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tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
The way I see it, the war was lost when Ukraine didn't crumble in the first couple of weeks. I'm sure Putin realizes that. Even if binders
full of womencurated by his aides are his only source of daily news, interservice rivalry should keep him relatively well-informed. He's not willing to give up right now because that will basically amount to an admission of defeat, and vae victis. Who knows what the USA will demand before Russia is allowed to rejoin the world economy? LDNR? Crimea? $300bln in reparations? Resignation of everyone who supported the war? Disarmament?So, the theme of the month is consolidation. Freezing the conflict. Waiting it out. Maybe the EU freezes over this winter and starts talking about a truce. Maybe the US finds itself busy with internal politics after the midterms. Maybe China finally decides to finish its civil war and everyone forgets about Ukraine. Maybe Covid comes back. Maybe Zelensky himself does something stupid and pisses off the nationalists. Or maybe Putin himself doesn't wake up one day and doesn't have to deal with the mess he has created. It worked for Nicholas I.
The mobilization is not about turning the tide and marching all the way to the Western Bug or at least the Zbruch and the Goryn. Who's going to make all these tanks, IFVs, howitzers and airplanes needed to outfit an army that large? Defending against Ukraine requires 1/3 of their forces. Advancing on them requires 3x their forces, a ninefold increase. It's better to survive until the autumn rains make any large-scale operations impossible, to dig in, to double the density of your troops so they can at least man the whole frontline and avoid humiliating breakthroughs. And hope for a friendly black swan.
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I think any analysis that focuses on the internal mental states and thoughts of other people is doomed. It's a mistake I made myself just prior to this conflict, in which I could not envision what could possibly motivate Putin to invade Ukraine. Suitably chastened, I'll restrict my analysis to the best facts we have, which at current point are:
1: Ukraine has held. You can blame western weapons and aid if you want, but the point is the Ukrainian people have used that aid to hold off the Russians. All the military aid in the world didn't do shit for the Iraqis or Afghans, because they had no nationalistic impulse to bind them together. Ukraine is finding and founding their national myths for the future, if they survive.
2: With the recent offensive, the Ukrainian military has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they can run a competent conventional military offensive operation, which isn't nearly as simple as civilians might think. What's more, it has worked at least to some significant degree. Once again, you can blame western weapons or badly trained Russian troops, but both those things are realities.
Early on, I was fairly pessimistic about Ukrainian chances in a stand-up war with Russia, and I think the fundamentals do still favor Russia. But we are seeing the cracks in this consensus idea. Yes, Russia could mobilize fully, but will their economic and political system withstand the strain? Yes, they could nuke, but that doesn't solve their problem. They're trying to annex this territory, after all. What is becoming clear is that without committing significantly more resources to the fight, Russia is not on track to defeat Ukraine outright. We don't know if Ukraine can continue their offensive, or repeat their success, but the idea that Russia can ignore their military capability is now dead. Beyond that, speculation can take a man anywhere he wants to go.
I think you always need to try to think how other people are thinking. I believe the Great Don Vito Corleone said something like that along with The Art of War.
I will admit to being wrong on Putins mental state. I thought he was a cold but rational master strategist. Perhaps he was once that and in old age he’s slipping.
I thought Russian elites want to live in the west once they have money (still think this is largely true) and Putin was largely one of those people.
I thought Russia would largely be happy atleast the elites with making money selling commodities to the west.
One thing is the worlds gotten weird since COVID. Far more irrational decision making. So many weird things. Academics not being willing to break certain ideological lines. News that seems purely propaganda. Riots in American cities over largely fake stats. Republicans having a legitimate riot - largely expected something like the boring normal gop tea party protest. China seems to be killing themselves with zero COVID. San Francisco and Chicago giving up their livable pro-business governance with an agreement they pay public sector workers well and turning into poop city and in Chicagos case unlivable actual murder/theft on the business class.
Honestly sometimes it just seems like lockdowns rotted everyone’s brains.
In Putin's case, I blame oil prices giving him delusions of Russia being great again, or at least having the opportunity to project its power with minimal consequences. That led to the South Ossetian war, which scared many Ukrainians, but probably not enough to make them consider joining the EU/NATO if oil prices had remained high. The 2014 invasion of Ukraine happened to occur at the end of the 2011-2014 oil price spike, right before the 2014-2016 dip. That intervention would presumably have gone easier for Russia if oil prices had remained high for a decade or more. That intervention created a series of entanglements that Putin cannot free Russia from without losing face on a regime-threatening scale.
January 2022-February 2022 saw crude oil prices return to a little above their trend levels. Maybe Putin thought that, if he could act when oil prices were at the start of a 3-5 year boom, this would give him the room to sort things out in Ukraine. Of course, he also underestimated Ukrainian resistance, but a lot of rational and well-informed people did that. I mean, I did that, and I'm the smartest, most well-informed, and most handsome person I know.
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I have a mental model of Putin that I believe has held up well, though I can't claim anything like complete predictive power. I think his goals are Russian-nationalist; his preferred methods are more security-state than economic; and his beliefs include survival requires growth.
The post-Cold-War 90s were a massive paradox, nowhere more sharply felt than Russia. If you'd asked a Soviet citizen of the late 70s or early 80s, "imagine the range of possible outcomes where the USSR decisively loses the Cold War within the next 10-15 years," the real outcome would have been dismissed as a ludicrously optimistic drug-induced fever dream. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic chaos in Russia were deeply traumatic on a societal level.
When Putin came to power, he was looking at a cratered population replacement rate that by the numbers predicted that Russia would not be a viable nation-state by 2100. Reversing this trend became his life's work. In order to create a Russia that would choose to produce the next generation, Putin needed to rebuild a sense of pride and accomplishment that had been savagely damaged by the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had the Cold War ended in Soviet defeat, it had ended with an American triumph, and the prosperity-bordering-on-decadence of the American 90s only made the Russian dislocations cut more deeply. I don't know to what extent Putin's anti-Americanism is ideological, but I think it's sufficiently explained by a strategic choice to build up Russian confidence by undermining American successes and pushing for American failures.
(A sadly common mistake in the US is to insist on putting Putin in our cultural context rather than his own. "Putin is a Trump supporter! Putin is a fan of Hillary!" No. Putin prefers Putin and/or Russia. To the extent that he cares about American leadership, he'd prefer the self-sabotage of poor decisions generally, and any policy choices that gives him a freer hand to operate elsewhere.)
In the case of Ukraine, I think Putin was taking steps to re-establish Russian Great Power status by enforcing a sphere of influence. I was also quite surprised by his full-bore invasion including a major strike towards Kyiv; I thought he'd continue the salami-slicing tactics of the past 10 years in Georgia and Crimea, this time with the Donbass as his target. Evidently, he decided that the Western non-response to the salami-slicing indicated a weakness that he was free to exploit with escalation to large scale conquest. He was wrong, on a great number of levels.
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I think the idea is to use the troops to secure the "1000 km of frontline" to prevent any more Kharkivs and then just continue the slow methodical grind in Donbass (and other parts of the four oblasts they don't yet hold?). It's not going to be a tactic for conquering entire Ukraine, but I don't think that's in the cards, unless there's some complete collapse or something else changing the picture considerably. (Though Belarus joining in or a sudden surprise attack in the Northern front areas Ukraine has retaken might change the picture considerably.)
On the topic of securing lines: any comment on Finns and Balts blocking escape for Russians who flee mobilization, Latvians allegedly even planning deportation for residence permit holders? I mean, is this just reflecting the popular desire to inflict punishment on Ruskies cost be damned, or that old chestnut that «if we force them to stay, they'll effect a regime change»?
Because I guarantee you that there will be no bottom-up regime change. They'll just get caught, drafted, trained and sent to fight in Ukraine.
"Russians do not care their country is hurting Ukrainians" => "Finns/Balts do not care their country is hurting Russians"
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Sigh. What needs to be understood about this issue that the border thing is not a new issue for Finland; it goes back to the summer, expect back then it was not about draft dodgers or regime opponents, simply about why the Finnish border was open for hordes of tourists, at least stereotypically your stolid "non-political" middle class, seeing it as their sovereign right to continue cross-border shopping or use Helsinki to go on an Italian flight despite all this war business and of course getting into very non-political fights with Ukrainian refugees in Finland while doing so.
The Finnish government indicated that it sees this as a problem and wants to end this tourism, but it can't do so, since there's a law issue, and Finnish governance is all about being sticklers about formal procedure and following laws and regulations to the letter. This thread by Finnish nationalist politician explains this tendency and its roots quite well, though I disagree with him on whether the border closure would have actually done anything to destabilize Russia ("When the Russian middle-class cannot go on holiday they'll overthrow Putin etc.").
This issue continued to build up, in large part because it has provided a good populist attack vector for Finland's right-wing opposition bent on accusing the Finnish center-left gov't of being weak on Russia and also in part because it has led to our little brother nation Estonians and other Baltics calling Finland an unreliable ally. This rose to a fever pitch just before Putin's mobilization announcement, making it all but impossible for border closure proponents even consider backing down and making it even harder for the Finnish government to maintain "b-but... the law..." position. Any arguments that now the border-crossers are going to be mobilization dodgers are just going to be met with newly-minted claims that since Putin and Shoigu implied that it's West that Russia is at war with, young Russian males crossing the border might just be destabilization agents and a danger to Finland.
Anyway, one more proper argument that I'd say might have weight is that if the intent is mobilizing 300 000 soldiers and the task has been delegated down to regions with quotas, any potential mobilization avoiders fleeing abroad might just mean that the positions they might have filled in the quota would just be filled by some poor schlubs who don't have the money to utilize this option.
In Russia there exists a meme that Russia has no middle class...
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There's a further issue, which I didn't see mentioned here, of being a long-term casus belli by Putin or similar russian nationalists.
Putin has repeatedly used ethnic russians as pretexts to intervene, or threaten intervention, around the region. Much of the pre-February rhetoric from Moscow on multiple fronts could be leveraged against Russia's more northern neighbors, which was one of the reasons Europe reacted as strongly as it did when Putin followed through with his threats with actual invasion. Just from this angle, significantly increasing the Russian national population in the border states- who are almost certainly going to locate themselves to the ethnic russian enclaves- strengthens an ethnic-based framing of a future pre-conflict narrative.
Further, there's also a point about what sort of Russians would be coming to reside in Finland/border states. Before this week, you could at least make an argument that these people were the minority of Russians who actively opposed the war, and were signalling their sincerity by leaving at cost to themselves. But these were the exceptions for a reason- among which being that most Russians, apolitical nationalist as they were, maintained high approval polling of Russian nationalist incursions in the region without issue, ie the potential threat against Finland or others... up unto the moment it potentially involved them.
If you work from the general assessment that Putin's approval numbers are genuinely high and representative of Russian people, and that these new would-be migrants are representative, they're drawing from the same overlapping ven diagram. These are not anti-imperialists who were committing to not associating with imperialism at personal cost, these are drawing from passively supportive imperialists who are only not associating with imperialism because it risks a personal cost... and who, if safe from that cost, have no history/credibility that they won't just go right back to vaguely supporting russian imperialism, only from inside the border territories where they could serve as a casus belli.
Is it a generalization? Sure. But it nests on real security threats (Putin using Russian ethnic ties as a basis for unprovoked war), and with a presumed- and at least not disproven- demographic overlap of the very target audience who have been passively supporting such revaunchism through political support so long as the nationalist element didn't harm them.
Now, one could make an argument that this compliant and low-pain tolerance is why they should be accepted- that they wouldn't be willing to tolerate social pressure opposing their nationalism- but this is where we go back to where they would likely go (existing or new Russian enclaves), what they could do wittingly or unwittingly (be sanctuary/support for Russian destabilization efforts), and whether they'd default back to Russian nationalism if social pressure from non-Russian social pressure targetted them.
I think this is a non-issue that gets propped up as a convenient justification for visa bans, and has no real significance whatsoever.
Wars are fought with soldiers, planes, tanks and missiles, not with flimsy excuses. Providing or withholding such excuses does nothing to help or harm the enemy. Suppose there were zero Russians or Russian-speaking people in Ukraine this February. Would it stop Putin from declaring the war? No. Would it make things harder for Russia on the international diplomacy angle? No. Would it stop Russian tanks from rolling into Ukraine? No. Would it make harder for Putin’s propaganda to boost support for the war among the Russian citizens? No; in fact it would make things easier because an important anti-war thesis is that the Russian army is essentially bombing Russian-speaking cities.
The pro-war thesis is that Russia is bombing Russian-speaking cities because they're held by anti-Russian oppressors, oh and that it's the anti-Russian nazis who are doing the worst bombing anyway.
The counterpoint to 'propaganda doesn't matters' is that the Russians expend significant amounts of time, resources, and center much of their international diplomatic strategy around it. They seem to think it matters, and the Russians will base their decisions on what they think is important, not what you think is a non-issue.
Propaganda can manufacture any other cause and work with it, they’d just say the Ukrainians planned to retake Crimea and roll with that.
Or remember the time they invented an insane conspiracy theory about NATO plotting to attack Russia with biological weapons developed in secret bio labs in Ukraine? That would work too
Putin doesn’t need a proper casus belli to start a war. He doesn’t need democratic approval; international legitimacy is a lost cause for him, so not a factor too (contrary to Hitler w.r.t. Sudetenland, for instance)
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This looks like another serving of your isolated rigor. Not so long ago you jeered about Russian incapability to respond to possible blockade of Kaliningrad due to exhaustion of troops and materiel, especially in the region; now you mention the threat of draft dodgers (drafted, to begin with, due to further exhaustion) becoming an «oppressed minority» pretext for invasion (of a soon to be NATO country). Which army will be doing that? And army of which state, seeing as Russia isn't likely to survive this?
"loading Dean model"
So how exactly do they change incentives for another invasion? Will this framing be recognized as legitimate by any party of interest, after Ukraine? Certainly not, unless long COVID makes us all unable to form long-term memories.
Is an invasion likely to be assisted from within by those who noped out of the current round of imperialist adventurism? I don't think so.
Will this pretext be recognized as less far-fetched than one relying on already-present Russian minorities who are clear civilians and not draft-dodgers? That's 1/4th of Latvian population, by the way. It will not. (From what I can tell, many of those Latvian Russians are USSR nostalgists, despise their host country and their disenfranchisement/deportation would be prudent, and same for their ilk in other countries; but this is another issue, and their genesis is different too)
Anyway, I have one idea about precluding this scenario: don't give them citizenship or long-term permits. (Nobody intended to, of course.) And needless to say they could be kicked out once the war is over.
Adjudicating their morality and stance on the war can be done on a more or less effortful case-by-case basis. Few of them will be ideological peaceniks willing to emigrate at personal cost just to protest etc., but few people ever deviate from vague my-country-right-or-wrong and my-family-comes-first mentality. Hopefully Europeans can tell a gopnik who pissed his imperial pants once asked to walk the walk from an autistic guy who's been learning Portuguese and Leetcoding the last six months (such as a few of my pals left behind); a 15-minute pen and paper test could suffice.
More importantly, this isn't only about them and their would-be hosts. All of them are non-combatants for now. In case of Europeans proceeding to assist the mobilization, they are getting drafted and sent down South as reinforcements.
I don't buy your long-term explanation. What's being done is pure unstrategic pettiness and moral grandstanding.
And if this is grand strategy, it's one you tactfully decided not to bring up: safer for Finns and Balts to have them die killing Ukrainians.
They could do all these things. My impression is that most Latvians just have an instinctive reaction – Russians bad therefore we shouldn't let them in even if they are avoiding being sent to Ukraine to kill more Ukrainians. No one really wants to think deeper because that would require one to compare which is the lesser risk – allowing more Russians into the country or risking them to be sent to Ukraine. Covid experience have taught us that such nuanced thinking is too complicated for policy makers. They operate more on the level of Idiocracy – covid bad, make lockdowns (electrolytes good, give plants electrolytes).
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Could you give me an example of what "Russia doesn't survive this" as a scenario looks like, both in terms of how that phrase cashes out and how we get from here to there?
I can, but it deserves an effortpost. Basically, it's not so different from late stage Russian Empire and USSR, only more dystopian, and it'll be scripted on the basis of Kamil Galeev's wet dreams.
It starts with war exhaustion in the ethnic provinces and far periphery (Saha, Dagestan...), provoking sabotage and conspiring in draft avoidance, which then grows into collective scorn for Moscow loyalists who fight against it, and general insubordination to the federal center. This provokes relocating additional police and, soon after, interior troops there, which exposes economically precarious Russian provinces to organized crime, that has been symbiotically coexisting with local administration.
