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Since everything is looking like a Trump win now, what are your actual predictions for the trajectory of the Ukraine war?
As far as I'm concerned, the doomsaying consensus predicting something like an end to supplies, forced armistice followed by Russia rearming to strike later with accumulated force struck me as unfounded and downright strange. If we even accept the premise that Trump would in fact cut supplies and force a truce, it's not at all clear to me that this would be to Ukraine's disadvantage. If anything, UA currently seems to be the side that would greatly benefit from a pause, as they could actually train up their masses of conscripts (probably to a higher standard than is available to Russia, judging by performance of "elite" Ukrainian vs. "elite" Russian troops) rather than burning them as fast as they can be equipped and give their backers time to actually ramp up production of crucial high-tech equipment such as air defense platforms, where it's clear that in the limit the West's ability to produce would outstrip Russia's ability to attrite but they just happen to be stuck on the back foot. Meanwhile, it's not clear how well Russia's losses and departures and weird 8D economic sprezzatura would even hold up under a sudden few months of deafening silence if the guns were to rest, and they don't really have all that much slack left to ramp production up further.
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia, while conditional on everything continuing as before I would now expect Ukraine losing more and more until its will to fight is broken and it feels compelled to sign a much less advantageous treaty of its own accord. Why is the former scenario not even being treated as a possibility by respectable publications? Is it just that they all tried to convert some pro-Ukraine goodwill into anti-Trump sentiment?
Trump will get stonewalled by Putin on his demands, resort to threats of reducing or cutting off aid to Ukraine as a way to force them to make whatever concessions to end the war, and hang the failure on the Biden admin and lack of support by the European satropies. Ukraine will end up a rump, disarmed state, with something like a constitutional requirement of neutrality as well as disarmament (with inspections). Russia will have more territory than it's already currently inducted into the Russian Federation.
Russia gains nothing from stopping the conflict. Everything is in their favor. They are winning all along the front. Every single week their military gets larger, stronger, and better equipped. Ukraine gets weaker, smaller, and less equipped.
I predict the war will end in 2025 with a significant chance of a cascade-failure of the Ukrainian army, likely as a result of a big arrow move by the Russians. I also expect serious political instability or coup against Zelensky & Co., likely by the nationalist faction who implement a universal conscription program in an attempt to stabilize the line and I think this will fail. I think there is a small chance in the event of a cascade failure, Europeans and/or NATO will attempt to put "peacekeepers" into parts of Ukraine in order to stabilize the conflict, perhaps first a trickle in places like Lvov and more if it's not punished enough.
The war will end as a huge embarrassment for the West with permanent degradation in the perception of the West's financial and military strength. It'll be yet another feather in the cap of failure by the US state department over the last 25 years.
Do you not think it likely/plausible that Trump would force Russia to accept a freezing of the conflict along current lines with no additional conditions by way of threats? Between the circumstance that any Republican administration is likely to contain more hawks/military optimists, a general preference his team seems to have for bold moves and a certain "Nixon going to China" effect now that in the public perception the Democrats are the party owning the "help Ukraine" brand, I think he could make the threat of escalation credible - say, to start, by providing Ukraine with significantly more and better deep strike equipment, letting them base combat aviation in adjacent European countries, greenlighting an incursion into Transnistria, or even going through with garrisoning some Western troops in the rear to free up Ukrainian troops for the front. It's not clear what responses would even be available to Russia to any of those that I can see Putin risking, apart from maybe shooting down some US surveillance drones over the Black Sea.
(Ukraine, I imagine, could be strongarmed to accept freezing with no additional conditions; their current public refusal is just for morale reasons.)
I don't think at this point Trump can "force" Russia to do anything because he doesn't have many believable escalatory threats. They will have to be given a lot and I think the bare minimum Putin will accept is Russia keeps the entirety of all oblasts it has already inducted into the federation except maybe certain parts of Kherson and at the cost of the US and Europe removing all sanctions on Russia and Russians and some sort of guarantee going forward, with Ukraine disarming and having their constitution reflect both disarmament and neutrality, as well as "de-nazification," and enshrining protection for russian-speakers.
Russia is winning and will win more the longer the war continues. They have advantage everywhere, they've already sunk a ton of resources into this capability, they've already spent a lot of blood, and they've already spent a lot of legitimacy and political capital on it. To get them to stop, you are going to need to give them something very valuable.
Ukraine is in no position to negotiate. They have repeatedly violated agreements, e.g., don't attack energy infrastructure. Ukraine will accept whatever the US wants because the US is a but-for supporter of their continued ability to fight.
I don't think the Russians will be moved by these escalatory threats. Russia has escalation dominance in region and it's not close. Russians will bomb any airfield irrelevant of where it is if the planes taking off from it are used in military operations in the SMO let alone Russian territory. I doubt the AFU is capable of serious escalation against Transnistria. Any NATO troops which step foot on Ukrainian soil will be immediately bombed. Russians have already framed this discussion because these threats have already been made over the last two years. I doubt they will retreat from any of these threats.
Additionally, I sincerely doubt many in the world would belief radical escalatory threats by the US military. The US military which invaded Iraq was built up during the cold-war; that force, its men, and its equipment have been spent and reformed. The current US is not the country which built that military, filled it's ranks, or built the equipment for it. I doubt the US military could currently accomplish something like the Iraq invasion now. It's been spending multiple years embarrassing itself in missions like protecting international shipping in the Red Sea against the Yemenis. By the time they declared victory, they struggled to convince US flagged ships to make the run through the straight with guarantees of protection. I doubt the US could even fight in place of either side in the war for longer than a few months without conscription and major industrial mobilization.
