone on for 30 months, we can infer from the Lindy Principle that it is unlikely to come to a quick resolution.
I've noted in the past, and will again, that attritional vibes has been the Russian information strategy for this year, both because this has been their year of maximum relative advantage and because of the impact vibes could have on the multiple major Ukraine-backer elections this year (EU already, US next).
As was noted last year, 2024 was going to be a year of relative Russian advantage due to its earlier (late '22) commitment to arms production expansion, while the US/EU expansions were later to be started and so have been expected to start paying out / scaling the production more next year. This mattered most in terms of artillery munitions and soviet stockpile reactivations. Not only was the relative production difference going to be greatest this year, allowing a greater ratio of fires at a time when shell-hunger has been the limiting factor on both sides as they are more or less limited to rates of production + foreign purchases, but the relative quality difference is as good as it was going to be due to the Soviet reactivations / DPRK imports going to worse and worse average quality levels. Drones aside, much of the Russian war machine has been devolving to a Soviet-era machine, while Western aid production / deliveries have a relative qualitative edge that has been increasing due to that. This works well enough when you can afford a more-or-less volunteer manning base, but it has limits- limits that were becoming more obvious over the year.
The limits of Russian capacity weren't just in the devolution to the point of using unarmored vehicles (down to golfcarts) in motorized rushes, but also in the manpower situation. While more attention was on the Ukrainian shortage, which was due to the Ukrainians putting off a hard decision to expand conscription, the Russian manpower solution's limitations were shown earlier this month- not only are the new recruit bonus costs rising higher in higher in Russia, indicating not meeting the recruitment goals, but the numbers they do have are for a relatively narrow front, while stripping others to very low amounts, hence why Kursk could happen.
None of these mean Russia can't fight, or continue fighting for some time, but rather that the rate of expenditures has been unsustainable (in terms of 'can't keep up the 2024 tempo for 2025')... but that doesn't matter if you don't need to, and you don't need to if you can leverage a relative advantage into peace on your terms (or at least of maximum advantage). Using golf carts in attempts to take the Donbas in 2024 makes sense if you need to get it done in 2024 in particular.
Putin's 2024 strategy has been with the US election in mind, and the 2024/early 2025 strategy will be for the sake of trying to approach negotiations in 2025, after the new US administration, which he hopes will be Trump, who he hopes will give a better deal. The current Russian budget structure already forecasts a massive drop in war spending for 2026 and beyond, and while that in and of itself is a signal rather than a requirement, it's not a coincidence that the signal is timed to when western munitions production is expected to be out-scaling Russian.
I'll note this has also been by design of Putin, who early on in the war made the decision to claim a legal annexation of more oblasts than he controlled while also tying war resolution to broader European security architecture and release of Russian money seized early in the war, and has only made proposals that amount to turning the conflict into a frozen conflict even though the Ukrainian body politic understands the potential for a fourth continuation war down the road. Some of these were done to consolidate internal Russian system buy-in to the war, some have been for the notiational purpose of the conflict, and some of these expectations on the west, but the so-what is that there are a number of actors with vetos over various demands, and no single party that can deliver them... which isn't a secret, but neither is Putin's consistent bias to believing that the US is such an actor who can deliver all that.
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What's your basis for saying this? My only real sense of Harris' positions is that she's much likelier than Biden to indulge the left of the party, and that wing doesn't really care about Russia beyond any supposed connections the country's leadership has with Trump.
Not the OP, but my model of Harris is that she is a cipher, with no real views or opinions of her own (except perhaps social justice). She's much like Biden in that way.
So the same people who've been running the Biden admin will run the Harris admin with the same results. If she has credible opinions on foreign policy, or can even identify Crimea on a map, we haven't seen it.
I think Biden was responsible for the Afghanistan pullout, and he's likely also responsible for the US not being pro-Hamas. He also doesn't have nearly as dumb ideas on taxation.
I think this is much better attributed to AIPAC than Biden.
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