Economy keeps tumbling down; military expenses grow; infrastructure and social services decay, perhaps evoking petty crime and protests of feeble desperate pensioners that need to be put down; everyone with half a brain tries to flee, increasing the load on border patrols and such; Ukraine/NATO keep crossing «red lines» without nuclear response, eroding the credibility of threats; manpower wanes, and less prestigious interior troops too are getting consumed by the war effort – when they fail to provide a quota of conscripts from a province. At some point, state capacity is overextended so much that there's no effective control over a region with a particularly capable criminal or ethnic leadership, nor political will to subjugate it, and it gets ignored by propaganda, like the Ukrainian bombing of Belgorod is mostly ignored now. And those new local elites decide that they needn't be burdened by the toxic Muscovite brand, nor bear the cost of sanctions. They either declare independence outright, or stop paying taxes and begin to surreptitiously trade with international actors cutting out Moscow middlemen. When it becomes clear that Moscow cannot put this down, it sets off a chain reaction and economically, logistically, demographically handicaps Moscow even more.
Soon, the breakdown of order in the interior army begins as local regimens decide that they can be paid as well by breakaway provinces and risks do not justify benefits. At some point Putin's regime either collapses, or its domain is reduced to an impoverished, desperately coping rump state; maybe Zolotov/Kadyrov/Prigozhin/Dyomin/janitor uses the snuffbox at last and pleads for mercy at the condition of accepting American General Governor to sort things out, dismantling Russian nuclear arsenal and personal safety.
This is one relatively optimistic scenario of how Russia might end, with combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties in the low tens of millions over 15 years.
Nuclear use would make it worse but not very different.
Putin's success at maintaining order, coupled with proliferation of the attitude Dean ascribes to Baltics and Finns, could make it substantially worse.
Some of that is already happening.
Galeev in his Russian channel, with more of the mask off than on Twitter:
The positive scenario is to walk around like a fucked bitch of a douche bag, under sanctions and paying reparations for decades. We could say that our grandchildren will make it, but let's be realistic. Given the demographic dynamics – they won't be your grandchildren.
Negative – a candidate for nuclear bombing. After that, see point 1.
The common denominator in both scenarios is the «fucked bitch of a douche bag».
At the same time it is possible to cast off the seal of scum: if you change the brand. Look at the Austrians, for example – they made it work very cleverly after World War II.
If you value the future of your children and your region, start thinking about a new brand right now. Just like Austria isn't getting called out for Hitler (although it would seem...), neither will independent Siberia/Urals/Pomorye get [called out for Russia].
And everything associated with Russia will be banned for generations and to a greater extent than it was with Germany. Because no one will be able to explain why those fuckers couldn't sit at home.
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I don't think you meant to attach this screenshot. What's that fanfiction you're reading?
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A future army, because this is a future-threat consideration.
Now, you might disagree with me on the prospect of Russian re-armament post-war, but this is a subject that explains your perceived inconsistency.
(Unless we really wish to get semantic on my isolated rigor, as the topics I discuss are isolated by nature.)
I also disagree on this, though with the caveat that if Russia were to fracture, I can easily sketch out scenarios that could manifest in our lifetime in which the US-European alliance fractures for a lack of Russia, the inter-European alliance fractures as a result of a lack of common position on how to deal with a broken Russia, and that a balkanized Russia with nukes could see interests in destabilizing neighboring European nations as fractured Europe and fractured Russia interact.
Which 'they'? The Russians, or the Finns?
'No change' is not an improvement for the Finns, because the Russian nationalist paradigm was willing to accept the Ukrainian invasion basis as legitimate. To this date, there's been no Russian cultural turn against the basis of the Ukraine war, only the lack of a successful execution.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Ilforte, but less than a year ago you didn't think there was any chance that Russians would wage war on Ukrainians, and lectured me that I would never understand Russians or the region.
I'm going to advance another difference in world views: I do not believe the Russians who are noping out of the current round of imperialist adventurism oppose Russian imperialism in principle, as much as a personal skin-in-the-game that only applies so long as they do have skin in the game and can't go back to being mostly apolitical passive supporters, and I do not believe that migrants renounce everything about their origins even when they flee, let alone views that are odious to their new neighbors of choice.
Intra-American state, inter-EU migration, and inter-continental migration trends of the last decades do not support the later. The fact that the most recent Russian nopers are leaving now, and not a week ago, supports the later.
It's not another issue, it's an extension and continuation of the same issue- a unloyal minority that approaches their host country from the perspective of cultural chauvenism and nostalgia for the external imperial oppressor. If this sounds at all familiar to the current Russian president who has had high support from the Russian public- from which these new migrants are coming- this is probably because Putin's support base is composed of, and has been cultivating, the same.
If one views the demographic issue as a problem, making the problem bigger does not make the problem better.
Except they wouldn't, because the modern Europeans don't have the same attitude towards ethnic cleansing from claimed sovereign territory as the modern Russians, even self-exiled ones.
Worse from the present-decision maker perception, even if they were inclined to do so (say that you are right and I am wrong), they might not be able to muster a political coalition to do so if more Russians are let in, as a new population inflow entails new economic interests that, once entrenched, are harder to expunge than to prevent forming in the first place.
Alternatively, they could not make new case-by-case beuracratic systems for unknown thousands of potential applicants whose approval would make their domestic ethno-demographic instability functions worse for the sake of people who until last week were supportive of Russian imperialist revaunchism.
No, not more importantly. The Russian emmigrees are the less important part of this balance of concerns.
The most important consideration of Russian migration to other nations isn't the Russian status as non-combatants, it's whether the other states give sovereign permission. Russians do not have an inherent right to freely migrate to neighboring countries and set up new lives amongst the Finns and the Balts or the Ukrainians or anywhere else at will. Ethnic russian migration interests do not pre-empt the interests, or sovereignty, of their non-Russian neighbors.
Well, yes, the Finns and the Balts governments are making decisions to prioritize their own safety. Why shouldn't they?
The responsibility of a nation is to its people, a state to its citizens, and a democracy to its voters. Ukrainians are none of these in the Baltize area. Neither are Russians.
You treat this as some betrayal of some broader solidarity, but there is none to be betrayed. The Russian nation demonstrated that, with the general approval of many who are now seeking to flee.
This is barely responsive to my post. Which I suppose happens when one's argument is shown to be without merit and there's no incentive to admit as much.
I dismiss this, because a) in no realistic event can those Russians hope to get long-term residence in Finland or Latvia and b) nobody there is even arguing that this is a risk, instead complaining about being a transit country or that Russians have to take responsibility or some such.
Why Finns, how could that fit the context? Those little miscommunications are a repeating pattern with you, and they are very telling.
Russians of course. Your starting thesis was: Putin has repeatedly used ethnic russians as pretexts to intervene, or threaten intervention, around the region... significantly increasing the Russian national population in the border states- who are almost certainly going to locate themselves to the ethnic russian enclaves- strengthens an ethnic-based framing of a future pre-conflict narrative
How, exactly, does this work? Surely you understand that wars of conquest waged by non-democratic states are not contingent on objective reality behind claimed moral justification, so this framing is as strong or as weak as the propaganda makes it. (Even absence of Russians can be spun into an ethnic cleansing story, if one tries). Your response on the same point to @hustlegrinder is similarly lacking in your usual causal clarity.
Are you really one to talk so smugly of this, given that your specific explanations for the Russian military buildup (forcing the NS2 issue or something) didn't differ much from mine and also implied no war? Also, «any chance» sounds very strong. But okay, I never quantified it, and indeed it seemed implausible, which in retrospect was stupid of me.
And before:
Assuming this is true: this is but a spin on the casus belli thesis (technically, was a spin on that thesis, now it's just a speculation on morality). The casus belli issue has already been addressed. Without it, what exactly does this add? If they consistently oppose being drafted for base egoistic reasons, they are even less likely to help out with the invasion of the host country (which would be even more personally dangerous). Is this about strategic security, helping Ukraine, or about punishing people who supposedly don't oppose Russian Imperialism in principle?
Wut? This if literary fluff in the shape of a coherent argument. I believe you can do better in distinguishing issues.
This gave me a pause. Perhaps we have differences in worldview regarding what constitutes ethnic cleansing, too? Wiki sounds about right: «Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous». I don't know man, this doesn't sound like, um, issuing short-term residence permits or erecting refugee camps for draft dodgers from a multinational neighboring state.
I imagine in a more equanimous state you'd have remembered that, and managed not to make this into another cause for a lame attempt at deadpan comedy.
This is some heavy stuff.
In any case, if Europeans do not believe in ethnic cleansing, like you assert, they might not believe in collective ethnic responsibility like you do, either.
Right, thanks. Admittedly I suspected this will be how you'll read it, which is why I wrote it ambiguously like this, and I know this isn't my broken English but your blinding, zoological ethnic prejudice that predictably determined this queer reading. Pease spare me more snark; few things could be funnier than what you're doing here on reflex, condescendingly explaining sovereignty to an imagined petulant Imperialist who asserts such a right to freely immigrate and colonize. (I don't believe in the usefulness of the doctrine of rights at all, in any case – at the bedrock, there are only interests and capabilities).
My claim here was that the subset of Russian males attempting escape and not posing current military threat will, in the case of being turned back, be mobilized for war (primarily in Ukraine), reinforcing Russian forces that are currently attempting annexation of parts of Ukraine. Which is, indeed, from the official European point of view, somewhat bad and more important than welfare of those males, and (I argue) more important than special pleading about ethnic blocs of the far future, weird definitions of ethnic cleansing, low moral qualities of all ruskies who leave home when staying becomes immediately life-threatening, and other 300 IQ bullshit.
Sure, they take care of their own. Can't say anything against it! I don't believe in the doctrine of rights, after all.
And of course they're under no obligation to spell it out. Because there is a pretension of broader solidarity, and it's convenient in many ways.
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This sounds like an example the more-general problem of determining whether people fleeing a place wrecked by bad policies are more likely to oppose them (because their last home was wrecked by them) or support them (because those policies had support in their old home and they may not have made the connection.) I admit the example that comes to mind is "Californians fleeing to redder states" but whether one approves of that example or not, I think it at least suggests that often it's not so easy to distinguish which is which as it may be in this mobilization case.
Pretty much, only instead of needing a majority dynamic (the issue of California idea exports wouldn't matter much if most Californians fleeing didn't share them), the nature of security threats is that they're disproportionate in impact to their population number. Even just a 5% over Russian sympathizer rate would be a major pool for Russian influence operations to be run from, and through.
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Understandable, thanks for the explanation.
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Also, that would be privileging middle aged able-bodied men... pretty unwoke.
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Finland and Baltic countries are small. What if you unexpectedly get, say, 5 million of Russians escaping conscription and while these 5 millions are much likely to support Russian Imperialism than those in Russia, they still be far apart in values from what expected to from Finland/Baltic resident.
80 years ago, USA and many countries didn't accept Jews escaping Nazis even those had >80% chances to die under Nazis (thought, we know it in hindsight).
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If they stay in Russia, civil unrest is more likely. You don't want to give Russia a safety valve to get rid of sources of civil unrest.
Just having large numbers of Russians in your country is dangerous because Russia treats them like the Sudetenland--they're used as an excuse to invade.
Some may be spies or saboteurs.
This is above and beyond the usual problems from having lots of immigrants.
I think #2 is a paper tiger for countries in NATO; Russia could not plausibly gain anything from invading a NATO member, so whether it has an excuse to do so is not very relevant.
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That kind of stuff really turns me off on the "rational cowardly West deceived Ukraine into hating us" propaganda, in particular. Hell, if you ask me, it's more like gigachad strong aura Ukro-Russophobes who rubbed off on the entire West. I do not recall such moods being so visceral among the common folk in the West before.
With number of protected classes increasing every day, people still want to hate someone.
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I don't find this kind of psychological analysis to be that convincing. It's compelling to imagine Putin ranting at his generals in some palace and to pull out all sorts of diagnoses - he's a megalomaniac, he's a psychopath, he's delusional, he's paranoid, etc. But these kinds of assertions are made without evidence, and are constructed to support desired conclusions. The claim that Putin is insane or Hitleresque is made to justify war with Russia, and what Americans think of as the good kind of war - total war that doesn't stop until the entire country and government is destroyed. It is made to rule out the possibility of negotiation or normalizing relations.
In any case, Putin's interior psychology is not really that important. Russia is in a very bad place right now, but they really have no choice but to continue to believe that victory is possible. People can believe anything if they have to!
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This is definitely a side note to all the other things going in this thread, but I can't help but wonder how this will play out. I just received a notice from my German gas provider and the price per cubic meter has gone up x5, that's on top of a 60% increase in electricity price. Fortunately my wife works at a place where they're legally obligated to keep the heating on, I do WFH and am unusually cold-resistant and whatever else we'll actually consume fits comfortably in our budget, but not everyone has that privilege.
Across Europe, there will be a large number of people that will be unable to pay for some of the basics of life this winter. Assuming that they'll not just be content to lay down and die, this might have serious consequences starting from cascading economic consequences of non-payment of absurd utility bills to populist parties surging in support. Another thing to consider is that this winter we're still able to largely run off of Russian gas which filled our storage tanks over the summer. That won't be the case next winter.
If this was happening before Covid then I would agree. However post COVID I think this will not be such a problem. There are numbers of things that governments can do to decrease energy demand. They government offices, schools etc. can move into online mode again to save on heating, they can even motivate businesses to do the same. Governments can shutdown certain energy intensive industries temporarily like Aluminum production offering subsidies. They can close "nonessential" things like ski resorts - especially those which require energy intensive artificial snow.
Of course there will be considerable damage especially when it comes to competitiveness of manufacturing industry with certain countries that have energy independence. But if we lived through COVID we will get through this.
Arguably this will lead to higher costs. Home heating tends to be inefficient. So sending everyone home to keep warm will likely result in higher costs. And it's not like you can just turn off all the energy to government offices and schools. You're going to have to keep them above freezing throughout the winter.
Usually, during the workday, energy use at home drops. And that's without considering that most people don't turn down the heat. If energy prices are high, everyone is going to be locking that dial when they leave home.
By keeping schools, offices, and basically any place where people congregate, open and warm, you're going to see people turn down their thermostats and spend more time in public places, making it even more efficient.
Basically locking people down during an energy crisis is going to lead to increased demand for stuff to do at home, and supply is limited. That's going to push up prices even further.
They should be creating communal areas where people can gather, stay warm, hang out, and even eat. Commercial kitchens are far more efficient than residential ones. Restaurants are getting priced out by energy costs, but then we're just going to end up with more people eating at home, which means more energy consumption.
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I don't understand how moving things online saves energy. Now instead of heating 25 kids in one classroom, you have 25 kids in 25 bedrooms with the heater on. Same goes for basically any office space.
We have "survived" covid in large parts because all fiscal constraints were forgotten for 2 years and all Western governments engaged in massive scale money printing to stop any social unrest. This is of course not really possible anymore, as there is already massive inflation. "Close everything and pay people to do nothing" might seriously lead to empty shelves and worthless paper money this time.
Meanwhile the virus itself didn't put any actual constraints on healthy young/middle aged people (the demographic that does almost all the work) to go out and do actual physical work. Governments mostly just told them to put on a mask and continue with their jobs. Not having energy and materials on the other hand cannot be solved in such manners.
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Which is the worrying slogan I expect to see repeated (and added to) over the years.. the fact that governments can now expect people to tolerate and even support extreme interventions rather than call for the metaphorical heads of the decision makers who got them here is a precedent I didn't expect to become relevant so soon.
Would the EU countries have been as confident in endangering their energy supply if they weren't also confident that it would be tolerated? Will the policies which lead to an over reliance on Russia be overturned and the advocates discredited, or will the same wartime fervour we saw in the pandemic ensure that only bad people ask those kinds of questions?
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Gonna register a prediction that nothing big will come of the gas price hikes this Winter in Europe. Maybe some sporadic protests that eventually fizzle out but little more. EU storage facilities are nearly full, and gas/electricity prices are actually coming down at the moment due to windfall taxes being imposed on the producers and changing the mechanism through which electricity prices are set with any monies raised being used to subsidise households. Plus, riots don't really happen in winter time especially in conditions like this: if it gets really really cold the general population will be too frozen to do anything.
Ukraine had revolution of dignity and Euromaidan in winters, both succeed, as you see. (2003/2004 and 2013/2014)
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My expectation is that if there will be protests, they won't be about "gas is expensive" but about "we are now unemployed because our industries relied on cheap consistent natural gas input". This is already coming pretty clearly: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/german-producer-prices-post-record-jump-august-2022-09-20/
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This seems to be a case of mistaking the map (price) for the territory (supply). Distorting prices downward via government edict is going to result in overconsumption and increase the risk of shortages.
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Riots don't happen in winter...
Jan 6th protestors and Canadian truckers would like to like to know your location... (and the Canadian truckers did it in a real winter, -40 Siberian conditions on the parries at the coutes blockade... and -20 at the Ottawa protest they drove 4000km to get to)
Even ignoring that, I think the calculus for winter riots changes if everyone is cold at home.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Ottawa#Climate
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One notable (and relevant) exception to this being Euromaidan, which took place between November and February.