Donald Trump will not risk escalation to war over a Biden administration debacle when he can just hang the idiotic failure on the Biden administration and even use it as an excuse to clean out the state department and other connected agencies. I agree he has "bold move" guys in his orbit, but I think the "bold move" here would be to blame the neocons, the Biden admin and state department, and walk away from a dumb foreign entanglement.
IMO, Donald Trump escalating something like this to war would end his political legacy and he would lose large portions of his supporter base.
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It isn't a victory, but isn't the fact that Ukraine is still fighting this far still an impressive feat?
At some point, you can't expect the West to be able to defeat Russia in every proxy war context.
This isn't even a symmetrical proxy war. The West is fighting only as a proxy against full Russian involvement. Feels a lot like Russia's Vietnam, even if in the long run Russia might eke out a points victory - a major power thwarted by a minor nation backed by opposing major powers, except even less flattering for Russia because at least Vietnam was half a world away and not bordering America.
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Ukraine losing half their population and their most valuable oblasts as well as 600,000+ dead (I haven't seriously looked into casualties for the last 6 mo or so) in order to successfully stall a much larger and more powerful country is impressive. The coordinated western and Ukrainian propaganda blitz and ability to control how the war is perceived in the West is very impressive. Unfortunately, manipulating perceptions eventually has to sync with reality. The West manipulating or buying of Ukrainian elites to feed their people and nation into the shredder is impressive.
However, it's going to result in a catastrophic loss and at enormous cost, too. Western weapons have been exposed, and even if we're being overly kind, western industry and capability to make these weapons in sufficient numbers to affect the battlefield has been exposed, and Russia (and their allies) now have countermeasures to all of them and they're quite effective, the multipolar alliance strengthens, Russia's willingness to supply weapons and tech to American enemies is in overdrive, the deindustrialization of Europe, amongst others.
The West has engaged in dozens of actions which could legitimately be characterized as acts of war and the only reason it's not is because of escalatory danger. There's a difference between supplying some 3rd world guerilla group to combat an enemy and focusing nearly your entirely military output to support a country up to and including on-the-ground military personnel who interface intelligence with that military and even even weapons.
I do think it's reasonable to expect a competent West to pick these sorts of wars only when they can win them and the cost is worth it. I don't consider the Western foreign policy establishment to be competent or reasonable because they have a now 40+ year history of incompetent idiocy which has burned the benefits of winning the cold war.
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Trump has a lot of flexibility given his nothingburger answers so far.
The worst-case scenario (for someone like me, who is pro-Ukraine) is that Trump caves to the Tucker Carlson wing and "forces" the two sides to negotiate by unilaterally demanding Ukraine surrender to Russian terms or face a complete cutoff of US support, or even levying sanctions against them. Trump has the space to simply declare Ukraine to be "Biden's mess", claim it was always rightful Russian lebensraum, that surrendering it will bring peace in our time, and throw them to the wolves. There might be some token concessions ("Russia must agree to play nice") that Trump would claim as "balancing both sides", and largely ignore the situation as it deteriorates like what happened with North Korea during his first term.
But Trump's not naturally anywhere near as pacifist as his supporters make him out to be. He could also decide to just muddle along like he did with Afghanistan. He might make a few incendiary tweets, claim the Europeans need to do more, but he could change his mind back to supporting them when he gets a call from Lindsey Graham or some Polish politician.
The path he takes is very uncertain as Trump has always been a waffle, and it may literally come down to whoever talks to him last getting their way.
This would be a very unusual scenario. The war so far has been completely dominated by hard positional fighting akin to WW1. Unless there's some new innovation that's on par with the tank, I doubt either side would steamroll the other without some massive force-generation problems making one side particularly brittle.
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I think one of the big foreign policy goals for Trump is going to be roping Russia into his anti-Chinese coalition. How can he get Russia to pivot from "NATO is the Great Satan, Jade Stick Xi is the best friend" to "actually, fuck China"?
Something like "Ukraine cedes the occupied territory and disarms, but as long as it doesn't discriminate against Russian language and bans the glorification of UPA/OUN, it enjoys American military protection" might sound like a victory to both sides. But that's still not enough to realign Russia against China.
I actually think that supporting Ukraine and making no concessions to Russia unless they give back every square inch of occupied territory strengthens our position against China, because it makes them expect the same treatment if they try something on Taiwan. The absolute best outcome with regards to China is to never have to go to war in the first place because they expect the costs to outweigh the gains. I see Ukraine as an opportunity to make an example out of Russia. They don't need to be completely obliterated, it just has to hurt enough to disincentivize similar actions from them and others in the future.
If instead Trump just gives them what they want as soon as he's in power, then China can reasonably expect to get the same thing (as long as they wait for the next Democrat President).
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I'm not seeing it. If there's a truce, especially an uneasy one, I'm betting all the young to middle-aged men who are currently stuck will immediately bail out. Though I suppose they can try and keep the war-time decree, that forbids them from leaving, in effect.
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Earlier this year I would've said it'll make a forced Truce more likely, but at this point I don't think the outcome of the election matters that much. The ball is no longer in the West's court after how disastrous this summer was for Ukraine. Ukraine's lack of manpower and conscription failures mean it's basically out of steam regardless of what the west does. There weren't many weapons systems left to deliver that weren't risking overly escalating things anyways. Unless maybe an EU country decides to throw their population into the FAB grinder which seems unlikely Ukraine is SOL.
It'll come down more to how much more Putin is willing to spend and what his goals are. I'm guessing at least the rest of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhia and Kherson oblasts. If things really start to degrade even faster for Ukraine maybe Kharkiv and Odessa I'd put at the more maximalist goals, unless he thinks he can just regime change Kiev at some point.
