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I don't think anyone has had a spotless record in this war. US intelligence got the invasion right but then publicly claimed that Kiev was in danger of falling 'within days'. How did that pan out?
But the facts speak their own language: if Ukraine was doing well, they wouldn't need to ask for NATO materiel when the same NATO countries no longer have "easy" choices available to them, such as mothbolled ex-Soviet stuff.
At any rate, trying to handicap the chances of UA victory wasn't the primary aim of my OP, but rather to question the assumption that victory in this conflict for the pro-NATO side is of such titantic importance that the media and the political class would have us believe. As I outlined in my OP, Russia is unlikely to be a long-term winner even in the event of battlefield victory and Ukraine's importance has also been grossly overstated.
I think that a lot of people in the US Intelligence Apparatus and State Department seriously underestimated both the Ukrainian public's willingness to fight, and the degree to which the UAF had reformed itself post Yanukovich. As usual they were more interested in their own pet theories and political narratives than they were looking at the ground-level truth. Accordingly they, much like the Russians, expected the UAF to fold rather than fight which is probably a major part of why they were able to call the invasion correctly.
Meanwhile you have guys like me and the former French Minister of Defense who back in January of 2022 were claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was unlikely precisely because any attempt to occupy western Ukraine was likely to end very badly for the Russians and "Putin is not that stupid". Ok we turned out to be wrong about Putin (or at least his level of confidence in his own troops), but back in April of 2022 I predicted that Russia would be unable to actually hold any territory west of the Dnieper, this was characterized by many here (including yourself IIRC) as a "bold take" but almost a year later I'd say my priors have been pretty well born out by events. How about yours?
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OK, what Big Sergei predicted? Can you link to some brilliant analysis that was validated by now?
I looked at their Twitter account and it is as bad as you would expect from "pro Russian Twitter account making bold predictions".
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It was in the danger of falling. Had the airport been secured, Russia would've been able to double the size of its Ćernobylj-Buća force, allowing it to push forward.
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Pretty well.
The US intelligence assessment that Kiev was in danger of falling led to Western policy changes that including flooding the Ukrainians with man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry that could be widely and rapidly distributed to both formal and informal forces with minimal training, and with far less risk of being intercepted/destroyed by local Russian air/artillery capabilities than conventional weapon systems. These asymmetric capabilities thus allowed Ukrainian irregulars to greatly slow and even stop Russian mechanized forces, allowing Ukrainian artillery to do decisive damage while mitigating key Russian strengths that- had there been a lack of anti-armor and anti-air capability- could have been far more successful.
This is a classic case of an intelligence assessment driving the policy changes that change the underlying assumptions that drive the intelligence assessment. That is the entire point of investing in intelligence as a national capability- not so that someone will tell you what will occur if you try policy X, but what will occur if you DON'T try to change a situation. And this doesn't even get to the dynamics of publicizing intelligence to drive public support for policy to achieve results supported by not-publicized intelligence.
Why not? No one aside from you claimed at the time, before aid or during aid or after aid deliveries, that the amount of aid delivered was expected to be enough for Ukraine to wage the rest of the war successfully. Key categories of aid- especially munitions- being insufficient has been a reoccuring point of discussion since the start of the war.
Ukraine doing well due to receiving an influx of expendable resources establishes a correlation of doing well with getting expendable resources. Asking for [Type NATO] expendable resources as [Type Soviet] expendable resources is exactly what you would expect if doing well is a result of expendable resource delivery.
You relied heavily upon a propaganda fluff piece author whose thesis has been claimed for most of the war despite all operational developments to the contrary, and you didn't even identify specific claims of gross overstatement.
You done goofed on the central and ancillary points of your argument. 'For the sake of argument, what if we assume the Russian propagandists are right' is not a particularly interesting or compelling argument when the reasons why the Russian propagandists are wrong is also applying to other areas of the discussion.
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