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It's definitely going to be a tough winter, but in terms of total demand reduction, there's probably quite a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, whether it's turning down the thermostat 1 degree, turning it off for longer periods, waiting till later in the year to turn it on. Much of that will happen organically as people see their gas bills. Of course, that won't directly help people who are already struggling to pay their bills, nor will it help industrial processes that are reliant on gas, so some state intervention will be required. However, I'm less worried than I was a month ago, and encouraged both by how quickly Europe has filled its storage and the trends in euro gas futures (now down to their lowest since July... still high, but the worm may have turned). As for next year, we'll hopefully have more infrastructure in place, like the floating LNG terminals in Germany, more renewables, more heat pumps, more insulation, etc..
I know almost nothing about energy forecasting, but naively could the lower futures prices reflect an expectation of rationing or price ceilings as well as they could reflect an expectation of abundance?
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LNG is the most expensive way to move gas. That alone will massively increase prices for Germany. Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work and battery tech is still not close enough to compensate. Insulation helps residential homes keep warm, but that’s it, and how many are able to afford it? I don’t quite understand your optimism here. Time will tell
While this sentiment is probably unpopular in the green space these days, over the past year or two I've realized that actually fielding scaled renewable systems anywhere roughly north of the Mason-Dixon line requires something like two orders of magnitude more battery capacity than even "battery-backed renewable" systems design for these days. Expected grid usage needs to go up. Way up.
To fully switch from fossil fuels, we presumably need to switch heating over from largely combustion furnaces to heat pumps: heating a home in northern Europe in winter takes far more energy than cooling one in a warmer climate. Electric transportation adds to grid usage. Including these, total demand is almost certainly highest when solar is least useful. A few net-zero days in summer is cute, but doesn't really provide a viable path to storing summer sunlight for winter, and without that investments in solar would be better placed in nuclear.
Question(I am a licensed HVAC tech and am well aware of the shortfalls of heat pumps)-
Are heat pumps enough for Northern Europe and Germany in the winter(heat pumps can’t keep up very well below 25 degrees F, and better insulation doesn’t extend that well) and can Europe afford to buy them(that is, install an AC unit in every house/apartment)?
Use of heat pumps in, say, Spain or France where it doesn’t stay frozen all winter probably makes sense. But my understanding is that Germany and Northern Europe are significantly colder.
My understanding based largely on this video is that state of the art heat pumps manage to perform such that even in places like Chicago using them to heat with energy from a natural gas power plant uses less fuel even including transmission and generation losses than a domestic furnace when the temperature is above -15C (5F). I'm not quite sure how cold any given place in Northern Europe gets, but Chicago isn't exactly known for being warm in the winter.
I'd like to see what the cost premium for "state of the art". Skimming the web I see that there are heat pumps that start to struggle below 40F, some 25, some 15, and I'm sure nobody's deliberately buying the crummy models to spite their electric bill, so there must be some kind of tradeoffs.
I had a house with a heat pump, and it worked fabulously through 95% of each of our mild winters ... right up until the temperature was freezing enough, at which point our options were "turn off the heat" or "auxilliary heat" ... which the manual said works via resistance heating, but my bills suggested that Aux Heat simply sets dollar bills on fire until the house is warm. More seriously, it looks like you can get around the problem with a lower-temperature refrigerant and a freeze-proofed outdoor unit, but is that a few hundred extra dollars per house or a few thousand or what?
It's one of those things where there are both generations and quality tiers. A Mitsubishi hyperheat that supposedly works down to -17F will cost 5x as much as a Midea which performs as well as the last (-5F) gen of Mitsubishis.
I'm keeping my wood stove for when it gets down to the teens, but I'm lucky to live in a mild climate where that's as low as it gets.
Don't know why anyone who has gas as an option in places that get below 0F would want one, unless it's mostly for summer AC and they have a long shoulder season.
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Is there any kind of portable fossil-fuel heater you roll out for emergencies?
Massachusetts is giving incentives to install heat pumps as part of the HVAC unit when it is time for replacement. It has been going on for a few years so there has to be some data on how it works.
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If you believe that you've never been in a cold place "heated" by an air source heat pump. The problem isn't just efficiency, it's efficacy. Burning stuff provides just as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm. A heat pump can't move nearly as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm.
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It used to get pretty cold even in Southern Finland. Then global warming happened and now we’re lucky to get a solid snow cover that lasts even some weeks. The highest electricity demand (natural gas is practically never used for heating / power here) is in late december / early january while the coldest weather is more likely to hit only after that, so heat pumps would generally work well enough.
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It doesn't actually get very cold where most people live. I live in Stockholm and it rarely gets below 25f for extended periods.
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LNG isn't as cheap as pipelines, but it's how a majority of the world imports their gas (Japan, China, India, South Korea....). And it's only a medium-term solution for Germany.
You seem to be operating with outdated information. In 2021, renewables provided 250 TW/h out of Germany's electricity production of 600 TW/h, about the same proportion as fossil fuels, the remainder being made up by nuclear power. In fact wind power alone was the single biggest source of electricity production if one separates out lignite and hard coal as fuels.
Energy storage is still a problem, but one that we're making great progress on. Gas and nuclear can cover base load medium-term, and there's exciting stuff also happening in geothermal. Ultimately the answer will be integrated global energy grids and lots of redundant electricity storage capacity (maybe fusion too), but we'll be waiting a while for that.
Why does it matter what the majority do? They already have the infrastructure set up for LNG, Germany doesn’t. Once it’s set up it will still cost far more than using a pipeline.
That’s great and all that they manage to eke out that much energy from renewables, why isn’t it 100%? Because my information isn’t outdated. Germany is still a cloudy place without much wind compared to many other places.
Progress is being made on storage but it won’t be made quick enough by winter. Gas prices are still going to be eye watering and the worlds 4th largest economy is likely to go into recession
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LNG seems to be competitive with pipelines over long distances, so while local gas is always better LNG imports at least have lower per-mile costs and higher flexibility.
But have you seen graphs of German solar production? It doesn't matter how much power you produce in July to push your annual average up, you're not running heat pumps off it in January. And you're not running it off a battery for six months either!
"Net Zero" is the biggest con of renewable advertising. The net is full of fucking holes in important places.
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Environmentalists have been claiming we can insulate and save our way to zero energy for decades, and they've got people believing it. We can't. The US EPA estimates a typical 20% reduction in heating and cooling in the most favorable climate zone. Unless European houses are typically uninsulated with leaky windows, it's not likely to be much better there. Now, 20% is a big number... but not when you're talking about the kinds of shortages expected in Europe. Same for thermostat reduction (and the better your insulation, the less you save from that)
I am a licensed HVAC tech and the 20% reduction number is a lie from the people who make these products so they can convince homeowners they’re cost effective. The real number is usually a lot less.
Do you have any sources for this? (I have no understanding of any of this but I know some people considering getting a heat pump)
Sources, no. Experience, yes. HVAC and insulation improvements are sold, mostly, financed, with the goal that the customer pays sufficiently less on the electric bill to make up for the payment. In general that doesn’t happen and the note on the improvements are rolled into the house payment the next time the homeowner refinances.
Now there are energy efficiency gains from a lot of that stuff(double paned windows, extra attic insulation, etc), just usually not enough to pay for itself in power bills(which the marketing data these EPA claims are based off of is trying to prove).
As for heat pumps in specific, they’re usually cheaper than electric resistor heating and more expensive than gas. They may or may not be greener than gas; depends on what your electricity comes from.
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The 20% number wasn't heat pumps, but overall improvements from insulation. Looking at the EPA pdf, they make some pretty major assumptions that homes have no underfloor or rim joist insulation, 23% duct leakage, dreadful windows, and an arbitrary 4% HVAC mischarging figure.
I've been around a lot of homes, and haven't seen many that would make me consider that an average sample to base improvement estimates on.
Hell, my piece of shit house was cobbled together in the sample era and has none of those issues left to fix as low hanging fruit. Other than half the west wall currently being a plastic sheet... I should probably get back to that.
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I've never felt as cold as indoors in Germany in early March. It was quite a shock for someone who was used to -25C outdoors temperatures barely affecting indoor temperature due to decent insulation and central heating (that I always have to turn way down to avoid boiling inside).
I swear I get sick every time I go to a Mediterranean country in the winter. Usually when the day temps are like 15C. My body just cannot take the shock of insides of houses being colder than the outside.
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It was also a revelation for me when visiting Ireland how much colder it feels when you actually can't escape (comparably milder than in Finland) outdoor temps to warm insulated homes for most of your time.
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Dunno about Germany, but having spent a few weeks in Airbnb in winter in Ireland, wow. The host gave us electric blanket and told us to never mind that the room was not room temperature. And Ireland is not even cold!
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Yeah I think this is a common thing! Coming from the Netherlands, I've heard people from Eastern Europe complain about the cold here. I was confused at first like "bro wtf, it's like -20C right now where you are from, how on earth are you cold here?!", but yeah, if you don't go outside too much and you crank up that thermostat indoors, I guess the Netherlands is effectively colder in the winter.
Likewise, I've experienced the opposite going to Norway in the winter. Everywhere inside was uncomfortably warm and stuffy for me. I prefer a bit of fresh air and 19C indoor temperatures all day.... But I guess that's harder to manage when it's -25C outside, compared to when it's 5C.
The Netherlands are also super humid. -20C and dry is much better than 5C and humid.
This is a huge effect.
Montreal and parts of ontario are near massive rapids, so no matter how cold it gets there's a constant churn of moisture entering the air.
I've almost fallen over shivering when the wind was right and it was -10 in Montreal, which would usually take -30 and heavy windchill in dry rural Ontario
(mind you very cold and dry conditions still messes up your skin vastly more... your core temperature might be find, but you get the equivalent of a major sunburn from just the wind)
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There's already a bunch of journalists and politicians making hay of asking that of people. But I doubt that will be of much consequence compared to whether the winter is mild or harsh.
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You are comparing Biafra war (where Igbo pop was about five times smaller that rest of Nigeria) with Ru-Ua war where Ru population is four (on dated census, now probably closer to 5) times greater?
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You're missing the part where Biafra was starving & forsaken by the entire UNSC, meanwhile Russia has a seat on it, and backing of one of the two strongest nations.
Apart from that, yeah, you can argue delusions and vibes and what not remind you of this & that, hard numbers say otherwise.
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Oh well. I did okay, all things considered.
Mobilization-that-is-not-mobilization, he pretty much literally announced it: reservists are getting «partially» mobilized, will get retraining and same compensation as contractees. I suppose what they won't get is a ticket outside. F for my «smart» Physics Ph.D friend who went through the military department instead of bribing the commissariat (and/or finding a disqualifying health issue) like all normal self-respecting people. That said, for now the partial-mobilization only applies to people with real experience in the army. Shoygu has given a ludicrous interview where he states precise numbers of Ukrainian dead and wounded as well as how many «mercenaries» are left. He announces reaping 300 thousand reservists for starters.
Kherson, LDNR and Zaporizhzhia referendums, okay. «Our main goal has always been to liberate Donbass from neonazis». More nuclear wunderwaffe bluffing... so that's the default scenario, he'll try to claim Kherson etc. join Russia and further UA attempts at regaining control will merit nuclear retaliation. (Reminder that Ukrainians have been bombing Belgorod oblast and Crimea for a while, pretty much burning entire random villages in the former by now, to no proactive response from RF).
The guy's alive, for now. Very mildly surprised to see it.
His hand is twitching.
Meanwhile Armenia and Kazakhstan are shutting down the Russian "MIR" payment system.
He's all out of ideas, has no balls for big moves and is completely unable to admit mistakes. This looks like agony. Unfortunately it can go on until many more people are dead.
Lives-destroying madness, but ballsy. Putin started out thinking he could buy the whole of Ukraine for a few thousand russian lives (and a few more ukrainians), now he’s gambling for 3 provinces at 100k. Unless this is some sort of ploy to force Ukraine to the table before the grinder really gets going, the risk and rewards matrix based on available information makes it morally worse than the original invasion.
At least your paranoia has served you well. They could, and they will.
Now they're elevating the pitch of nuclear rhetoric; some directly admit this is an order from the top. I agree with the idea that they'll probably aim to nuke bridges over Dnipro and some other infrastructure, then try to flood the seized provinces with fresh meat.
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Are you sure? From what I know Ukrainians were not using limited capability for shelling random villages but rather targeting military infrastructure and things like major power substations in places with military bases.
Well, there are images of destroyed villages around Belgorod. Either the Russian army is doubly incompetent and can't even exploit the results of its own false flag operations, or the villages were hit by Ukrainian fire.
In case that they were hit by Ukrainians I would assume that they were at least trying to hit military targets (stationing army, convoy, ammo depo or something).
In small part because I do not expect them to target civilians for moral reasons - but mostly because I expect them to not target civilians for strategy reasons and because they are unlikely to be running out of military targets.
Well, I doubt either army deliberately targets pure civilians, but both are very cavalier about collateral damage.
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Ukrainians have shot serious amounts of artillery deployed anti-personnel mines on Donetsk.
Military usefulness; nil. Maybe delays logistics for a couple of hours. Not sure if anyone lost a foot either. The only prominent victim so far might be Russian 'influencer' who was there for unclear reasons.
They just did it anyway. Most western media reported that either Russians mined their own separatists urban areas in a false flag attack, or that it's 'fake news'.
These are not 'civilians' but separatists or terrorists. The entire area was initially called an anti-terrorist operation zone..
They have been hitting it with various seemingly terror attacks since 2014.
There's zero military utility in a strike aircraft shooting unguided missiles into a city center. These aircraft have no advanced targetting beyond a allistic computer, so pretty much no chance of homing in on any military target. It's just pure spite, basically.
Both sides there have very little in the way of 'warm feelings' towards each other.
How to tell someone is not not a military analyst without them telling they are not a military analyst.
The mines are trivially easy to clear out from roads and paved areas.
Their utility lies in making advancing through vegetation tricky. Was Donetsk a vegetated area Russia had to advance through ? No.
There's videos of them deployed correctly during the UA's summer retreat in DPR.
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The current concern is that the actual text of the edict does not limit mobilisation as much as Putin's mouth words did.
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I believe Putin’s awareness is underestimated. Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position. His real problem is controls.
You (Putin) can give any orders, but the longer the hierarchical chain of command they have to travel to reach the ground – the more they will disperse through attempts at every level to spread and avoid responsibility. There is no guarantee any order would be executed. You can iterate through all possible officials and commanders to find those, which work (and we’ve seen how many military officials have been changed since the start).
But you can’t iterate much through the pillars of your domestic power and administration – elites and technocrats. Technocrats/ managers do their job well, but there is only so much they can do with their tiny but precise levers. The real issue is that one of the primary mechanisms, through which Putin has been feeding his domestic elites for decades – is government contracts and corporate shares/management. But gradually it has rotten so much as to become a device solely for cash transfers. There has been many purges of petty fraudsters during the war – across all industries, like aerospace, military complex, high tech – but you can’t purge everything. And even after purge, it takes time to rebuild Potemkin industries, especially when many of them turned out to depend heavily on imported components.
In this situation your most reliable option is to order big impactful things, with sufficiently big impact-margin to account for all efficiency lost during implementation. This include diplomatic sabre-rattling, mobilization decisions, huge geoeconomical levers like shutting pipelines, etc.
As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable. At the same time he can query any of his subordinates, posing whatever uncomfortable questions he likes: they would serve you the bullshit, but the manner in which they do it certainly tells a lot. He can request a phone call to officials anywhere on the ground – and figure out why the governor of Kherson is unable to reply since a week. So at the bare minimum Putin can connect all those dots and infer the situation at least at strategic – “upper operational" level, but has little to change it.
On the other hand, people don't make blunders until they do.
The fact that Putin has managed to stay in power until now means he's decent at staying in power, sure, but it doesn't make him infallible. And if you become paranoid and get rid of any possible threats around you, you also get rid of anyone who might correct you when you do make a mistake.
Good point. It's a classic tradeoff, facing dictators: by over-optimizing your domestic environment for survival and rents, you may severely damage incentives of people to compete for anything except your patronage. Conflicts with foreign powers/ technological backwardness often make this clear.
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Putin famously hardly uses the internet. He doesn't own a smartphone and thinks the web is controlled by the CIA.
Apparently he gets most of his news from spy agency briefings. These have the problem so common in dictatorships that nobody wants to give the boss bad news.
Since the beginning of war I've seen rather high levels of bureaucratic activity: officials fired and reshuffled, legislative trappings expanded, corporations merged and shuffled. I take this as evidence, that at least some information trickles down to Putin's mind.
The point is not that he is personally fond of gadgets or internet. To survive in his vipers nest, he needs a lot of information, from various sources/services, competing and being played against one another. I doubt it's as simple as "everyone just serves him rosy reports": when one official over-serves his rosy vision, his rival might undercut him by serving something closer to reality, with more details. It's more effective to compete down toward ground truth, gradually adding more details, than to race up - into more and more delirious and vague positive reports.