The whole point of Russia invading was to prevent Ukraine from becoming armed to the point that it was a threat to Russia, and it seemed like they waited too long on that. There is no way Russia will sit back and let the US train up and further arm what is left of Ukraine simply due to a temporary cease fire. They aren't that dumb.
Haven’t you been arguing this exact line for at least a year? What difference did the summer really make?
For longer really, ever since people over corrected their priors on Ukraine's chances vs Russia after Russia failed to take Kiev in 2022.
It just solidified things more, there's uncertainty in anything even if all the facts point in one direction you can't account for every variable. If time passes and you continue to get the results you're expecting it becomes more likely you're correct. That's all.
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Taken from credibledefense:
Nothing quickly changed. Ukraine has been struggling with a major manpower crisis since 2023, now the front is finally collapsing as a result.
First off, military service has never been popular in Ukraine and they had issues with draft dodging since early 2015.
Early in this war the AFU primarily relied on volunteers or at least motivated individuals who eagerly did their duty when mobilized, ie conscription during wartime. However, the Ukrainian mobilization system was corrupt, incompetent, and the pool to pull from was deliberately kept small. Even by early 2023, cracks in the mobilization system were notable since early 2023. But nothing was done, probably because there were high hopes for the Spring 2023 Counteroffensive, if it went well then the war would hopefully end with a military victory in 2024.
But the counteroffensive was a disaster. More so, the Ukrainians kept it going for six months, racking up losses they never planned to take, the mobilization of new soldiers was grossly insufficient to replace losses, so combat units grew weaker and weaker. A reputable military analyst named Michael Kofman says the Ukrainian only cut their counteroffensive off because they basically ran out of troops.
During the summer of 2023, the mobilization crisis finally became so problematic that Zelensky got involved. The UA parliament passed a law to lower the mobilization age from 27 years old to 25, but Zelensky refused to sign it (he was worried about it polling badly). However, he did mass fire every regional military recruitment commander (called the TCC), as corruption and incompetence were the two best words to describe the system.
However, the situation didn't improve, it just got worse. Just as the Ukrainians cut off their strategic offensive due to unsustainable losses, the Russians started theirs, and it's only grown in intensity as time went on. Initially it was largely directed against Avdiivka, that culminated with its fall in April 2024. Then the Russian strategic offensive grew in scale on a broader front, adding Kharkiv in May, with other localized offensives against Chasiv Yar, New York, Kupyansk, and along different locations in the South.
The fall of Avdiivka was outright blamed on two things, limited ammo (blame fell on the US for not passing the large supplemental aid package to help Ukraine) and manpower. Zelensky finally agreed to make mobilization reforms and in April he signed the law to lower mobilization age to 25, he also signed laws expanding penalties for draft dodging, to make it easier for TCC to track mobilized personnel, and a few other odds and ends.
Ukraine mobilization jumped up in numbers in May, when the laws went into effect, and in June too, with the first month numbers of inducted personnel being reported to be at 35k, which was more than they got the previous four months combined. June supposed got about that many too, then it started dropping. Those that came in during May took about two months to be fully inducted into the AFU. counting admin, transportation, screening, training, and more transportation before they would arrive at their units, so it would be around August when the results would become noticeable.
However, August saw a much greater expansion of the war. Ukraine attacked Kursk, successfully too, driving pretty deep and taking close to 1000 sqkm of land. There are many reasons they might wanted to do that but what it did do is turn a relatively quiet frontage on the border hot, necessitating triple or more of AFU units to hold the new ground they took and to try to take more. Kursk has become the strategic main effort for Ukraine, that's where the majority of military assets are going in terms of reserves, quality equipment, and manpower.
In the Donbas, the Ukrainians never stabilized the front after losing Avdiivka and that's come to bite them in the ass. They've had numerous fall back lines but none held and the Russians keep advancing. Now they threaten the key transportation hub Pokrovsk, but also everything south of it. Because priority of everything is going to Kursk, the Ukrainians are losing more there, and many AFU units are being seriously attrited in those locations because they're stuck fighting against the Russian main effort (getting the bulk of Russian military support), taking heavy losses they can't place, effectively dying in place because they're not allowed to retreat and there isn't anybody to relieve them with.
The Russians launched a big offensive against Vuhledar in late August and it fell in late September, largely because the unit holding it was utterly exhausted. Reserves were sent and they did poorly, a mix of unpreparedness and poor morale.
Meanwhile, the manpower crisis keeps getting worse. The May July induction numbers dropped significantly, by 40% according to reports, or more. Zelensky still doesn't want to consider more mobilization reforms especially to expand the pool of potential recruits because he's worried about polling.
Overall, AFU morale is seriously degraded and now desertions have become a major problem, including among the better troops who finally had enough and quit because the way things are going nobody is leaving combat without becoming a serious casualty. The problem was so bad that the UA govt tried to fix it but because they're worried about political optics and polling, they took a very timid approach to limiting desertions, instead of cracking down they outright decriminalized desertion for first time offenders. The hope is those who left already will want to return knowing how badly they're needed and that there won't be any punishments. But it effectively motivated everyone who hadn't deserted yet as they know they too will suffer no consequences.
Overall, the intensity hasn't been this high since the start of the war in terms of Russian momentum. The AFU units fighting can't replace losses, can't be relieved, can't retreat unless violating orders. Losses are beyond casualties, most of the vacancies are deserters now. More and more units are crumbling, and when they crumble it causes Russian successes, as they aren't blind and are timing their attacks against the weakened units to take advantage..