Is it actually the case that competition trends towards the truth? That would be ideal, but why would you be sure that a more truthful report will be looked at more favorably by Putin? How would he distinguish a truthful from a rosy report other than the truthful reporter having an easier time adding details that a rosy reporter would have to make up? Maybe the sweet spot for competition is a rosy report that is (arbitrarily) 20% rosier than the actual truth, and Putin looks badly on reports less rosy or more rosy than that. Who knows?
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I mean, the western news media are, in effect, controlled by CIA. Or rather, the US nomenklatura -the elite body. whose members are usually very highly placed. Consider ECFR's (the EU sister organisation)'s own inforgraphic.
Not overtly, there editors know what to run and what not, and if someone doesn't take the hint the resident nomenklatura representative takes the case on.. When the journalist strayed too far from the approved narrative on Douma, an 'editor' who was unlike other editors during curiously little day-to-day work according to their CMS, but had spent several years working for the US nomenklatura got on his case. Of course, it ended up with the foolish journalist leaving.
Internet though, isn't, as Putin who is no doubt well familiar with the extent of Russian cybercrime because it regularly causes international incidents knows.
Is there any particular reason we should trust the takes of "Swiss Policy Research"? A cursory inspection suggests that they are generic FUD-spreaders looking to appear more dignified.
I'm not actually objecting to the premise that American interests dominate western news media, but do you really need a shadowy conspiracy to explain that?
You want WaPo ? Here's WaPo writing about the same thing.
You can check out the OPCW Newseek post I linked by the journalist fired. He specifically mentioned the most aggressive person who took him to task over the story was a suspiciously inactive editor who mostly posted jokes and only edited politically sensitive stories. And an ECFR alumnus.
As to the SWPRS article, it could really be anything, from some pissed off Swiss journalist to an unusually slick presentation by Russian intelligence. What matters is that it checks out, largely. But does it matter ? It's boring, right. Who cares that a notionally democratic republic somehow, no matter which party wins, ends up with members of a specific organisation in key posts. Who cares that nothing ever really changes, policy wise. Voters just haven't expressed their preferences!
CFR membership isn't even secret. It's just an incredibly boring topic nobody cares about. Who gives a shit that most of every US cabinet in last 100 years are members of the same pretty exclusive club ? Bores and morons like Chomsky, that's who.
Journalists don't. Some dopey professors.
Journalists are carefully trained to avoid touchy subjects. Hence, you will never hear about CFR unless you go to e.g. Infowars.
Inspite of people like e.g. J.K. Galbraith saying things such as:
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I have no problem believing f.ex. the local Finnish media is biased (ironically often slightly on the pro-Russian side until Russia went out of their way to burn every bridge they possibly could). Claiming that they're controlled by some US body is some next level conspiracy theory stuff, though.
You got 5 upvotes for a reply that seems to be based on a complete misreading of my post.
The link I posted doesn't claim Finnish media is controlled by CFR. It says CFR members are in every major US media organisation. Who are, in addition, owned by a very few business entities.
Although ,living in a small country and seeing the dismal state of Czech media, which is basically "publish your own takes on foreign policy stuff that are basically what WaPo / NYT said two days ago", there's really no need for control.
They (in this case 'Respekt', a leftist weekly reprint Fareed Zakaria's editorials quite often, and there's really nothing NYT prints they disagree with.
If you intend to make a claim about US media, you should say so instead of writing about "western news media". The latter clearly includes European medias and trying to claim they are "controlled by CIA" is outright conspiracy theory stuff.
What, you think that guy at Newsweek who was an 'editor' but with a suspiciously light workload is the only one European CFR alum out there ?
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Depends how strongly you interpret "control". I don't know if it's CIA in particular, but it's pretty clear the Western media coordinates to hammer the same message.
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Why are you so sure about that? Both the capability and the interest in doing anything of the sort.
First assumption is that he cares about his political survival and understands which domestic and foreign variables to track. Second, that he receives highlights from western media/ analysts anyway. If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him. Seems like a standard routine for an autocrat who is fed up with sycophants.
This would also apply to many historical kings / military leaders, and suggest they didn't make the many catastrophic mistakes that they did make despite that.
Every autocrat who is fed up with sycophants arranges a RCT? Can you name even one who has done that?
Stalin was notably paranoid. He constantly reshuffled and purged party cadres, and closely watched and probed members of his inner circle (~7 people). He often brought them to his dacha, at night, for a supper, forced them to drink until they loosen their tongues enough; tested food on them, as he feared it might be poisoned. He probed them tête-à-tête, played one against another by sharing his "suspicions", etc. Even dragged them to his personal month-long vacations for closer monitoring. Not to say about spying. This is an example of a dictator, trying to deal with sycophants and the threat they pose.
Another example is about notorious over-reporting in Soviet economy. It seemed to me they used some concrete scheme to get right estimates, but I can't find details.
For earlier instances I was thinking, eg, about Henry VIII's reign with his court, being dominated by factional strife. Again, I didn't find how exactly he coped with conflicting views from rival groups, trying to topple each other, but it seems he at least acknowledged various interests behind them (although, arguably still was over-influenced by certain figures like Wolsey, Cromwell).
Roger Lockyer, "Tudor and Stuart Britain"
It's hard to gauge, because mistakes also result from poor implementations and irreducible contingencies. I said "Putin’s awareness is underestimated", not that he or every autocrat is omniscient.
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Sounds like something much more common in LessWrong-sphere fiction than reality, to be sure.
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That's not unlike LW concerns about artificial intelligences: one needs to start with certain unspoken assumptions for these ones to lead to where you see them going. Sure he is motivated to survive: it's not clear he knows effective means to maximize his odds of survival, that's the whole problem (starting this war has done very little good for his long-term survivability, I think). I don't see reliable indications of Putin knowing how to use personal computing devices, or knowing that they're safe and worthwhile to use, or believing that people who use them are trustworthy. Klimenko asserts he doesn't use any gadgets or Internet. His professional career started and ended while they were of no consequence, and computers were basically specialized scientific/military tools (in his world at least); ever since then he's been bossing other people around, and mainly people from the same generation and way of life, people who are his direct threats, by means that have changed little since Assyria or, at most, Medieval Muscovy. Decades ago there were some staged videos of him using a PC I think; this, too, looks fake as hell (though maybe not as fake as these people believe).
As LWers like to say, we have trained doctors who can't handle elementary statistics crucial for interpreting test results. How the hell is Vladimir Putin supposed to know what an RCA is? Where will he get «independent analysts», through which causal chain – would he, like, growl at one of his 3-5 direct retainers and order to round up some eggheads in an unbiased manner? Why would he see reason to doubt his advisors in the first place? You assume an outside view, expected of a guy with an intellectual interest in governance and social structures, who has read books and articles and blog posts on history, politics, economy, epistemology... But you are not him. He's a political animal: that much we know. We can't really say more.
In your analysis, he's basically unable to affect precise terminal outputs; this seems fair. We don't really know if he receives meaningful inputs either. You probably remember that event. Kremlin may be the biggest Potemkin village of them all. Potemkin zoo, even.
What indications would you imagine? That Peskov or some news media would mention in a passing, that Putin "recently browsed runet to gauge domestic sentiment", "Putin is actually very modern, high tech guy, he uses PC and internet regularly"? or that Putin would conspicuously tap at his smartphone during meeting or forum? You would dismiss those signals as a part of "enlightened monarch" theater (like videos you refer to). It means there is no reliable evidence to reject the hypothesis outright.
My core belief is that an autocrat would learn to filter higher level signals on which his survival depends. Higher level means he is like a mediocre CEO/ early modern ruler -- he doesn't know how stuff at lower level works, he knows how to build and manage patronage networks, play them against one another and how to discern through them any conflicting information. That's rather weak assumption on his part, much less than classic field-independent rationality with infinite computing power.
Do not sweep me into "LW", that's a weird rhetorical device. Methodologically, my main issue here is to find how to evaluate likelihood of what we observe about Putin, given my or your hypotheses. Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative of a stupid "political animal". My assumptions rely more on historical parallels and general logic of delegation/ autocratic rule. Public image of savvy rulers of the past also didn't reflect hidden variables of their decision making.
No. That much we observe. And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.
It's not very fair to dismiss my arguments on grounds that I could as well have made worse ones in a counterfactual world where there were more evidence against my case. It's just bad faith. Suppose I claim that in a world where there's as much data in favor of Putin being minimally tech-literate as there is for Trump, Medvedev or Obama I'd have agreed with you, but in our one the specific evidence provided (testimonies of pro-Putin people, a single terrible montage in many years) supports me better. Well, this cannot be proven, can it?
Even astroturfed personas are based on some nugget of truth. Putin's macho persona, for instance, is due to him liking sports and especially sambo. To give off a fake impression of his familiarity with sambo, his side would have had to somehow fake his personal connections preceding access to substantial power, a ton of photo and video content and so on; that'd be hard-ish and prone to failure. It's about as hard to fake tech literacy; and Peskov's insinuations that Putin is tech literate would be really sus without faking more context. So I buy that he really is a tech illiterate sambo guy.
But your idea doesn't depend on him being tech literate, so that all is a tangent. You're arguing that he has the high-level understanding to make use of modern information infrastructure, or keeps around some people who can do that. This is what I'm analogizing to LW mindset (again, it's not fair to dismiss that as a rhetorical device, it's a good faith reference to a phenomenon we discussed earlier). It can be called «generality hypothesis». LW AI riskers assume, in short, that almost all powerful AIs will act like utility maximizers cutting the shortest path towards maximum reward value (inherently so, or with extra steps). This is far from certain; it may well be that many strategies towards capable AIs that are currently in development won't exhibit this property. Likewise it's not clear that Putin's political success to date indicates that he's a self-aware political power maximizer who understands that knowledge is power, proactively seeks out knowledge and devises strategies from domain-specific first principles. Or as you put it:
I do not think this is a weak assumption at all, or that it should be the default hypothesis, or follows from your observations like reshuffling of administrators (this might happen in any disturbed hive, mechanistically). My null hypothesis is that ours is a (perhaps extremely) degenerate case of autocracy, that Putin is not that savvy at this autocrat thing, and owes his success at staying in power solely to narrow specializations like building a small intensely loyal mafia family and murdering key people outside it. It just so happens that his dacha cooperative also controls the levers of power in Russia and can act like a Singleton; their power-grabbing aptitude and toolset don't generalize to other scenarios.
I also do not believe that inter-service rivalry in Russia has a noteworthy epistemic dimension and doesn't amount to mutual distrust and libel, to prevent them from ganging up on the Czar. The task that he was solving and proved adequate for, centralization of power in Russia, did not require data from beyond Russian «patronage networks» so his tools may not have evolved to gather or transmit such data. He knows very well that Gerashchenko won't stab him in the back (now for certain!); he didn't know whether Medvedchuk had any pull in Ukraine or whether Yanukovych stood a chance, and may be equally misinformed now with regards to the war effort. This is all without even getting into speculations about his own wishful thinking and echo chamber effects.
I am not sure we can reduce uncertainty here by discussing precedents. Mine is certainly a maximalist position. Let's see how our respective models hold.
That's fair enough.
The following excerpts are from the "Russian Military Intelligence: Background and Issues for Congress (Updated November 15, 2021)" [pdf]:
Here's from Joss I. Meakins (2018) "Squabbling Siloviki: Factionalism Within Russia’s
Security Services":
I am not sure much more details on this subject could be obtained.
There is no doubt about inter-service strife, but the question remains as to whether it leads to competitive race down the ground truth -- as I proposed -- or to mere gang-style clashes. The same sources also note that:
and, as you said,
Meakins also writes:
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Great analysis, thank you.
I apologize if you discerned bad faith in my words, there was none of it. I explicitly admitted that “Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative [...]”.
For now I’ve googled out a few more claims about Putin’s alleged aversion-to-PC. That plus data you provided have updated me. Many asynchronous claims from rivals and subordinates alike, pointing in the same direction is improbable to fake.
I appreciate the way you and others have scrutinized every causal linkage in my story, stating that evidence X is not necessarily caused by hidden dynamics Y. It's a fair criticism, but I'd like to know what evidence, in principle, could have shifted your prior towards mine or least away from yours. Rejecting extreme cases by analogies would get us only so far. If you can't contemplate such evidence (due to nature of the question), then probably this discussion is boring for you, as I would repeatedly hit the same tiles on your epistemic map, thinking that your battleships are there, while there are none. As for me, I enjoy your counterpoints.
Here’s what Alena Ledeneva writes in "Can Russia Modernise?: Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance". The book is from 2013, but assuming a degree of institutional inertia, its findings might still be relevant.
Alexander Stubb (former prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister of Finland) recently shared his impression of Putin at Lawfare podcast. Stubb and Putin (then prime minister) participated in ceasefire negotiations in 2008. I am not going to extrapolate from this vignette, but I deem it an informative perspective from someone who has no clear incentive to praise Putin (I mean, aside from denying that he was negotiating with a moron). Starts at 11:44
Analogies of the form “Not unlike folks from $outrgoup, you’re making a methodological error of” collapse diverse opinions within $outgroup and blur the line between their cluster of opinions and mine, and it's those collateral implications of the analogy I dislike. I called it a rhetorical device as your argument is perfectly valid without this wrapping.
I admit, my hypothesis is similar to Efficient Dictator Hypothesis (akin to Efficient Market not Pareto efficiency) or something like political no-arbitrage: if Putin didn't use some sort of higher-level information filtering techniques, this knowledge differential would have been exploited by his opponents and he wouldn't have survived and stayed on top of a ruthlessly competitive Kremlin environment.
But what does mafia building consist in, exactly? Isn't it about managing and filtering patronage networks?
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I think that the entire situation involves a great number of mistakes, generally tragic ones, by all parties. The magnitude of the mistakes varies by quite a lot, from the trivial (Zelensky's glamor magazine photo shoot) to the profound (Putin's decision to attempt the conquest of Ukraine).
In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives. I believe that he wanted to elevate Russia back into the upper ranks of the Great Powers, and intended the enforcement of a Russian sphere of influence as a necessary step towards that goal. The actual effect has been to make Russia a pariah state, and hardened anti-Russian sentiment all along its borders.
Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses tomorrow, and Russian forces secure Kyiv within a week or so, the above failure remains. Putin's life's work is dead. Immediately calling a unilateral ceasefire and pulling every Russian back across the border won't revive it, either.
I feel pretty confident in my read of Putin's motives, but not confident at all in predicting his next move, since I don't see a next move that is productive from his perspective. Stall and hope for a miracle? But Russian attitudes stereotypically tend to the dour, not the optimistic.
In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade. I can see how, with Ukraine drifting toward the West, this might have been their best shot at returning them to the fold. Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed. But I don't see any real scenarios where, failing to accomplish regime change within about a week, continuing to press would do anything except start the meat grinder and drive irreconcilable wedges between Russian and Ukrainian identities. I'm not a gambling man, but I can see how that might make sense to one. Retreating after 72 hours claiming troops "got lost" or something still seemed possible, and probably would have held off the firehose of Western materiel that they're unable to counter.
Since then, I've realized that my understanding of Putin's goals and methods was flawed, although I'm not sure what they should be. The current situation seems fairly unwinnable to Russia (and I don't see mobilization changing that -- there's pretty good photographic evidence that they've been scraping near the bottom of the Soviet stockpile for a while), and I can't personally explain any action other than an orderly retreat with their tail between their legs (compare the US retreat out of Afghanistan or Vietnam)
Oh, I was completely wrong on this point as well. After Putin's adventures in Georgia and Crimea, I expected that we'd see a repeat, salami-slicing a good chunk of the Donbass, but stopping there. I was stuck in the mental mode of "the previous tactics worked, let's repeat," while it seems obvious in hindsight that Putin's thinking was more "the previous probing tactics revealed Western weakness, let's escalate" and we got the thunder run on Kyiv.
I think you're right that this alternate timeline gets closest to a win for Putin. The Western response in reality was a panicked economic cancellation of Russia. In the alternate "quick Russian military victory" timeline, what changes when the West is presented with the fait accompli? What's the likelihood that the West simply accepts the result, maybe with a militarized border in Poland?
There are countervailing pressures in the alternate timeline--maybe a quick Russian victory makes Putin more of a threat, accelerating the economic/diplomatic responses in the same direction, but with more urgency. Alternatively, maybe the real timeline where Russia got bogged down, showing weakness, allowed for a more vigorous economic/diplomatic response, and full economic cancellation would be seen as too risky in the "stronger Russia" timeline.
Setting aside the details of the military situation within Ukraine, I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics. The first is diplomatic, with Sweden and Finland set to join NATO. The Finnish border was never friendly, but going full NATO is a stark rejection of Putin's publicly declared preferences. The second is more cultural/economic, with the collapse of the European Green movement, and in particular German efforts to figure out an energy strategy that is reliable and diminishes Russian influence.
I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.
Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.
For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.
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Maybe it is not much but for me reading news about polls measuring approval of Russia was hilarious. In Poland it dropped to 3%.
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I think we shouldn't assume that there are any moderates ready to take up Putin's job. Getting rid of Putin should not be our goal.