I'm not saying that the AFU will crack and a major operational breakthrough will happen. But historically when those happen due to attrition, the runup to mass collapse looks like what is happening now.
Yeah, this narrative wasn't quite so. Whomever from CD and I remember things differently.
This has some tropes characteristic of the revisionism that Russia tried to interject about the 2022 mobilizations and the 2023 offensive afterwards, both in ignoring the cause of change in the early 2023 and recharacterizing the Ukrainian limitation. Early 2023 is a when the end-2022 Russian mobilization filled the gaps that had been present from the start of the 2022 invasion due to Putin's decision not to actual meet doctrinal manning levels. Both of these elements- the lack of manning and the mobilization- were major Russian scandals that Russia has tried to dismiss / divert attention from since. In contrast, the Ukrainian mobilization challenge in early 2023 was the same as in 2022- equipment, especially artillery ammunition limiting fieldable forces, rather than manpower.
Further, the idea that the Spring 2023 counteroffensive was supposed to lead to an end of the war a year later is, ahem, fanciful. When one looks at the actual direction of advance, scope of the Spring 2023 counteroffensive wasn't any sort of military victory- it was an attempt southward to pressure the Russian logistics chain over the land-route to Crimea. This had value, but it was explicitly a long-war strategy to cause logistical complications, not a short-term 2024 military victory, not an attempt to drive the Russians out of eastern Ukraine.
Again, this narrative wasn't so.
I am familiar with Michael Kofman, have been following him since the war started, and this isn't really capturing his key themes from 2023, or his assessments of the underlying issues at the time of the counter-offensive or afterwards. Kofman was far more focused on the debilitating equipment issues, including special equipment losses and limitations. One of this points at the time was that the Ukrainians were preserving people rather than spending them because of their need of landmine clearing equipment, the consequences of western limitations to go after helicopter airbases, cluster munitions, and so on- but not manpower disaster, and certainly not 'they thought they would take no losses.'
Michael Kofman has made many critiques of the Ukrainian manpower issues, and he's absolutely on record having advocated for more conscription sooner to not have problems now, but not on the basis that the counter offensive continued until they ran out of troops in 2023 / that the Ukrainians never planned to take losses / that the losses were disastrous.
The intensity argument doesn't quite match the narrative you think it does. The intensity equivalence isn't Russia at the start of the war- it's Russia during during the Kharkiv offensive at the end of 2022.
This is just attrition looks like if you aggressively do it faster in a shorter period of time. Both the gains, and the casualties, are accelerated. In terms of scope and scale, though, this is much more like the Kherson offensive in terms of scope and territory changing.
Ukraine's manpower shortage is absolutely contributing to making things worse, it is very relevant, and the loses of terrain are indeed notable- but the terrain was always going to be lost. Most of the Ukraine War has been Russia making consistent gains in the area it chooses to focus in, with the Ukrainians trying to make it take time and inflict high casualties in the process, and the counter-offensives have typically followed a similar pattern of penetrations but not dramatic breakthroughs (Kharkiv being a singular exception).
Not really. When attrition collapses approaches- when the state looses the ability to resist- the casualties of the attacker tend to plummet, not scale upward.
This is because attrition has compromised the ability of the defender to bring their systems and networks back. Attriting an air defense network allows you to bring air power to bear against defenses for more effective neutralization, attriting the logistics network deprives the enemy of maneuver or ability to reinforce and makes them easier to flank to attack advantageously, attriting enemy artillery lets your own operate more freely to suppress the enemy more, etc. etc. etc.
The 'high surge then collapse' runup model is less about attrition and more of climatic battles for all-or-nothing standup fights. Those do acctionally happen, but that is pretty clearly not what Ukraine is doing in the Donbas (hence why the counter-attack forces went into Kursk, where they have not faced a climatic destruction).
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I think this is uh improbable without economic and military aide that the West seems to already be unwilling to give (Russia still has a massive production advantage in key areas, and a huge manpower advantage that will not go away), but I agree that there's basically zero reason for Putin to agree to a pause (especially given what apparently happened last time they tried to negotiate) because I think it would disproportionately aid Ukraine. Even if the West doesn't use a pause to rearm and reequip Ukraine, it gives them a tremendous amount of time to build new fortifications. There are also still Ukrainian troops on Russian soil, and I doubt that Putin will agree to a truce of any sort that doesn't involve them retreating. However, I am not necessarily good at anticipating Putin's next move.
If there is a truce, I expect it to be short. I'm unsure as to what Trump finds palatable, but as I see it, for Putin to agree to anything less than territorial concessions and a no-Ukraine-in-NATO treaty would be a geopolitical mistake. It seems likely to me Russia attempts to force Ukraine to disarm, as well.
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It's tough. Zelensky has been clear about not wanting to concede Ukrainian territory but it's obvious to everyone that that particular ship has sailed. It's hard to know if he will secretly be happy to be "forced" to accept a compromise, or if he's a true believer. I also don't think a compromise will be nearly as easy as Trump says, because Russia does seem like it's gearing up for another 1-2 years which Ukraine might not be able to hold. So your scenario is plausible for sure. Execution matters, though. Let's say a cease fire lifts a lot of Russian sanctions. In that case, it's totally conceivable that Russia is able to use that money and tech access to come back to the table better equipped than before.
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Trump was the one who started shipping arms to Ukraine (Obama thought it too escalatory) and also help Johnson sell Ukraine aid package by calling it a "loan". "They want to give them $60 billion more. Do it this way. Loan them the money. If they can make it, they pay us back. If they can’t make it, they don’t have to pay us back" [this seems less like 3d chess than an open scam to me].
My prediction is that status quo continues.
Trump did so but only after a mass pressure campaign coordinated by the three letter agencies that painted him as a compromised Russian asset. Which conveniently for the MIC put Trump in a tough spot when it came to doing anything that could be construed as pro-Russia. This time after the whole Russiagate investigation fell flat it will be harder for them to pull off the same maneuver.
Johnson is a snake for sure though and it's a point against Trump's judgement that he was up there celebrating with him at the rally last night. Really a lot of Trump's next term is going to depend on whether he has finally managed to be able to tell friend from foe and won't just fire anyone that doesn't tell him what he wants while hiring every brown noser. Hopefully some of the better allies Trump has picked up can steer him away from the mistakes he made last time.
He's 78. I'd put my bet on the "old dogs" aphorism.
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Mostly the same trajectory as the last year: Russia continues to make slow, steady, and small gains in the Donbas while continuing to overheat its economy, western aid comes in fits disrupted by internal politics, and the Ukrainians continue not to cascade-collapse. Some pro forma attempt at peace talks are attempted, but Russia's inability to compel war termination, the wrong-actor coordination issue of various Russian war demands, and Putin's own habit for strategic procrastination in hopes of a more favorable deal later lead to the failure of talks and a more or less continued western sustainment of Ukraine. Already-underway western industrial expansion continues, and starts to approach Russian production of some key items (particularly artillery ammo), but falls behind 2023 predictions of the 2025 catch-up because of (a) implementation issues in 2023/2024 and (b) the addition of major North Korean arms flows into Russia.
On looser predictions of what 'new' things happen... Putin attempts new and probably counter-productive pressure efforts to try and coerce the Europeans / US into concessions but which also further undermine casefire prospects. If Russia manages to seize the administrative boundaries of the Donbas, Putin attempts to declare a unilateral ceasefire and end the war declaring it won and that Russia would only be fighting in self defense, but I also expect any such effort to fall flat and Russia to attempt to build coercive leverage by attacking elsewhere, further undermining ceasefire prospects. European aid efforts shift as Europeans deal with consequences of Trump. What those shifts mean varies from country to country, but efforts led by France at least to consolidate European military aid at an EU level in the name of European strategic autonomy.
As for talks themselves... maybe late 2025, but probably inconclusive.
Trump is a wild card, but less because there's any particular reason to believe that Trump would cut supplies to force a truce and more that he's been deliberately unforthcoming and his margin of winning from last night means he has previously-non-existing incentives to continue support.
That narrative that Trump would compel a truce is largely based on the reporting covering two non-Trump Trump advisors whose Ukraine proposal was included limits to aid if Ukraine refused to participate in talks, but which also included a lot more aid for Ukraine in general and conditioned nothing on accepting terms Russia was willing to agree to. In short, viewer projection is required to assume what Trump's view of a reasonable deal is, and that the Russian offer would meet it, and that Trump would / could compel Ukraine to accept it, and most of these viewer perceptions were deliberately shaped so during the US election season.
By contrast, Trump has not expressed his own view of Ukraine war termination in any meaningful way in the last two years, and probably won't for another half-year yet as Trump's political priorities are domestic rather than foreign. For Trump to prioritize Ukraine means putting it ahead not only of Israel-Palestine, which he had a personal hand in due to the Israel-Arab normalization efforts he led, but also domestic priorities including domestic agency staffing and removing Biden/Obama opponents. This is not 2016 where Trump thought the opposition would go away, and I have not heard a compelling reason why Trump should care more about ending Ukraine than other issues, particularly when tying support to Ukraine to his own domestic priorities is probably the most credible way of breaking the Democratic attempts at party unity.
My personal prediction is that this is actually the main interest that will motivate Trump regarding Ukraine, and will push him to provide aid conditional on Democratic policy concessions rather than conditional on Ukrainian acceptance of Russian terms. The Ukraine (and to a lesser extent, Gaza) wars will complicate Democrat efforts to recreate the 2016 maximum-anti-trump opposition stance, since that iteration lacked the Ukraine (or Gaza) wars that the ruling party could frame budgetary opposition to as hindering. With the Democrats deeply divided by the Gaza War, and heavily politically invested in the Ukraine War, supporting funding will be a way to break off Democrats to support / bolster narrow Republic majorities, which in turn gives Trump more leeway within the Republican coalition.
Since that will be most relevant in fiscal year budget negotiations, which will be taking place across mid-2025, and which also provide the negotiating leverage of Ukrainian aid to raise against Russia, I wouldn't expect Trump to make a priority of Ukraine until fall 2025 at the earliest.
Further- and even more important to the timing- is the Europeans.
Just from a Putin acceptable-terms perspective, Putin is a strategic procrastinator who often delays when he thinks he can wait out a foe for better conditions and thus better terms. This will most notably come with the end-of-September 2025 German elections, in which the current pro-Ukraine coalition will likely be replaced with something... well, more plausibly less pro-Ukraine. My position across 2024 was that Russian was over-extending its economy and military expenditures (including manpower, material, and monetary) in unsustainable ways to maximize perceived Russian gains in a period of relative industrial advantage and to hopefully shape elections (such as the US one). This same line of logic applies into 2025 for the German as well- the industrial gap momentum will possibly be reversing by the end of 2025, providing the window of relative advantage, and the Germans are the key stakeholders in the European Union budget providing equally-critical economic assistance. Whatever Trump may / may not be willing try to compel, Ukraine could likely be compelled to concede more with a less favorable German government.
So this means that 'serious' talks won't occur until likely until November 2025, when (a) the nature of the new German government has been identified and thus a sense of how much Putin can push for on that end, and (b) when Trump has been able to make political hay out of Ukraine aid to divide Democrats and bolster his domestic priorities.