The second largest political party in Russia (behind Putin's United Russia) is the Communist Party. They support the war in Ukraine.
Zhirinovsky led Russia's 3rd largest political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, until his death early this year. Far from being liberal or democratic, the party is generally considered to be fascist if not megalomaniacal imperialist.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1500973674811346946
All these parties are considered pawns of Putin to some extent but they have more of a presence than the genuine liberals. As I understand it, they're still reeling from the disaster of the 1990s.
Putin is the moderate candidate. If Russia loses we'll very likely get a much more exciting, much more dangerous leader. Since when did non-total military defeats in authoritarian countries ever lead to a strengthening of liberal forces? The specific conditions of a defeat and coup would be extremely unpromising - what patriot is going to work with the West given that our weapons were killing their troops just a few weeks ago? What is the point of replacing Putin if our options are communist Putin or fascist Putin?
I expect that Russia will begin to mobilize and start taking this war seriously, as they have made motions towards recently. There is no good reason for power to still be on in Ukraine, they have a great deal of ballistic and cruise missiles that could be striking power infrastructure. During the Iraq War the US intensively bombed Iraq's infrastructure until electricity output was at 4% of pre-war levels. There is no good reason for Russia to be outmanned by a smaller, less populous country. They have a large force of reservists. There appear to be motions towards recognizing Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson as parts of Russia. That would let them deploy their reservists 'legally'.
Conditional on them taking the war seriously by deploying the rest of their army and destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, Russia will start winning decisive victories. The war thus far has been an offensive war half-heartedly fought against a numerically larger, well entrenched defender. It's easy to see how the defender has an advantage in such a conflict. If all else fails, Russia has 2000 tactical nukes to Ukraine's 0. There's no level of grit or clever Western technology that can stand up to firepower of that magnitude.
Support for the war in Russia is fairly high.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/09/07/my-country-right-or-wrong-russian-public-opinion-on-ukraine-pub-87803
The physical fundamentals really are on Russia's side, the constraints are mostly imagined within the Kremlin.
Edit: Live speech from Putin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iCdPPYtJeag
I think he's just announced partial mobilization.
Just a minor nitpick, but the communist party in Russia isn’t really communist, they’re the conspiracy theorist wing of Russian nationalism.
Could you expand on this? Sounds interesting.
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This is why I think current Russia is a lost cause for the world, little more than a gangrenous sore on planet Earth. The only real solution is complete and utter cultural eradication of "Russianness" until the current subjects of the federation are themselves left cursing very name of Rurik.
That seems....extreme, unlikely and counterproductive.
When you've had as many of your DOTA games ruined by Russians as I have (who play on EU servers as even Russians don't want to play with other Russians) you'll understand why I feel the way I do.
I was curious and downloaded my game history to check and I have a large 15% lower winrate when there is someone with a Cyrillic name in my team (an almost always sufficient, but not necessary condition for Russianness) compared to when I don't.
Write like you want to include everyone in the conversation. More generally, don't be a troll. Your offense is arguably more subtle than the name-calling you get downthread, but no less a violation of the rules. Banned for a week.
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Hey now, navalgazing is a great blog, and one of the best offshoots from the old slatestarcodex open thread
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Name-calling breaks several of our rules. User banned for a week.
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I agree that BC's take is bad and should feel bad, but responding with insults (even accurate ones!) is not within the local rules.
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What makes Russia such a bad influence on the world is not it’s “Russianness”, it’s the fact it’s a post communist state. All communist states are quite frankly very evil in their behaviour towards their own citizens and others. It is therefore communism that clearly must be crushed worldwide if what we seek it a more peaceful world
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Use just a single one of those and Russia loses every single ally it has in the world (well, maybe not North Korea and Syria but with friends like those, who needs enemies).
You lose allies when you suffer strategic losses, not when you succeed in ruthlessly waging war.
Using nukes at this stage would be a strategic loss.
It would be a tacit admission that despite having every advantage on paper, the vaunted Russian military is incapable defeating a 3rd - 4th rate power on it's own borders.
Isn't Russia framing the conflict as Russia vs the American Empire?
Still not great if the narrative can be spun as "Russia can't even knock over a recently-added podunk tentacle of the American Empire."
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That admission is going to have to happen one way or another, if the facts demand it.
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Strong agree. Recall that non-proliferation has succeeded partly because we've managed to effectively taboo nukes' use; South American and Africa are 'nuclear-free zones'. The reaction of almost every non-nuclear power in the world should be to either condemn the use of a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear power in the harshest possible terms, or nuclearise as quickly as possible.
Or both.
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The Duma is the inversion of the Roman Senate. The Senate lost all its powers but was still formed independently. The Duma has kept all its powers, but its elections have been a "special operation" since at least 2007. Putin's replacement can be given two chairs, as Russian prison slang goes:
keep the "special elective operation" going and eliminate the Freikorps out of politics, with United Russia unexpectedly electing dovish MPs and communists and LDPR losing their seats to liberal parties
uncork the political debate and remove all traces of "special elective operation", give old and new parties at least a year of glasnost 2.0 before the elections
Option 1 is super safe in the short term but has a risk of backsliding. Option 2 is risky, but I guarantee you it will transform Russian political landscape, and your worries about CPRF and LDPR will become obsolete.
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You say that, but...
What do you think happens after Russia Turns Kiev Odessa and Lviv into mushroom clouds?
Firstly, tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field, not cities. That's what strategic weapons are for (of which Russia has 4000).
If Russia decided to vaporize Ukraine, the West would do nothing because Russia also has the capability to vaporize Europe and North America. That's what those strategic weapons were designed to do in the first place. I don't see why the US would commit national suicide by waging war against a nuclear superpower.
As I write this comment, I'm listening to Putin's live speech as he claims that other nations were threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, where he stated that 'the wind could blow against them.'
In the context of anything except a global thermonuclear exchange, there is effectively no distinction to be made between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Either would be a massive escalation of force and perceived risk. And even the yields on smaller tactical nukes make large civilian casualties/devastation inevitable. Little Boy would qualify as an unusually small tactical nuke in the modern context, and it killed 100k+
I don't think this is correct. Browsing wikipedia indicates that if anything, Little Boy (15 kt) is slightly on the higher side of yields (many which can be dialed down to around 1 kt or less).
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Let's bring this to the concrete level.
The Iskander can be mounted with a 10 kilotonne warhead. If you fire that at a city it will obviously do a lot of damage. Most people within about a kilometre and a half radius die of burns, shockwave and radiation. If the city is made of paper and wood, it will obviously burn down and cause a huge number of deaths.
If you fire it a military target like an airbase, it will destroy the airbase but not much else.
Go into nukemap and see what sort of casualties you get dropping 10 kt nukes on random parts of the countryside in eastern Ukraine. I get 10 deaths, 120 deaths, 150 deaths, 190 deaths, 700 deaths... We are not talking about huge numbers of deaths here. The Saudi bombing of Yemen (assisted by the US) has apparently killed 20,000 Yemeni civilians. Many hundreds of thousands more have starved to death, though direct responsibility is hard to ascertain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%93present)
Now if you drop an 800 Kt SS-25, a strategic weapon, on Kiev you get 600,000 dead, which is a large number! These are genuinely different issues. You can't say they're the same.
Ya its actually kinda surprizing the norms around nukes have stayed "No nukes ever" Vs. Nothing above a certain Yeild, no civillian targets...
a 1-5 kiloton over-pressure would be so bloody usefull for taking out reinforced bridges, bunkers, and airbases... Conventional explosives generally suck at airbases especially, they're so spread out and they're constantly moving the planes around so its impossible to really take out an air wing without a whole operation with lots of scouting
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Most people probably overestimate the efficacy of tactical nukes against armoured formations. No-one knows for sure, of course, but there was a lot of analysis done in the Cold War when it was assumed that NATO would need to use tactical weapons to blunt any Soviet invasion of Western Europe. There are two big problems with using them in a battlefield capacity. The first is that most armoured units aren't conveniently bunched up in very tight proximity like buildings in cities, so the same kind of bomb that would devastate an urban area might only knock out a dozen tanks. The second is that armoured vehicles are very good at surviving heat and blast effects - one Cold War study found that tanks require approximately 45 psi of overpressure to be reliably rendered inoperable. The 10kT warheads on Russia's SSC-8 creates a fireball approximately 400m in diameter (probably fatal to tanks in the affected area), but once you get half a click away, overpressure has already dropped to 20 psi.
On top of these inherent limitations to battlefield use of small yield nuclear armaments, it's also worth remembering that the battlefield situation in Ukraine is VERY different from that which NATO was facing in 1970. Back then, NATO expected to be dealing with massed armoured columns attacking in accordance with Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine. The topography of Germany means that the majority of these would be funneled through a few relatively narrow corridors, most famously the Fulda Gap, thus creating favourable conditions for the use of battlefield nukes. Additionally, even if tank columns survived the nukes themselves, the expectation was that the roads, bridges, and infrastructure near the blast would be damaged so as to slow the progress of subsequent reinforcing units. All of this is very different from Ukraine, where the actual number of troops and armoured vehicles involved have been comparatively small, and largely dispersed across a massive front.
Ultimately, the best way way to use small-yield nuclear weapons to obtain results on the battlefield is to use them to systematically knock out an opposing force's command and control and logistics capacities within the theatre of operations by targeting communications, bridges, airfields, power supplies, etc., essentially doing with nukes what America did to Iraq with precision bombs in Desert Storm. However, this kind of effort is unlikely to be effective in piecemeal form; in order to permanently degrade Ukraine's ability to wage war in a given theatre of operations, Russia would need to be looking at the use of multiple bombs, perhaps more than a dozen. And since many of the relevant targets would be located in or close to built-up civilian areas, casualties among the civilian population would be high (the human body, unlike tanks, doesn't tend to do well with 20 psi of overpressure).
All of which is to say that a handful of small-yield nuclear bombs used exclusively against military targets is unlikely to create sustained military advantage for Russia, while incurring significant diplomatic penalty. In order to be decisive even within a theatre of operations such as the Kharkiv front, Russia would need to use multiple weapons and target military infrastructure and supporting civilian infrastructure, with attendant massive diplomatic costs. If they adopted this second strategy, they could almost certainly obtain a decisive advantage in the short-term, but the cost would be complete international opprobrium and the breaking of the nuclear taboo (this latter ultimately being advantageous for Russia as one of the five official nuclear powers). Moreover, it is likely that there would be overwhelming political pressure at that point for the United States to intervene at least conventionally in the conflict, significantly raising the risks of escalation to general (nuclear) war between Russia and the United States.
There are no easy nuclear options for Russia.
Don't forget that shitty Warsaw Pact armor is designed specifically for fighting in conditions of nuclear warfare.
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Absolutely, you would need to use dozens of weapons or more. They would be effective at destroying entrenched infantry and break up any large-scale counterattacks which require concentrated forces. But the Russians have thousands of weapons.
But why does everyone think would be overwhelming pressure on the US to intervene and join a nuclear war?
Imagine you're the US president. There's a nuclear war going on between Russia and a country you're not obliged to defend by any kind of treaty. The country with the single biggest arsenal in the world is using somewhere between 0.2-1% of its tactical nukes. The remaining 1990 tactical weapons are held in reserve, ready to be used against you. The remaining 4000 strategic weapons are obviously pointed at you. The whole Russian arsenal is on very high alert because this is a major crisis.
Why do you join and make yourself a target? Do you think the Russians, after just launching nuclear strikes, will back down now? After they've done extremely costly signalling to show their desire to win? What benefit does joining a nuclear war have for the US? Why is it worth it? Everyone here seems to think the US should or would intervene but I can't understand why!
The US is not a sensible target for Russian nuclear weapons unless it is likely to use nuclear weapons against Russia. However, in the event of Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the US and it allies have a lot of extreme measures they can use that are short of nuclear war or even direct attacks on Russian soil:
(1) Massive, apocalyptic cyberattacks that cripple Russian access to the internet.
(2) Attacking Russian satellites to destroy Russian TV and communications capacity.
(3) Closing off Russian access to the sea at all points.
(4) Closing off Russian civilian air access to all possible points.
(5) Closing off Russian civilian land access to all possible points, including Kalingrad, which would face food shortages etc.
(6) Expelling Russia from the United Nations Security Council. China would almost certainly abstain at worst and maybe vote for Russia's expulsion, since association with Russia would be massively toxic. Russia's suspension from the UN would also be an option. This would mean that, in future, Russia would face Korean War type scenarios, where the UN Security Council could vote to mobilise the UN against Russia and/or its allies (assuming it still has any after Pressing the Button).
(7) Extension of sanctions to countries that still trade with Russia, which after Pressing the Button may not be that many. While India would be out, somewhere like Cuba might still be in, and would face apocalyptic sanctions.
(8) Intensification of sanctions in all respects.
This is why, unless Putin is colossaly stupid, he will not Press the Button, even on a limited scale, let alone bombing Ukrainian cities. Much of the world still likes Russia and there is a lot of incentives for the West to keep their powder dry on extreme measures. Once Russia ends the nuclear taboo, it loses both of those, and goes into a forced pariah status that is unprecedented in human history.
You may say "Are China/India really going to give up on Russia in this situation?" Think of it from their perspective: right now, using nuclear weapons to any extent is taboo. This means that e.g. India doesn't have too much to fear from nuclear war with Pakistan, and China doesn't have to worry about the US using tactical nukes to defend Taiwan. If Russia breaks the nuclear taboo without massive consequences, then that sets a precedent for Pakistan or the US to do so without massive consequences.
That's all pretty fucking horrifying, and probably will transpire, nukes or no nukes.
Looking into Putin's early career, I've just read an interesting interview, admittedly from a suspect source: an Israeli-Russian arms dealer who filed some lawsuits against Putin-affiliated companies for scamming and forcibly removing him out of his businesses in the 90-s-00's. (and beating him half to death). He talked on a USA-funded Radio Freedom. A terse intro in English.
The point is, he says the same thing I've seen from many other people personally acquainted with early Putin: that he is absolutely, purely amoral. This image reminds me of Achilles Desjardins from Peter Watts' trilogy. Except Achilles was very smart and rational.
To be clear, I do not subscribe to this interpretation: Putin clearly has some attachments, some scruples, it's just this sentiment is reserved for «his people». And I don't mean Russians or something, but literally his little mafia team. Then again, even Achilles Desjardins mourned his cat.
With time and age, men become dumber, emotionally unstable, insecure, fall into echo chambers, come to believe in nonsense. But they still have habits and customs to guide them. Old Putin, Putin we have today, may be both stupidly irrational and completely devoid of conventional morality that could have prevented self-defeating extreme moves on its own.
Two short excerpts:
[...] But then an unpleasant thing happened: they called me and told me that there had been a general meeting of shareholders, and they signed the documents for me, which was probably true. According to the general practice, there are a lot of such things even now, when some part of the company's shares is assigned to a bum or to someone who is sure not to come, for whom they sign, and everything is fine. Because if you start dividing shares, there are a lot of questions from other co-owners. But this way they put it aside and put their signatures on it. It's a common practice, in fact, such an "unallocated stake".
I was offered to buy documents with which I could go to the police and to court. I came to the meeting, waited in the cafe "Victoria" in front of my house. It's a cafe with a counter, and then a restaurant and separate offices in the restaurant. I waited for the guy who called me. Another guy came up, said this one wasn't coming, if you need papers, come and see. I went into a separate office in the restaurant, got hit in the head, a hole was made in it by hitting me from behind.
– When was this?
– December 2003, after Dima Skigin died. They hit my head, kicked me hard, ripped my pancreas, ruptured my intestines. It was highly unpleasant. Along the way I was told several times: "Sigma, Sovex - just forget it, good man" - in the process, so to speak, of the beating. Well, I ended up in the hospital, they cut me open, did a laparotomy, I can show you the scar from here to there. They operated for four hours and still saved me, although it was not clear on that subject. When I recovered, took off for Israel. I tried to find out what happened to the company, because it was a silly situation: on the one hand you seemed to have shares, but on the other hand they were useless.
[...]
– Aside from civic position, or rather, one of its manifestations, there's another goal here. Whether or not you can punish someone is another question, but you can point the finger: this is a bandit, and this is a thief, and this is a crook. Just, you people, know that, and then how you deal with them is your problem.
– For whom exactly do you want to point with fingers?
– For people here in the West, among all else. Because a man with money comes, and until recently very few people were interested in how many old ladies were hacked to death with an axe for this suitcase of money. So I would like to point to the facts, and then people will decide for themselves how to treat this. You can shake hands with them, or not.