Post-Posting Major Edit: And in other news that may throw this entirely out of whack, within hours of posting this the German government entered a stability crisis when the German Chancellor fired the Finance Minister, setting the ground for a snap election. This obviously changes the previous predicted timeline reasoning, as a snap election could be held in January-March, but removes the October delay incentive.
I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring.
Good write up. Most IRL Trump supporters I talk to, especially younger ones, seem to be of the opinion that we shouldn't be sending any aid to Ukraine because it's not our war, etc., etc., and I think that general sentiment on the Right has seeped into discourse about Trump since he's been ambiguous on the issue. Trump's actual statements, though, lead me to believe that he still thinks of himself as a master negotiator and that he has the kind of influence with Putin that the Democrats don't, and accordingly he will be able to hammer out a settlement that both sides can live with.
Kudos to Trump if he can pull this off, but I'm pessimistic about the chances. The biggest problem is that any settlement would likely involve freezing the front lines where they are now, and it isn't in Russia's interest to do that. Problem number one is that they're currently making progress — slow progress, but progress — and any pause gives the Ukrainians the opportunity to further entrench their front lines. Problem number two is that the Ukrainians control part of Kursk, and while the area controlled isn't huge, I doubt Putin would be willing to put any of his own territory under semi-permanent Ukrainian control. He can dilly-dally when it comes to retaking it, but publicly acceding to its continued occupation would have negative political consequences.
As far as Kursk is concerned, there could theoretically be some horse trading involved, but it's unlikely that Zelensky would be willing to give up his greatest strategic asset in exchange for a comparably sized piece of the Donbas. Trump could certainly use the threat of withdrawing aid to force a deal down Zelensky's throat, but he'd probably only do this if the deal objectively made sense, i.e., if Zelensky was turning down obviously favorable terms because he wanted to continue the war. As much flack as Trump has gotten for cozying up to Putin, I highly doubt that he'd be willing to give up the store in Ukraine. Add in the probable necessity of some kind of security guarantee for Ukraine, and you have a recipe for failure.
In short, I think the end result of all of this is that Trump tries to hammer out a deal, Putin makes demands that are obviously preposterous, the talks fail, Trump comes back and claims he made progress, and the current levels of military aid continue unabated.
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As I understand it, the situation in the donbas is deteriorating at an accelerating pace in favor of russia. US officials have come to the same conclusion.
In addition the number of glide bomb strikes has increased to >1000 a week, and it is too risky to deploy expensive anti air assets close to the front to counter these, as Russian ISR has improved. Shahed drone strikes are also getting through more easily due to depleted AA, Ukraine is no longer claiming 90% shootdowns as in previous months. Ukrainian desertion numbers have skyrocketed and their solution is that everyone gets 1 AWOL as a treat. Zelensky is still resisting Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds but there may be no other choice.
Uh, does he know he’s at war? Like I knew Ukraine needed to expand their draft but I didn’t know it was that bad.
One of the dynamics of this war is that both sides are relying on mostly older age brackets. Russia honestly has a bit more youth conscription going on in that the normal conscripts are still occuring, but being used in rear-area roles and kept from the front in favor of increasingly highly-paid volunteers (and, starting recently, less-highly paid north koreans). Michael Kofman has written/spoken more on it if you're curious.
One of the bigger issues for Ukraine is that they don't have brigades-worth of spare equipment to arm more brigades of conscripts with. The prospect of sending poorly-equipped conscripts into combat is a semi-scandal in Ukrainian politics- it raises issues of why more elite children aren't in the poorly-equipped units- and so (very) relative 'equality of equipment' is/was being prioritized over 'raw numbers of bodies.' Ukraine has been deliberately avoiding the Russian 'bring out the WW2 tanks' model of mobilization, as that would be a domestic solidarity issue if they did so. (Also, they don't have a meaningful reserve of WW2 tanks.)
This has actually been occurring since the start of the conflict, including in 2022 when the Ukrainians were turning away would-be volunteers and telling them to stand by for later mobilization. Note that the 2024 Ukrainians still had sufficient 'spare' manpower to launch the Kursk offensive. It's not that they literally can't send more bodies into the Donbas pocket, it's that there's a political consideration not to. (In part because the Donbas pocket is largely unsustainable long-term, so more manpower wouldn't stop the grind, but would incur larger political costs if ill-equipped forces were rushed in.)
I knew about contract soldiers in Russia but Ukraine’s reticence to conscript adequately is new to me. I’d assumed that the unequal brigades weren’t being sent into the Donbas for reasons you describe but that they existed and that, like normal countries in existential conflicts, young Ukrainian men were in the military even if most of what they did there was make-work.
Different kind of existential threat. You are (probably) thinking of existential threat in terms of 'we are about to be overrun', but the Ukrainian perspective is more in 'this war will determine whether the next war will be our last.'
Remember this is the third continuation war since the invasion of Crimea, and that Russia's opening war-termination demands were such as to render a future-Ukraine functionally unable to resist a future attack (i.e. demanding that the Ukrainians demilitarize to a smaller tank fleet than the number of tanks they've lost since continuing to fight, limiting Ukrainians to weapon ranges that couldn't hit rear areas, allowing a Russian veto on foreign assistance to Ukraine). The Ukrainians view their prospects in a future war where they may have no allies / partners far less optimistically than continuing this one with foreign support.
There certainly are plenty of young men (volunteers), and there are definitely unequal brigades (of wildly varying equipment quality), and you aren't wrong in how the unequal brigades are being used (though 'make-work' is probably the wrong way to put it). While Russia is prioritizing efforts in the Donbas, there is a long border to be guarded, and so units of various levels are being sent there.