And regarding Vladimir Vladimirovich himself, he is a person who is, how should I put it... When we met with him, and, understandably, I was considered a CIA and Mossad agent – an Israeli, an arms dealer – I was struck by a feeling in him that is hard to convey verbally. He is not human in our understanding. It was not something infernal or like he's demon-possessed, but, apparently, something very strongly broke inside him, there were no human reactions. I don't even know how to describe it. I had various acquaintances at that time in St. Petersburg. There were people who loved women, money, cars. But they were very much alive, they had certain inner limits, set for themselves: I'm going to do this, but this here I won't do, else I won't respect myself. Vladimir Vladimirovich showed that he was not burdened at all. Either the KGB school had taught him that, or something else, but it was clear that there were no ordinary human standards – no gratitude, no boundaries. I'm trying to find a metaphor.... Well, some beyond-scary bandit wouldn't strangle a girl with her own ribbon for a candy bar. After all, it's kind of awkward. But here it was clear that there was only expediency and nothing else.
That's the horror of Soviet man in general, who has lost the notion of good and evil in principle, and this man had no such inner conceptions at all.
– Can you give me an example when this became clear to you about Vladimir Vladimirovich?
– No, just from the general stylistics, when certain phrases were uttered.
– It's just that there are completely different opinions. He made an extremely positive first impression on many people. In the '90s he said the right things about the development of small businesses, the free economic zone, banks, and so on and so forth.
– I think that both Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky fell for this. Because a man unwittingly models his interlocutor in accordance with himself. As they say in the criminal world, there are some "understandings," some framework, within which a person will constrain himself. But here, as it seemed to me at the time, there is no such framework at all. And it also seemed to me at the time that the man has some kind of fetish for money, with money as an abstract idea. Maybe as a way to protect oneself from this world. It was clear that he also joined the KGB in order to have the organization propping him up. In general, it was clear that he was trying to protect himself, and that for him this sacred fetish of money was simultaneously a protection from all possible trouble. And if you add here a common idea, popular in Russia, that "everything can be afforded for money"...
I have long had a mental model of Putin as a cautious but ruthless Russian nationalist, who is occasionally led into overconfidence by high oil prices, as in 2005-2008 and 2011-2014. Basically, Brezhnev with a trim waistline, who also was led astray from his normal caution by high oil prices in 1973-1979.
Thus, I interpret Putin's nuclear posturing as for domestic consumption, to assuage the wounded pride of the Russian people. "The West is threatening us with nukes, but WE have nukes too!!" is as much national pride as Putin can offer Russians right now. Pathetic? Yes. Sensible given his goals and means? Yes.
I would also be stunned at the US, China, and their allies doing such things without Russia breaking some huge taboo like using nuclear weapons. Even Russian "strategic bombing" of Ukrainian civilian areas would probably only increase Western aid to Ukraine and investment in fucking up the Russian economy through e.g. reducing the demand for oil.
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The issue in question was 'overwhelming political pressure at that point for the United States to intervene at least conventionally in the conflict' which I think you agree is off the table, especially considering the 'at least'.
By the way, you can't expel Russia from the UNSC, they have a veto. There's no legal mechanism to expel permanent members of the UNSC.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-06/can-russia-be-removed-from-the-un-security-council/100969106
It depends on what you mean by "intervene at least conventionally". If the US navy and its allies block all naval vessels from leaving Russian territorial waters, is that a conventional intervention or not?
As for the UNSC, there may be no legal mechanism, but that wouldn't mean much in a situation where Russia has broken the nuclear taboo.
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The US has a longstanding position against the military use of nukes by other people, and has made firm and public "serious consequences will follow" statements to that effect. Admitting that this position was a bluff is credibility-destroying, and frankly, credibility is more difficult to build than cities.
Has the US promised to defend Ukraine under its nuclear umbrella? No. It's as simple as that.
You don't fight nuclear wars to defend countries if you don't even promise to do so beforehand.
I believe you may have overlooked the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, where the US promised to do precisely that.
A random detail of interest--the US Ambassador to Hungary at the time was the father of the current US Secretary of State.
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The costs for using nuclear weapons (pariah status worse than the DPRK at best, utter annihilation at worst) make them rarely a positive square on the reward matrix, unless the alternative is equally grim. This makes them particularly bad at anything that isn't critical deterrence. See Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy by Sechser and Fuhrmann, chapter here.
Putin might think that the West is not going to sanction him any more than it already has. And that the West will not invade/seize control of the nukes/de-nucelarize Russia because that means total war.
What is the appropriate escalation for the West for 1 nuke used against Ukraine? One nuke against Russia?
There is A LOT of space here. For start USA holds about 300 000 000 000 $ hostage. For China and India that may be enough to start full scale blockade.
And there is plenty of space like taking military action, full scale military gear delivery or actually volunteer units in NATO gear going into action. Or actions by special forces.
Come on now. I agree that there's still some way to go to the bottom even purely sanctions-wise, and perhaps Putin still fears it (although by this point he probably should fear shunning by other anti-Western parties more). But we know those 300B go to Ukraine just like my Tesla stonks go back to USA and NS2 goes to hell and Russian conscripts trying to flee into your country go to Donbass.
Edit: oh you don't mean frozen Rus reserves it seems. I should sleep more.
In good news: one of my friends made it out, we've met up.
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More likely asymmetric escalation - something like blockading Russia or committing NATO airpower directly to the war in Ukraine. NATO doesn't want a nuclear exchange, but it is also strongly incentivized to make it clear that nuclear blackmail doesn't work.
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Kaliningrad returned to the Polish Maybe?
It was never Polish. A Baltic ethnicity, Prussians, lived here before Germans assimilated them.
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I am not expecting that it would be wanted by Poland (however you define it) or Poles or Polish government.
Then make it Kaliningrad People's Republic, nominally free but doing everything EU (or USA) wants.
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There are methodological problems with the chapter in that a lot of the unsuccessful threats they discuss are totally irrelevant to nuclear warfare. Nobody would believe that France would think about nuking Serbia if they didn't accept the Kosovo peace plan in 1993! Nuclear weapons are irrelevant to that scenario, as they are to the US vs Afghanistan in 2001.
In fact, they admit that coercive nuclear threats were explicitly made in the case of Suez (by Russia) and Cuba (by the US). Both these cases saw the threat-making party succeed. The US did indeed take costly actions to make its threat credible to the Soviets in the case of Cuba, dispersing its nuclear bomber force amongst civilian airports and keeping planes in the air 24/7. In the case of Suez, Khrushchev threatened nuclear attack against France and Britain.
That chapter makes a similar argument to: 'we examined 200 occasions of gun-owners making threats to see if having a gun made threats more credible. We found that most of the time they didn't have any effect - most of the time guns weren't present or even mentioned. There were two instances in which guns were actually being pointed at the other guy - in these occasions the threateners successfully compelled their targets. But most of the time owning guns doesn't help in securing obedience.'
The argument is technically valid but silly.
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I think you're are seriously underestimating the likely response. If "never get involved in a land war in Asia" is the first rule of war "never underestimate mongrelized rednecks' willingness to fight" ought to be the second. World Wars one and two could have been avoided by heeding such advice.
If the US is so eager to die for Ukraine, why not tell the Russians that? 'If you nuke Ukraine, we'll nuke you'!
Furthermore, if you don't understand the distinction between tactical nukes and strategic nukes, then how are you qualified to pontificate on nuclear strategy? Why would you suggest that the US will sacrifice its major cities for the remnants of Ukraine, a country it's not even allied with?
I'm not convinced the US would die.
If the performance of the Russian Army, Navy, and Airforce is any indication of the state of their Strategic Rocket Force, I sincerely question they can actually hit the US hard enough to kill us.
Even so that's not the point, the point is that if your entire battle plan relies on your opponents being a bunch of idiots who'll roll over if you say "boo", your plan is a bad plan and you deserve to loose. Russia very clearly bet on the Ukrainians not being willing to fight, and now they are paying for it in blood.
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Putins legacy turns into Hitler. China embargos Russia. Russia becomes a state without friends. Potentially owns a completely depopulated Ukraine.
China will never turn on Russia, they're going to be at war with the US in Taiwan probably at some point this decade (possibly this spring if they want to capitalize on Russia already being committed)... And they need Russia's 4000 nukes in their back pocket if they're going to have an effective deterrent against the US's vast stockpile.
Otherwise the US could escalate to tactical nuking of Sea and military targets, while china's limited stockpile of 300 would be running into US anti-missile systems, and the maneuverability of Aircraft carriers (which at 30+ nts could probably escape main blast area in a 10 minute flight time)...
Unless they have the backpocket threat of 4000 Russian nukes, those 300 become 100-150 you can spare without losing deterrence, becomes a few dozen that actually hit any targets... At which point the US could be tempted to take out those manmade Islands and costal military facilities.
Chinese might have a lot of more nukes than 300, because unlike Russia or USA they never reported to anyone.
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Russia has limited (though nonzero) value to China as a semi-ally. That's why China has given very limited assistance to Russia over Ukraine. Being the ally of the country that broke the nuclear taboo is more costly to China than anything Putin can offer them.
For one thing, why would Russia use nuclear weapons to protect China? Why risk the destruction of Russian civilisation to help out Russia's principal rival in Asia? Russia's nuclear arsenal exists to protect Russia, not to destroy it to save another country.
A much better protection against US nuclear is the taboo against using nuclear weapons in any capacity, which... Russia would have broken. Thus, it would be in China's interests to enforce that taboo, including perhaps by blockading Russia, cyber-attacking it, punishing any nearby country that maintained trade or diplomatic links with Russia etc. That way, the US would know that China is a Peace Loving Country, and that there would be severe consequences for any US use of their nuclear advantages.
list Russia and China's geostrategic conflicts in asia... THere are basically none.
Russia's far east is largely irrelevant whereas it as strategic insecurities in central asia in the "Stans" and major geostrategic and economic Concerns in Europe.
China by contrast lives 100% in concern for its access to trade routes through the pacific and south China sea, and the US' effective strangle hold on them through the first Island chain. as well as the ease with which their trade could be strangled off in the indian ocean or the Strait of Malaca.
There is nothing 1/1000th as major a concern on the border between Manchuria and Siberia, or what... Mongolia?
There might be some aging Kremlin types worried that the yellow peril will extend Manchuria northward, or some weirdo in Beijing delusional enough to think it might be a good idea...
But their mutual existential geostrategic threats to any economic or political survival are so obvious and glaring that there's no chance in hell either can afford to lose the other as a partner.
Its wishcasting to imagine either will willing cast aside the only pottential ally that makes either remotely capable of standing up the american empire
China is a big player in the Stans which worries Russia.
China and Kazakhstan recently signed broad security agreements, China has troops in Tajikistan. China sells a lot of arms to the region. (Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are skirmishing, like Armenia and Azerbaijan with Russia unable to exert influence.)
The Belt and Road Initiative (which was added to China's constitution) involves land routes to China from Central Asia in order to survive a loss of sea routes. China is the biggest trade partner in the Stans. Kazakhstan's Nurly Zhol and Uzbekistan's New development Strategy have been fused into the BRI. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is replacing the (Russia led) Eurasian Economic Union as an umbrella only missing Turkmenistan. The actual activities are more massive than this:
China's building a railroad through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to reduce transit times to Europe (the transsiberian was at capacity) (but the planned route goes through Ukraine, which China's not happy about) and allow for direct imports and exports to Central Asia without going through Russia
Huge investments in gas infrastructure directly to China, sidelining Russia as a transit point besides as a produer: https://eurasianet.org/analysis-can-central-asian-gas-exporters-rely-on-china
China halted investments in Russia after Russia blocked Kazakh fuel exports - a conflict between China and Russia over Central Asian policy...
Anyway, true geostrategic conflicts are immaterial at this point because Russia is under China's thumb. Chances are, Putin's successors will be Chinese plants.
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Just one example: Russia is a perennial ally of India. India is a perennial rival of China.
Another example: there are two major powers with borders, strategic/economic interests, and strong potential influence in Central Asia. Russia is one of them. Influencing this region is a zero sum game. If it's becomes part of the Chinese sphere of influence, then it is no longer part of the Russian sphere of influence. Of course, Russia's interests may coincide with China's for a time, and perhaps even now, but long-term, Russia does not want to be dependent on identifying its interests with China's.
And there's no historical basis to regard China as a potential ally for Russia. Such an alliance has never worked, even when they shared a common ideology.
Is China a major rival for Russia right now? No, I didn't say that. They are rivals insofar as only one of them can be Asia's number one superpower.
Most importantly, China is not worth risking total nuclear war with the US. Nothing short of Russia's survival is. Thus, Russia's status as a nuclear power has very little use to China.
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Your crazy. Nuclear War is a graver risks to China than any desire to get Taiwan. China doesn’t want a new world order where Nuclear War is an accepted reality therefore they would turn on Russia.
Exactly which is why they'd need russia on side for any invasion of Taiwan to act as a deterent so the US doesn't do a first strike with tactical nukes against their sea based and coastal assets
US has no doctrine of protecting Taiwan with nukes. Russia normalizing use of nukes is an existential risks to China.
Besides Russia nuking Ukraine there’s a risks they would nuke others like Berlin that would put on full nuclear war and a nuclear winter for China. There is no world where China wants nuclear winter happening over Taiwan.
The US pursues "Strategic ambiguity".
They won't launch the minutemen missiles at chinese cities over taiwan, nor are they obliged to. But its very possible they'd use tactical nukes to take out China's artificial Islands in the south china sea, or disrupt Chinese staging bases.
China needs a deterent to that since they'd struggle to escalate in kind.
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That strikes me as perhaps the best case scenario for Putin in such circumstances.
So far the pro-Russian propaganda has been leaning heavily on "acktchyually, we are the ones supported by the majority of the world, by the numbers - just look at China/India".
That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it works out.
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...at which point the best case for Putin and his supporters such as yourself is the one @sliders1234 outlined above.
More likely scenario is that the Sejm finally says "fuck it" and lets the polish army of the leash. I've got a bunch of meat-space friends in the polish military and they've been itching to retake Kaliningrad and march on St Petersburg for years now and who are you to claim that they should not
Please inform your Polish friends that at least one Pole considers their stupidly bloodthirsty attitude to be a betrayal of their duties. A leash would indeed be fitting if they daydream about being an attack dog for western interests.
I don't think they would characterize themselves as being "attack dogs for western interests" so much as "putting the fascists in their proper place".
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Russia has just mobilized twice as many people as entire Polish army + reserve. This is even before the utter hardware disparity. In terms of competence and experience, I’m sorry to say that I have no reason to believe that they are any better than Russians: no smart Pole has enlisted in Polish military in 30 years, there was too much opportunity elsewhere. There might be good amount of morale and bravery, or there might not, same as in Russia.
In short, if you want to win this, you’d need to send your friends from Joint Base Fort Whatever en masse, instead of expecting that more Slavs will grind each other to dust.
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*sets paper on fire*
But I don't want to win this, I want more Slavs to grind each other to dust!
I mean, my point is that of course US is very happy with Slavs grinding each other to dust, but I think it would also like to actually win.
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Are you suggesting the only reason the US/Europe is involved here is a racial hatred of Slavs? This seems...far-fetched at best.
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The US also was pretty clear about it's intent to rebuild it, and this was at a time when cyberweapons weren't available that could achieve similar effects. As the joke went before Iraq, the best way to American investment was to declare war on America.
The good reason for the Russians not to go after Ukrainian power power generation is because it's very easy for someone else to give the Ukrainians the means to go after Russian power generation, both directly or via cyber attacks. This is a similar parallel to why the Russians did not destroy the oil pipelines going through Ukraine and instead have kept paying oil transit revenues through the war- because if they destroy Ukrainian pipelines, it's not very hard for someone to give Ukraine the ability to do so to Russian pipelines.
To paraphrase a different war, it would be a very naive belief to hold that the attacker will be the only one attack the other party's cities, and that the defender will not do the same if they have the ability to. The reason Ukraine has largely limited its engagements in Russia has been of western concerns of escalation driving Russian mobilization. If Russia mobilizes and escalates the war instead of taking a loss, the western concerns limiting Ukrainian operational freedom be undermined as well since what they ward against- Russian mobilizing- is already occuring.
Are we talking about the 1991 Gulf War or the 2003 Gulf War? Because I'm pretty sure it (also) applies to the former, in which case American rebuilding wasn't on the table.
I'm also sure that the Russians plan to rebuild destroyed capacity in the areas they plan to capture.
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In WW2, the Germans refrained from using their advantage in nerve gas because they feared that the Allies would use gas against them via aerial bombing. The Allies held escalation dominance over Germany in that they could make things worse for Germany than Germany could do to them. Compare the effectiveness of V1 and V2 attacks to the UK's thousand bomber raids, incinerating German cities.
Today, Russia holds escalation dominance over Ukraine. Even if the Ukrainians hit back as hard as they can, unless we're giving them a full nuclear triad the Russians can hit harder. At lower escalation levels the Russians can also hit harder, since Ukraine is a smaller country with a smaller number of targets and a smaller arsenal.
Furthermore, is it really wise for the West to be blowing up Russian pipelines during a global energy crisis? That fuel is going somewhere. Removing it from circulation will reduce global supply.
Escalation dominance is, of course, why the Ukrainians have not raised their capabilities to resist since the war started, because escalation dominance prevents retaliation at lower levels.
Alternatively, escalation dominance theory runs into the reality of deterrence, which works when the opponent's capacity to retaliate is enough that even though you could hit back harder, it doesn't matter because you don't want to be hit in that way in that context, and that overwhelming annihalative capacity doesn't actual deter people from fighting back if you attack them, and that people will often fight back in kind.
Russia's ability to nuke Ukraine harder than Ukraine can nuke Russia is irrelevant to the reasons why Russia wouldn't want to do something that could be done back to them if they did so. Nukes do not stop Ukrainian from counter-artillery fire, nor do they magically prevent Ukraine from retaliating in kind in other ways.
Okay. In other news, water is wet. It still doesn't change that were Russia to knock out Ukrainian energy infrastructure, other people would happily help the Ukrainians do it back to the Russians. The Europeans can afford it, the Americans will profit from it, and the Poles would probably do it even if they couldn't afford or profit from it.
reducing risk of getting again invaded by Russia is worth a lot.
WW II when allied Russia and Germany invaded resulted in 16% of Poles being murdered, to say nothing about economical and political losses.
Sure. So is deterring the Russians from knocking out your energy generation by targetting theirs. Note that you are increasingly far from the claims of escalation dominance being relevant in negating deterrence.
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The Russian recent actions have demonstrated that this is a fools errand, It seems clear at this point that the only way to reduce the risk of Russian invasion is to cripple Russia's ability to invade anyone. Every Russian soldier killed in Ukraine, every plane shot down, armored vehicle destroyed, and Russian naval vessel sunk, makes Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe safer.
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It certainly looked that way back before the most recent invasion. But the actual course of events has shown the Russians can't hit harder unless they go nuclear; if they could, they would. If they go nuclear, they risk WWIII with the US and Western Europe directly involved. This does not give them escalation dominance.
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No matter how much Russia underperforms, screws up, or fails against seeming ridiculously favorable odds...
They can mass mobilize a million+men any time it gets heated, while Ukraine is already maxed out (in terms of new troops per week)
they have the old soviet stockpiles that means even as the average equipment regresses decades, they can feed the war machine, whereas the European and even American stockpiles are getting hazardously low.
The Russian economy is actively profiting from the war and global increased scarcity, whereas the Germans are preparing warming centers because they won't be able to keep the lights or heat on.
The collapse of international supply chains if this continues are going to start Arab spring style regime change and civil war throughout the world, which draws the American empire away from Europe and towards Middle eastern deployments, whereas Russia has already secured Assad and its few major allies.
Ukraine's GDP was 3k per capita before the war, Russia's was 10k. As the Eurozone economy collapses and shortages hit the world, the Average Ukrainian's standard of living is going to collapse even if their government has properly managed their food stores so they won't starve (which who knows?)
Russia has already conquered all the territories it geostrategically needed. It has Donetsk and Luhansk, it has Crimea, it has its land border, it controls Kherson and the mouth of the Dnipro river... Those are its victory territories. Those are its bare minimum victory territories... but that's it. If the borders never move Russia has secured everything it strategically needed from this war.
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Winter is not going to favour the Ukrainians... Russia is already in place and has its supply lines. Russia does not have to pull off big maneuvers to win. And the economies Russia is intimately tied to aren't going to collapse and fall to riot and rebellion this winter.
Ukraine just made a big deal of taking 1000 square kms... Russia has taken hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and the lines have barely moved in 5 months. Unless the Russians mutiny and break, which is very very unlikely...the lines are likely to stay there til next spring at the earliest... all drawing out the war is doing is killing 10s of thousands of Ukrainians a month, and ensuring that the inevitable global humanitarian crisis is all the worse.
there should have been a negotiated end to this war months ago, and the European countries should be pushing Ukraine to cede and accept their loss... not egg them so their constituents can freeze (probably to death in the case of the elderly), global famines can wrack the world, and more Ukrainians can die under Russian artillery... and all to prop up America's hegemony, not even their own empires.
This seems weakly false to me.
Here's an interesting article about how "soviet stockpile" is a myth because equipment, including dumb ammunition, can expire and needs regular servicing, something that Russia hasn't been doing much of until recently: https://archive.ph/4FYzG Also, a CredibleDefense thread that adds some details, including counterpoints, to these claims: https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/x2uhp1/a_farewell_to_arms_by_year_end_russia_will_be/.
I would also be careful about putting much faith in outdated equipment. The way I think of it is that equipment is configured to fighting certain specific kinds of conflicts. So in aggregate, it gives the tactician certain features like speed, time in field, etc. and it would seem to me that old equipment geared toward a 1970's style all-out war w/ NATO would not do well in what's happening in Ukraine right now. More concretely, I would imagine 70's-era tanks to fair quite poorly against modern man-portable anti-armor weapons and tactics. Even more so when we're talking about modern comms equipment.
There's a small counterpoint to be made here using the example of the Millennium Challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
In a gist, it was a US military exercise that basically pitted a high-tech player against a low-tech player and the low-tech player won on such a staggering scale that they had to reset the exercise. That said, I'm not sure if Russia is capable of deploy an effective low-tech strategy: to my armchair general knowledge, I can't think of an instance when Russia didn't fight using massive force.
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So that Russia will repeat the same year or decade later? Even German politicians noticed flaw in this idea.
Yeah, because Russia is famous for its great logistics.
[citation needed]
Yeah, because tanks kept 20 years in Siberian mud are so useful. To be clear, some stockpiles are useful but this 12 000 tank count is a deranged fantasy.
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How long do you think it would take to draft, organize, train, equip and deploy those million men? It strikes me the lead time on successful mobilization across Russia is probably something like the length of the war up to this time. What moves do Russia's enemies make during that time?
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Russia will never outproduce the West.
China, or at least some Chinese analysts see Russia as defending their western border. Seeing as it's the most industrial country in the world, with some serious long-term planning, it's quite possible they have large conventional weapons in reserve and some production capacity.
Were Russia to fall and be decolonised, the sparsely populated Siberian Republics would end up just being bought by the West. What would prevent US army in Germany from being relocated to northern China border ? That's where the security threat is now, it'd make perfect sense.
So they don't want to let that happen.
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The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.
The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.
I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.
It appears the US has about 400,000 civilian machinists; 1.8 million assemblers and fabricators; 428,000 welders, cutters, solderers, or brazers, and 1 million metal and plastic machine workers. This isn't "tens of millions" but it's not nothing either.
Do you really think the US would be as nimble organisation-wise as back in the 1940s, and be able to transition to arms manufacturing in a couple of years ?
The US is already making tons of weapons. The US is the world's largest arms exporter, responsible for 37% of the world arms trade and delivering weapons to 96 different countries since 2016. The civilian sector makes almost 10 million firearms per year. Military production is also quite high, since equipment does wear out, and the military is constantly replacing old equipment with upgraded versions. Sending 20 MLRS systems to Ukraine was seen as a big deal, but the US makes 9,000 rockets for those launchers every year, and those rockets are soon to be obsoleted by the ER GMLRS.
Counterpoint.
Even Russia is probably getting low on ammunition and they were making far, far more per year and stockpiling in anticipation of a conflict.
US never planned for something like this:
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It doesn't have to be as nimble as the 1940s, it just has to be better at doing so than Russia, with vastly more resources than Russia.
You are forgetting who is the pre-eminent industrial power in the world.
Hint: it's not the US.
China produces more, measured in terms of manufacturing output in dollar terms, but there's not a huge gap:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scorecard-how-the-us-compares-to-18-other-nations/
Russia is similar to countries like Turkey and Spain.
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When you look around at everything with a weld on it, 428,000 seems like such a tiny number, doesn't it?
Was just thinking that about the 200k HVAC techs who would collapse civilization if they all went on summer holiday at once.
It's probably not enough to churn out millions of AR-15s, sure, but it's enough to build something. Perhaps at least build tools to make other things with.
The US civilian sector produced over 2.4 million AR-15s and AKs in 2020.
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Production is irrelevant when the time to produce the stocks is measured in years, and the rate of consumption is measured in months.
The US cannot keep the supply of Javelins or any other matteriel flowing to Ukraine at anywhere near the rate this war is consuming them. Russia's crappy soviet stockpiles are decades behind the times and half have been plundered... but 50ish% of them are there.
To take just Javellins, the US had given 1/3rd of its total stock of Javelins to Ukraine by April and most of that's been consumed or been sold off to the highest bidder by now.
The US has almost certainly crossed the 50% mark by this point.... that's it. The supply is not going to reach that peak again during this war and the US is almost certainly hoarding most of the remain stock for themselves given they just witnessed how fast that supply is consumed in any real conflict.
The history of WWII stands in direct rebuke to this thesis
Any reason you left off the second part of that clause:
WW2 no one was consuming materiel at rates vastly in excess of what even US production kicked out. The allies had to bomb german factories to get them falling into shortages, they weren't consuming 30% of global stock in the first 5 months of Barbarossa.
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It's not your grandmother's country these days.
Irrelevant, the claim being made is still demonstrably false
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Manufacturing was close to 25% of the US economy in that era, it's 10% today (and far more narrowly focused on a smaller number of high margin industries rather than low value businesses like assembly that are pretty important if a nation wants to convert to building weapon systems). GM could quickly make diesel engines and jeeps or tanks, Intel can't convert to missiles or something similar nearly as quickly.
Dunno if that's a good analogy. Intel probably can't switch to building whole missiles, sure, but they probably can build the electronics for guiding said missile.
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10% of US manufacturing capacity is still an order of magnitude more than what the Russians got.
Sure, but they already have a gigantic stockpile of old weapons, they don't have to match manufacturing.
Most likely most of that "gigantic stockpile" is fictional or doesn't work.
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Not saying the US wouldn't beat Russia in raw steel output, but the number isn't "% of manufacturing capacity", it "% of GDP that goes to manufacturing", which, if this whole affair has taught me anything, is a silly number.
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I think you, like some of our mutual acquaintances, have been putting too much stock in the Russians With Attitude Podcast without adding the requisite pound of salt.
I don't listen to RWA. I just pay attention to the relevant ratios, who's consistently shown to be full of it, and what get leaked or admitted.
none of even the serious pro-Ukraine people expect them to win the fight. Peter Zeihan is a full on neo-con and he keeps talking about pushing Kherson and cutting off the water and Electricity supply to Crimea, that that'd be a bargaining chip, or taking out the bridge at the Kerch strait and cutting off rail supply... but neither of those seem to be materializing, and it seems more likely Russia would just retaliate against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. And aside from that, he's just "Ya Ukraine is outperforming... really showing bravery, too bad the default is they'll probably lose"
And every neo-con or belicose commentator is like this once you ignore the high energy announcements and get into their analysis and predictions its "Ya no its exciting they could pull off this crazy dramatic campaign we've never seen signs of them doing and it would change everything ever... but odds are they won't and they'll get ground down and lose everything slowly and painfully... but hey we still bleed Russia and stop the Germans from pivoting to them, so a US geostrategic victory"
Every time, as soon as you dig into one of these more serious commentators that stake their influence on major us intellectuals taking them seriously, they'll spend ten minutes hedging, praising the UKrainians bravery, lay out some absurd tele-lazer snipe Zelensky could do if he levels up his mech to 5 stars... and then they say "But they need something like that, because as is they're going be ground down militarily and economically until they collapse"
Zelensky admitted 200-500 deaths a day, that's probably 1000-1500 total casualties once you include wounded. That's not sustainable. Their squads that go around black bagging people for the front are going to become predictable and conscripts will dry up. Especially in a corrupt country where gdp is 3k per person, everything runs on bribery, and perhaps even a majority of America's 100 billion went to just paying people off.
We should not expect the Ukrainian commanders to be much different than the Afghan allies the US was funding and training for 20 years... Right now they're getting those black bagged conscripts to the front, because the money hasn't dried up yet... after a winter of economic decline and the US has gotten distracted by an election cycle, another current thing, and congress and the senate are gridlocked across multiple parties, and no one can pass a Ukraine funding bill without someone attaching funding for abortion for illegal immigrant's ar-15s...
US clients have never not been like this. Vietnam collapsed the second US funding and backing started to wane, ditto Iraq, ditto Afghanistan... Hell the US almost lost Berlin to the soviets.
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US backed regional wars are a very specific genre just like slasher movies or romantic comedies There is a formula, a very simple formula.
The enemy is always on the run... except none of the "Dangerous" regions ever seem to become safe regions, and there are a shocking number of offensives that get uncomfortable. The allies are always great brave men fighting for their homeland and the best anywhere in the world... but their budgets are never trackable and they seem to be oddly overlapped with organized crime... hey is that oppium? Hey are those neo-nazi tattoos? America's allies are always winning and training and get really professional and buttoned up...yet they never seem to stop being dependent on attached mercenaries and special force... and seem to always have bad luck maintaining any initiative,
and finally The enemy is always laughably incompetent, loses every battle, and can't do even basic stuff the US expects of its worse units...and yet somehow they win the war.
.
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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results... well the US kinda learned... they aren't sending their own conscripts to this Vietnam... just blowing incredible amounts propping up an ARVN force they know isn't sustainable... so instead of years and administrations before the whole thing fails, Ukraine has months and a midterm.
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America wins every invasion, and cia coup... for the same reason it loses every complex local enabled patronage war... the US in constitutionally incapable of addapting its meta tactics. Its winning formula are winning and they work, and they don't get changed... and the second a US invasion gets repelled it might literally be the end of the world, but until the end of the world every US invasion will be a cakewalk. And likewise every US backed local military force, militia and insurgency they arm and train are going to be primarily interested in scamming the American tax payer, because hell that's what the American contractors are there to do and the US isn't going to adapt tactics even if you're caught scamming them.
That people can still fall for this Afghan National Army bull... I swear some of the articles about female fighters were just search and replace and they forgot to take out the sentence about face coverings.
Its a formula. Its a very simple formula.
So many words, and so little truth and substance. Everything verifiable in your post about the war is a lie, and others are just inane ramblings.
Zelensky said that? You got a source for it? The max I remember was 50-100 a day during the most intense fighting when Ukraine was pursuing a ridiculous no-step-back strategy in Sievierodonesk. Considerable casualties for sure but 4 times less than your lies. That difficult period lasted about a month.
You got a source for the black bagging squads? If this is common occurrence responsible for any appreciable amount of conscripts then we'd have hundreds of telegram videos as proof.
Yeah? Who are those credible commentators you are referring to? Michael Kofman? Dara Massicot? It's easy to make up shit when it's unspecific.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61742736
This Zelensky Aide puts it at 200 dead and 500 more injured.
RT cites one of Zelenksy's main negotiators as putting it at the 200-500 mark:
https://www.rt.com/news/557262-ukraine-daily-military-casualties/
And here's the Axios story if you don't trust RT citations:
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
And here's the video of Ukrainian forces conscripting people off the streets at gunpoint:
https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1556566862846169088?s=20&t=6Cp7CVwajUHcXaPalKx9zA
"RT"
Are you serious?
Lavrov in March was claiming that Russia has not attacked Ukraine.
Even official count of shot down aircraft provided by Ukrainian propaganda is more credible.
Reading comprehension is important.
I provided two sources with the exact same data
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So, not Zelensky, and not 200-500 deaths with 1000-1500 total casualties? Your sources support none of your initial claims, but you still post them as if they do. How would you feel if I claimed Putin verified 20k dead Russian soldiers but had to walkback to Shoigu saying 6k dead Russian soldiers? Would you think I was being intellectually honest? The same applies here.
On the topic of forceful conscription, it's just a single video of soldiers bullying civilians without context. Your initial claim is that an appreciable amount of the 700k mobilized forces were pressganged off the streets, so the evidentiary standard needs to be higher.
Did you even read the axios piece? https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
200-500 dead per day and 1000 tatal casualties per day in the donbass alone. Per the ukrainian negotiator working directly for Zelensky.
Sorry I don't know the Ukrainian term for their whitehouse so used Zelensky to stand in for the Office and Senior leadership. A normal linguistic convention for world leaders if you ever attributed anything to Biden or trump that came from Jen Psaki or Sean Spicer.
Sorry i was trying to let you save face by giving you multiple sources the most face saving of which dips down in the direction of your estimate... but lets be real Ukrainain officials have been lying about every operational detail then openly admitting they were lying at every point in this war... so I'm going to take the higher number that even they admitted.
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You say "none of even the serious pro-Ukraine people expect them to win the fight." and I ask define "win". The Fins "lost" the winter war by all official accounts, but that's not how history remembers it.
You talk about "high energy announcements" I ask who, when, where? Because the way I remember it is guy's like you Shakesneer, Cimafra, AlphanumericSprawl Et Al predicting Kiev's collapse and Moscow's inevitable victory "any day now" for 7 months now while at the same time I was getting derided for suggesting that any Russian incursion into western Ukraine would likely end in a bloodbath. You might disagree but I'm feeling pretty validated in my priors, where as yours appear to have been thoroughly falsified.