But for the question of drafting demographic in particular, Ukraine is taking what might be called a seed-corn approach, i.e. prioritizing future growth potential. Ukraine is aware it is a rapidly aging country, and that the youths are the future, and to the degree possible it is trying not to rely on the youth to carry the costs of combat. (Additionally, the older age brackets are far more supportive/tolerant, and thus less politically costly, for mobilization.) The loss of a young man is worse than the loss of an older man, not least because there are a lot more older men and the youth will be needed to take care of the survivors.
Note that this is similar to why women may volunteer, but also aren't being drafted. Women have more long-term value to the nation. If things were so catastrophic in an immediate sense, the state very well could and likely would draft women as well just as it started mixing molotovs in the capital at the start, as many other existentially-threatened states have in the past. But for now it doesn't perceive a need, because the existential risk isn't in the current war, but how this war sets up the next one. Ukraine is operating off of the assumption that it is going to be significantly demographically impacted regardless of how the war ends, but prioritizing the more enduring elements while trying to establish longer-term deterrence.
None of this says that the current strategy is sufficient, or superior, or best. It's not an argument that the Ukrainians aren't losing on the Donbas front. But it is a point that there was a tradeoff of costs, and that the risk perceived as greater isn't imminent military collapse existential risk.
This is one of the issues that the AWOL/foreign flight/draft dodger issue isn't as catastrophic as one may think: the ones doing it are primarily already older (though not old) men, and between expanding the draft age and simply cracking down harder on draft dodger demographics, the state would prefer the later. This is not analogous to the US experience in Vietnam, where college kids flee to Canada to get out of going to war and so spend all their most productive years benefiting another nation.
Fantastic set of posts, reported for AAQC.
Danke
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This situation is true, but implication is not necessarily what you understand. The underlying issue that a big % increase of a very small number is a still a small number, and that proportional increases don't continually scale
The theme of 2024 has been that Russia has significantly increased its rate of territorial gains in the Donbass, but 'significant' comes with the contextual caveat of 'compared to 2023.' The Russian gains in 2024 look proportionally impressive in part because the scale of the zoom-in maps was consistent for so long, but the degree of zoom-in was itself a result of how little the Russians were advancing, justifying exceptional zoom in to show differences. This was, in turn, partly because they were focused on advancing in other places (where we no longer see maps).
On a larger scale, however, 2024 has been closer to the creeping artillery campaign in 2022 where artillery overmatch allowed slow-but-steady gains elsewhere on the Ukrainian front, places which didn't receive/retain such familiar maps because they were changing faster and then lost. Unlike in 2022, however, 2024 has not also had simultaneous major Russian military operations across the front- the Russian operations have been primarily focused on the few spots being covered. This is consistent with what was observed in 2023, with the slow-but-consistent Bahkmut. Russia focuses on two-three places at a time, and presses those, and then reaches a point where it transitions to somewhere else.
In short, increasing changes in the Russian position in the current parts of the Donbas aren't themselves evidence of Ukrainian systemic collapse, but where Russia is currently focusing fires. The Russians have always been able to consistently advance when and where they chose to concentrate fires.
The rates of change of territory even lead to changes in where the territory shifts from favoring the operational defense to the operational offense. The formerly defensive high ground the Ukrainians enjoyed in some places became more advantageous to further Russia offensives when the Russians captured them, whether by increasing offensive fires range (thus allowing more concentration of artillery) or compromising other position to prompt a withdrawal of Ukrainian forces (such as has recently happened at the Ukrainian logistic node whose name I can't remember atm).
These positional advantages can even compound. The advantage Russia has gotten from partial-encirclements (approaching 3-side encirclement) is significant. It allows Russia to park more artillery for more range of fires across more of the Ukrainian front and rear. Because more of the Ukrainian rear is in range of fires, high-value-but-costly Ukrainian assets- like air defense or artillery- can't be brought in nearly as close. Because UKR artillery is denied, more Russian artillery can be brought in for further artillery overmatch, and because air defense is blocked the Russians can bring in more glide bomb aviation and helicopters to contribute. This adds up, and consistently enables things like 10-to-1 fires advantages that let the Russian forces make successful rushes for trenchwork and displace the Ukrainians to retreat to less compromised defenses.
But this is positional advantage, not strategic collapse. The artillery army is at its strongest when it can surround the foe on three sides and negate their air defense and airpower, and this position is untenable for most defenders, but there's a reason that the ideal of warfare is about encirclement and not simply flanking. The Russians put the Ukrainians in a bad position, the Ukrainians eventually withdraw, but the withdrawal is a choice to not commit further resources holding untenable positions further, not itself evidence of a lack of resources to commit. The Kursk offensive, for example, demonstrated that the Ukrainians had more combat assets to send, but that they thought there was somehwere better to use them than in the most pressed parts of the Donbas.
The issue with positional warfare analysis is that momentum advantages gradually negate themselves.
When the rate of advance depends on favorable positioning, the victor goes from advantageous terrain to neutral or even unfavorable terrain as new equilibriums are found and defenses rebuilt. If the positioning was favorable, after all, the attacker would continue attacking and advancing. This is more along the lines of 'water runs downhill' than the gallantry of a stream for following the path of least resistance.
But when/if the Russians close the 3-year old Donbas pocket, they won't have a 3-side advantage anymore, but a much 'flater' front. These means less ability to stack fires, less ADA coverage of glide bombs, etc. This means that the Ukrainians can commit more of its limited forces more easily, and more effectively, with defenses that lead the Russians to limit their exposure until they can start re-creating that 3-flank advantage. On the other hand, depending on where they make a push, they themselves may face a three-front disadvantage where a push leaves them exposed rather than able to bring in superior fires.