Ditto so called the claims of so-called "intellectuals"
Continuing, 200 - 500 deaths out of 1.5 million or so aint nothing, but it aint exactly something either. Yet somehow Zelensky admitting after the fact that that the ISW's initial estimates of Ukrainain casualties in the first few weeks of the war (despite those estimates being substantially higher than the official tally) were largely accurate is somehow supposed to to prove the Russia partisan's claims that that the ISW is hopelessly biased in favor of Ukraine. I don't see it.
You say
and I reply that the first statement is a patent falsehood, I get that as a Canadian and as a pot-smoker you have difficulty with long term memory so I will remind you that back in March the city limits of both Kiev and Kharkiv were under immediate threat not so much any more. as for the latter statement it is trivially true because all offensives get uncomfortable.
Hey, leave us pot smokers out of it.
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You really should, Ukrainians are not like Afghanis, or if they are, they're closer to the Taliban.
Oh well.
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Can they? I think they can't actually mobilize all those men. And if they could, they'd just be turning them into cannon fodder.
Ancient equipment which hasn't been maintained and quite possibly exists only on paper (long since sold for scrap to feather someone's nest) isn't going to help them
The Germans are of course idiots, but it's hard to see how Russia is benefiting.
International supply chains will not collapse over Russia and Ukraine. Aside from Europe's natural gas. If they'd execute a few Greens for treason they could probably solve that problem, but they won't.
Yes, war does that. But what else can they do, surrender? That's not better.
Russia holds important territory now, but they can't just declare victory and stop as long as the Ukranians can fight.
The trick is finding one which doesn't mean "We take Eastern Ukraine now, and the rest later". At this point I think it's off the table until Russia is exhausted or Ukraine is thoroughly beaten.
Fairly certain I’ve seen data that Russia no longer has a trade surplus since their not selling gas anymore and oil prices fell.
And that’s besides long term issues that Europe won’t trust Russia as an energy supplier or that Russia isn’t getting the imports they need to run their economy.
Also not sure how useful 1940’s tanks are today. Not many cars work from then. And they would be going up against HiMars and Javelins. Could be just canon fodder which I’m not sure how many Russians are willing to be.
Is that kind of analysis super relevant in a world where we're talking about mass mobilization of infantry? Russia feeds itself, if it can do that and produce weapons, the current account and living standards are kind of irrelevant if the government retains control.
That's like saying that the flammability of material is kind of irrelevant if it does not ignite.
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More than you'd think.
The reports I read on sustained warfare recently penned by French generals were surprisingly glowing of that old tech actually, if you can bring in the numbers and the industry to make the parts.
The basic scenario they have for a WW3 would be everyone blowing up all their fancy modern equipment in the first year or so (or not using them out of fear of destruction like the dreadnoughts of WW1 which is functionally the same) and then reverting back to primitive but reliable equipment that's about 40s levels of tech once the satellite communications and fancy gizmoes all run out.
Now this isn't WW3 so the parameters are not exactly the same, but Ukraine is in a situation that still makes large amounts of shit armor useful: for logistical reasons the West mostly gave them light equipment and they are running out of the complex weapon systems and vehicles by their own account.
Another thing to consider is how vulnerable armor has become on the modern battlefield. The people now clamoring that the tank is dead and we should ditch it for light vehicles and artillery may be going too far, but modern ATGMs (which is just what the Ukies have been given) do make the difference between modern and not so modern tanks less relevant. If your modern tank blows up all the same, you'd rather have two not so modern tanks.
I don't share your doubts that throwing a ton of troops with mediocre equipment as target practice to the western wunderwaffen would be acceptable to the Russians. This is what Russia does and has always done, after all. And it worked out for them so many times that it might actually be the right call.
All in all, I think people are overselling the materiel angle here. Manpower is a much more constraining factor in my opinion.
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They can force conscript, if Putin's willing to pay the costs he's gone to significant expense to avoid to date, but a major issue is that the Russians already cannibalized their mobilization and training infrastructure. The units whose job it is/would be to train new arrivals have already had their cadres raided to fill in at places like Kherson, and some reports of mobilized reservist training are of 1 week refresher before going to the front.
So, yes, probably cannon fodder, especially as the systems they would be meant to give mass to- and which in turn force-multiply them- have been extremely degraded, and the Russian supply system hasn't fixed its fundamental dependence on rail.
The crux of mobilization is that it would have been far more effective far earlier, when Russia still had its higher-tech precision strike capabilities and hadn't lost modernized tanks number in the multiple european nations. Even if mothball reserves still exist /work / get refurbished, they're at this point to replace superior equipment that already failed, even as Ukrainian capabilities have grown.
The argument generally rests on Russia's record oil import dollars from the energy price jump, while ignoring different metrics like the GDP slump or impacts to various non-oil industries like the airline sector (uh, not good) or vehicle manufacturing (97% car production decline in May 22 compared to May 21), on top of the implications of hundreds of thousands range of emmigration.
The general argument is that thanks to the fuck-off money the other impacts don't matter, and that the Europeans will cave and go back to buying Russian gas long-term instead of completing the gas import terminal projects, thus giving Russia a bumper crop of energy sales instead of functionally increasing the room temperature by burning down the house.
Supply chains no, food chains maybe, but the assumption to be challenged is why Assad would be stable in a food-insecure region, and how insecurity in the middle east actually benefits Russia beyond 'oil price stronk' arguments that resolve economic health to oil prices and assumptions that the US response to a Middle Eastern humanitarian crisis won't be to just sell the oil-rich countries more food at higher prices.
There isn't enough exports worldwide.
EU imports from RU were the size of the LNG spot market.
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Every war in history has ended in a negotiated settlement in which the winner keeps the territory and prizes they took. The exceptions are things like Troy, Carthage, and Berlin... and the Ukrainians aren't making it to Moscow.
The most likely scenario if Ukraine doesn't negotiate is this continues until America stops funding them, and Europes economic aid stops working... at which point they collapse, Russsia takes vastly more, and they become a warlord run failed state for the next several decades.
Wars are either won in the maneuver or the economics and logistics... the maneuvering has stopped and Ukraine's economic position is only going to get worse. America isn't going to give them another hundred billion dollars, perhaps even a majority of that disappeared into bribes, and what's left of their economy is going to collapse in the next 6 months.
Russia taking its land corridor and the republics, and crimmea now, and then Ukraine getting a few years to actually have an economy, rearm, and ideally set u psome trade ties so they aren't on constant edge with russia is a massively better idea than them fighting til they collapse on some lie Europe told them about an EU membership they were never going to give a country with nothing to offer and a GDP below 5k per capita (ask the Turks about that one)
Meta: I hope we can maintain norms that downvotes aren't for mere disagreement. This thread has some heavily downvoted comments that as far as I can tell aren't arguing in bad faith, breaking rules, or violating other norms. This is one such comment, there are many others.
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The opening premise is false and thus the rest of the argument is false.
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The UCDP Conflict Termination dataset (link, paper) has this data:
Most wars fizzle into low-level unresolved stalemates without formal concessions or recognitions. Only half or so of interstate conflicts end in a ceasefire or peace agreements (typically the former).
In suggesting a negotiated solution, one should also be aware of the statistics and factors regardings the durability of peace agreements, and particularly the tensions over incompatible interpretations of Minsk II that failed to be resolved in the Normandy format talks that initiated this conflict.
So a negotiated settlement or a defacto settlement which saves face by not signing a paper. the point remains: there is no way you magically get lost territory back by wishing, and unless you keep escalating til you lose everything you have to accept your enemy controls what they control.
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Certainly not. Troy, Carthage, and Berlin are not the only wars where one side was vanquished. There have been many successful wars of conquest.
America can fund them at these levels (tens of billions, not hundreds) indefinitely. There's no point in them negotiating until they can be assured it means more than "we'll take what we have now and the rest later". And there is another option -- the Russian invasion and occupation force collapses and Ukraine drives them out of the country. It is not a foregone conclusion that Russia wins.
Russia has made it clear that Ukraine is not a legitimate entity to them. If the war were somehow to stop now, it would be Russia which would take a few years to re-arm and re-group and then take the rest of Ukraine.
That seems highly unlikely given how poorly the war has gone so far, and could be prevented simply by inviting Ukraine into NATO.
What does that have to do with anything?
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No it is not, but it's important to remember that there a sizable contingent of Red Diaper Babies amongst the "Gray Tribe" who's belief in Materialism, IE a rational world ruled by inductive reason, requires the Russians to win.
Why is this?
Why are the Red Diaper Babies amongst the Gray Tribe? chock it up the the academic mindset and the shit I'm always going on about Hobbes vs Rousseau.
Why is it important? It isn't in the grand scheme of things, but it does explain why rationalists in general and mottezens in particular seem to skew pro-Putin and pro-CCP despite their ostensibly libertarian backgrounds.
you are aware my Seniors thesis was on Hobbes and I'm a biological determinist?(completely antithetical to Russeau)
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Note: I don't "Identify" as a biological determinist... I am a biological determinist. My biology is deterministically making my mind process the sum of all available evidence and conclude biologically deterministic conclusions.
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Ps. For those of you wondering how one could be a Hobbesian and a libertarian, Royalist in the 17th century would be think they naturally follow. Most absolutists hated Hobbes and described Leviathan as a "Rebel's Catechism" (Ie. Justification for almost all rebellion)
To give just one example Hobbesian analysis preclude conscription, or atleast allows that armed rebellion against conscription is justified and logical, unless the person being conscripted is in immediate danger of an opposing force (such as a besieged city or alien invasion)
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I meant more "why does Materialism imply support for Russia?"
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Some of my friends have gone back to Russia (many others never left in the first place). I really hope they're not going to be mobilized, so that may bias my reasoning (in what direction, though?).
In short, yours is a reasonable approach, but
A. despite the unexpected cohesiveness of the regime in the face of many grave setbacks, we still need to ask whether the «collective Putin» is collectively deluded; and that matters a lot. Aside from Putin, there are two names most associated with personal agency and most shilled in Russia these days: Prigozhin and Kadyrov. I can't believe that either is remotely as optimistic as Putin about the outcome of the war; both had exposure to major shit in life, and learn about the frontline from battle-tested allies, unlike Putin with his «folders» full of sycophantic nonsense. It may be that their displays of belligerent enthusiasm are in line with a long-term aim to build personal armies and survive as warlords; in that case, the subordination mechanic can begin to unravel without any watershed event like a coup, both in ways of creatively fulfilling orders and creatively dodging them, and that'll determine more than Putin's opinions from now on (there are other signals for this tendency too). It is also plausible that people closer to the First Body are aware of the state of affairs, and we will not see Putin's speech tomorrow, or we'll see him reading someone else's script.
The biggest argument against that is that we have a great deal of mostly intact interior army, and that's the backbone of the system. The Interior Ministry (cops, many of them militarized) – 830 thousand; National Guard – roughly 400k (most are literal guards, as in, non-departmental security service, glorified watchmen, but still); FSB – 200...350k. Assorted departmental security that's not subordinated to the National Guard – something like 100k (+some in the Army). Federal Penitentiary Service - maybe 300k. Federal Security Service – about 50k. And the list goes on. In total, Russia has over a million somewhat combat-trained men, 1% of the total population, who are not in the regular Armed Forces, and (almost) all of them are in structures directly controlled by Putin's loyalists such as Zolotov (off topic, both him and Putin remind me of the main character of the incredible short Polish animation Fallen Art; as does this entire situation).
Russia really is not committing fully to the war, just like Z-patriots assert, because the true existential war is civil; framing Ukraine as the breakaway province doesn't change the fact that the dominant threat model is internationally recognized provinces telling Moscow midget to go pound sand. Still, it is possible to mobilize some among those and reinvigorate the occupation force, while limiting exit options for reservists and also maintaining sufficient deterrent against wannabe warlords.
B. Putin is not a strategist. He's an amateur, an armchair geopolitician, doing things for his own personal immature satisfaction. My favorite analogy is an out-of-shape guy who watches soccer and comments disdainfully on skills of people on the field (is this a universal type?), only to end up transported there. He cares a hell of a lot whether Macron or Scholz «respect him as an equal», he gets hurt by words and can throw a fit. He can LARP as a wise leader with some long-term outlook but that, too, is done for immediate impressions. What I mean to say is that Putin may be driven entirely by his spite and unwillingness to lose face, rather than any specific belief about the game board, and can do things that only make sense narratively, not militarily, including a limited nuclear strike.
All in all, if Putin lives, I expect some mobilization-that-is-not-mobilization, copes about our successes at protecting the people of Kherson, patting oneself on the back about referenda, maybe snark about NATO-Turkey-Azeribaijan-Armenia, stern warning to traitors who think that they can exploit the war for their own gains – nothing decisive; and more consternation from patriotic bloggers.
I may be severely mistaken.
What would I have done in his place, while holding his stipulated beliefs? Heck if I know.
P.S. Girkin is quite aware that the war may be strictly unwinnable but, like many others in that camp, he's fully committed to the idea that failure = death (and it most likely is for him!), so calls for maximum effort and doesn't much care about the odds.
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In the interest of not over-indexing on Hitler's downfall, what are some other slow but inexorable military defeats that failed to pierce the epistemic closure of leadership until the very end?
I think partially complicating the narrative is that the Russian fantasy of a well-equipped and organised military, of a fractured and compromised Ukraine that would welcome them as liberators and turn against Zelenskyy, and of a weak Western alliance, has already been incontrovertibly destroyed. There are certainly bad ways to react to that which would retain a kind of disconnect -- and the purges of the Siloviki may well result in more fear than more clarity -- but the knowledge that you have already got it very wrong once still remains. What would really be that different about Ukraine liberating Kherson or Lysychansk or Donetsk compared to that first disastrous collision with reality?
I'm not convinced Putin does have a particularly sunny outlook, accordingly, though I'm sure significant issues with carrying bad news accurately and objectively up the C2 chain remain. Instead of one big epistemic collapse, where eschatological hopes pinned on a coup de main get transferred to gradual territory gains, to hopes of European collapse of resolve in the winter (while weaning off looks more and more realistic) until no more transference is possible, an alternative and perhaps more likely view is that however bleak the coming year is for Russia, leaving humiliated with nothing is a far bleaker alternative to Putin. The looming collapse of CSTO as a bloc orbiting Russia shows how dire Russia's credibility is. Hence the current moves to consolidate notional gains -- not militarily, but within his own domestic political sphere. It's unlikely to work, but sometimes there are just no better options.
Many guerilla movements. For example Armia Krajowa in Poland was doomed but they tried (see Warsaw Uprising for example). Or Jewish uprising against Roman Empire.
But here you have also a decent dose of fight being elaborate suicide, still preferable to alternatives.
Baghdad Bob. For some values of slow.
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The pro Russian essayists I follow have argued that the retreat to the Oskill line was strategic and purposeful and that breaches across the river have been exaggerated with the only real beach head occurring in Kupyansk (SP?)
Of course this is exactly what I would expect to hear as a kind of cope for pro Russian bubble but a week after the breakthrough, Lyman is still held and when I look at the map it does look like Russia moved from a clear over extension to something that looks like an imminently defensive line. So I believe the strategic pullback is a plausible explanation even if it happened sooner or more quickly than they wanted. I have heard reports of abandoned equipment and vehicles, which is exactly the kind of thing you want to avoid in a strategic retreat.
Everything could change tomorrow but so far the Oskill Lyman line has held and apparently Russia withdrew from Kharkiv in the North, allowing Russia's border to function as a kind of political defense, (i.e. if you cross this line you have escalated the conflict and I can call the draft, threaten nukes etc.)
But either way it's clear that Russia is now in a much more defensible position as Winter approaches. Because of energy costs, it seems to me that time is on Russia's side as the sanctions destabilizes NATO countries. Or at the very least, Russia stands to refill their coffers as the price of gas goes up precipitously.
I'm not sure the pause is particularly well-rationalised as Ukraine suddenly hitting on a well-defended position so much as logistics needing to catch up and forces recuperate while the crossings are better supported. I'd expect a push to the Luhansk Oblast border within a couple of weeks.
I'd expect a push even sooner now that the referendums and partial mobilization have been announced.
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I'm tired....
I don't really care, I'm tired of reading the coffee grounds to try and guess the destiny of the next weeks. Any moment something will happen that will turn this this around......right, right?
And then nothing happened and it kept not happening...forever!
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Well I have read dozens of times on Twitter that Lyman has been taken but to this day that seems not to be the case. (Of course you're right it could change overnight.) But the quick victory seems to have stalled out at a well prepared defensive line that would lend credence to the intentionality of the move, even if it the retreat itself didn't go as planned.
Twitter is full of shit, Descriptions of an inevitable Russian victory and claims about how "Kiev is only days away from collapse" have become the new "two weeks to flatten the curve", no one who's been paying attention actually believes them.
pro russian twitter accounts are outnumbered by pro ukraine twitter accounts by an approximate ratio of 10-1. This ratio among bots has actually been confirmed. That doesn't take Twitter censorship into account.
https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/
This claim has little to no bearing on whether or not twitter is, in aggregate, "full of shit"
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