In other words, rather than a maneuver-warfare acceleration effect- 'Russia is increasing its rate in the Donbas; after the Donbas it will further increase its rate of advance'- positional warfare has a reset-effect. 'The Russian position after the Donbas is no longer as favorable; after the Donbas the rate of advance will slow until Donbas-like contexts can be created again.'
This runs into the separate issue, which I'll address off of your next point.
And as long as those weapons continue to work at the ranges they do, that may be bad news for the Donbas front but it's good news for the ability of Ukraine to generate strategic resistance, because the Donbas isn't where Ukraine draws its ability to fight from.
The Russian glide bombs, as effective as they are, are not what the military would consider long-range weapons vis-a-vis normal indirect fire capabilities. They are launched from behind Russian lines, with the ability to get close limited by exposure to air defense. Since high-value air defenses won't be placed in pockets in range of tube-artillery supported by short-range drones, this is why the glide bomb strikes have been able to increase to >1000 a week: the Russians have a reasonably large array of targets in a zone they can reasonably know is exposed and safe to fight in.
But this makes them, in effect, a different sort of tube-artillery. Bigger boombs, harder to counter-fire, but not a meaningful threat to critical infrastructure / major supply nodes / depots. These are trenchlines, bunkers, or buildings. This is not good for the Ukrainians, but it is not the critical threat, especially if / when / as increasing long-range fires open up attacks on Russian rear areas. The glide bombs can't range those sort of capability-generations.
Shaheds might, but this gets into the limits of a Shahed drone. In short, it's not trivial, but it's not factory-destroying either, while there are indeed less AA rockets to shoot down Shaheds with, there are other limiting factors on their effectiveness, ranging from non-missile AA (not as effective, but a baseline), protection systems (like nets, additional baseline), or just the warhead limitations of a shahed drone. These are often much closer to 'can destroy a vehicle' than 'can destroy a building' payloads. You can throw a lot of Shaheds at a single target to make up in volume, but at that point you're just recreating the narrower and narrower focus of the artillery issue.
What matters more is that neither of these advantages is actually removing the ability of the Ukrainians to generate capabilities and forces, because those capabilities aren't located in the Donbas in the first place.
Ukraine could literally lose all the Donbas, and while it would the advantages of already-prepared defenses it wouldn't lose its force generation potential. Ukraine isn't depending on the remaining settlements in the Donbas for recruitment. Ukraine isn't producing its long-range weapons in the Donbas. Ukraine isn't receiving the import of foreign supplies through the Donbas. The Donbas isn't the Death Star at the battle of endor, where when the Emperor dies the imperial navy flees the field.
The Donbas is, in effect, a political trophy. Its conquest does not win the war for Russia / render the Ukrainians unable to fight. It may shape negotiations or political calculations, most notably Putin's willingness to claim victory with a face-saving 'I own all the territory' salve, but it's not vital to the Ukrainian ability to continue resisting.
But there is a choice, which combines with the fact that the biggest limitation on Ukrainian force generation (still) isn't actually manpower to recruit from, but the gear to equip them with, and the artillery ammunition to back them up with to negate Russia's fires advantages. The former is a question of the next year of foreign supply politics, while the later is something that has been expected to take into next year regardless.
The fact that Zelensky is in a position to resist Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds is a mark against collapse desperation, not evidence of it (which it will inevitably shift to being characterized as when/if Zelensky does proceed with expanding conscription). The Ukrainian decisions to not conscript more earlier may be the 'wrong' one (I suspect we don't have the insight as to what the priorities actually are- such as if Zelensky wants to scale conscription with western arms deliveries so as to avoid public war support issues of sending ill-equiped troops into battle), but it has been one the Ukrainians felt they could make.
Manpower is one of those information fields where I'd caution you to be very, very cautious with narratives that don't have credible comparative numbers (such as Ukrainian desertion comparisons between years, or comparisons to Russian equivalent acts, or even comparisons to other countries in other conflicts,) especially when it is a field so plagued by deliberate propaganda campaigns. 'Ukraine's army is on the edge of collapse' has been a distinct propaganda theme for years now, and if I were a betting person I'd offer a bet that we'd be dealing with the same theme in twelve months because it is one of those 'maybe it wasn't true before, but it seems credible now' indefinite narratives that can appear credible no matter how many times it fails to materialize.
Is there a name for this kind of narrative? Because it seems like a common failure mode
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Man. The 18 - 25 year old conscription ban (on basically prime warrior years) is kinda a funky choice, but I'll feel pretty bad if they lift it. I already don't think Ukraine will recover from this for a long, long time.
I am not sure if I am correct, but I think that 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
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My understanding is that contra the popular narratives on /r/noncredibledefense the Ukrainians' major bottleneck is more equipment than it is manpower, and that they are specifically trying to preserve thier youth demographic to maximize future potential.
Yes, my understanding is that the entire reason for the 18 - 25 conscription ban is to preserve the youth demographic they badly need.
It definitely seems plausible to me that they are shorter on equipment than they are on manpower, but they wouldn't have lowered conscription standards if manpower was abundant. Of course, in an existential war you can hardly have too many of either if you are losing and Russia absolutely has them beat on both fronts.
Ukraine had 2x to 3x advantage in soldiers at front in mid-late 2022
Correct, but that was two years ago. Even if the Russians still don't have front-like troop superiority, they have larger manpower reserves and have narrowed the deployed troop gap considerably.
Manpower might not matter if people do not want to fight and Russian propaganda faces much more difficult task than Ukrainian. Russia relies on increasingly large money to hire people for war. The 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
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