Dean
2d ago
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
He is. Strongly endorsed for anyone interested in a non-American/non-European perspective from another hemisphere, and also anyone who for some strange reason has personal interest in how militaries are designed and planned for.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
I concur with this recalibration, and your other points as well. I think a 5 year recovery is too short, and a 20 year too long, but 10 years is quite reasonable in general terms.
It's also one reason I don't expect the Europeans to cease support for Ukraine even if the US does, as the 10-year rebuilding point functionally starts when Ukraine ceases to cause more attrition of the important capabilities than Russia builds in a year, and the advent of drones to strike airbases / strategic infrastructure suggests that will be when the conflict more or less formally ends, or just before. Every additional year the Ukrainians hold out is a year the Europeans can continue their own military reconstitution (which itself may take the 5/10/15 year timeframe), and as the European further expand their capability, the more they can support Ukraine to prolong to further expand the European capability.
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
Actually a reference to the officer corps.
One of the key moments in the first year of the war that underlined to me just how bad the conflict was going to be for the Russian military as an institution was the fate of the pre-war officer corps. It's been noted in the past that much of the pre-war NATO-trained first generation of Ukrainians who have been fighting from the start have since died, but the Russian officer corps not only was devastated in the course of the conflict- see the number of generals who died early on, or the Ukrainian precision campaign against identified officer locations- but their training institutions as well. One of the (many) short-sighted things Putin did in an effort to put off having to invoke conscription was cannabilize his training units to fill the front lines.
For those unaware, the Russians don't (didn't) operate under a training-base model like the US, where soldiers would go to an installation dedicated for training before moving to the installation with their home unit. Instead, every major Russian formation had its training units built-in, where the conscripts would directly report to the main unit and be a part of the detachment before going to a 'normal' position. The implication of this is that when Putin had these training units deployed to the front line, it killed not only many of the students, but the cadres teaching them as well. This was the root of some of those videos around the first mobilization of conscripts arriving at bases and receiving next to no training before deploying to the front line- the teachers who should have been there were either dead or already forward.
As a result of both of these dynamics- the culling campaign and the loss of the cadre generation- Russia's military has lost so much institutional knowledge, and what the replacements are learning instead isn't necessarily 'better', but rather a selection effect of what works in the current, extremely atypical context. You rightly note that the Battalion Tactical Group has died- and that was relevant as the Russian strategy relied on easy-to-mobilize BTGs as the modular deployable option for various conflict scenarios- but it also goes further than that. The Russian-NATO conflict strategy typically relied on a Russian war of maneuver to rapidly attack before the US could mobilize and intervene at scale; however, the current rising war generation is one trained and pruned for slow, attritional trench warfare. And while they will certainly do that far better than the Americans, that is also exactly the wrong strategy to take against a maritime/air power dependent power like the US who- by expeditionary necessity- will be coming in behind other people's front lines. The entire Russian rapid aggression strategy was to pre-empt the American ability to enter a theater, but for the next twenty years it's going to be in the hands of people whose formative/career defining experience is closer to WW1 with drones.
That's not nothing- and that could easily be very relevant in various types of conflicts and there will be countless posts in the future of how the Russian lived experience is worth more than the American inexperience- but WW1 with drones is a strategic model that heavily, heavily favors the American strategic model of not fighting WW1 yourself, but helping someone else fight it on your behalf.
There's also a point/argument that big dumb artillery armies are as much on their way out as the Airforce-models, and for the same reason- drones and long-range fires. One of the most surprising things about the HIMARs injection into the war wasn't how much damage it did to Russia artillery stocks directly, but how much it throttled the Russian throughput of ammo-to-guns despite how few launchers were actually in the Ukrainian possession. The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward. As drones continue to proliferate, the viability of such major ammunition reserves needed to brute force advances is likely to be a liability as drones get better and better at targeting up and down the value chain from the massed munitions to the massed artillery.
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike.
And note what the actual distinction is here, as there no significant range limiting factor at the 460-to-600km range in the modern era. Rather, it's time.
A nuclear decapitation in the modern age would be reliant on hypersonic weapons which- if not simply branding for old ballistic weapons- are traveling at a minimum of about mach 5, or 6, 173 km/hr. As the additionally 140 km is the distance to be traveled, this this simply adds time to the transit time, not a range limitation in itself.
An extra 140km at 6170 km/hr equates to an extra 80 seconds- again, at a slow hypersonic rate. Which, while not nothing- and I'm sure you will insist is very relevant- doesn't actually change the acceptableness of a nuclear first strike. If the goal of the decapitation strike is to kill a leader then the 80 second differential won't realistically make a difference in the target escaping the nuclear blast radius, and if the goal is to do a nuclear armegeddon first strike, this doesn't change that the success factor is being primarily driven by the ability to mitigate second strike capability, not the 80-extra seconds to alert / get release authorities for non-second strike.
Which returns to the question of who is unleashing nuclear holocaust on Russia in the first place in light of second strike capabilities. Which isn't the US, both because (a) the US has been deterred by much less capable nuclear risks for decades, and (b) the idea that the US is looking to nuclear genocide the russians is based in fever fantasy rather than any realistic understanding of American politics or its military-strategic community.
Which returns to the point that nuclear deterrence is still being waived away, because the argument premise is silly when Russia's own nuclear capabilities are brought into the picture.
Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
Missile defenses based in Ukraine would complicate Russian nuclear strikes on Ukraine or over the Black Sea. The nature of the curvature of the earth is such that the Russians don't need to fire over Ukraine to hit any other NATO nuclear member for the purposes of maintaining deterrence, and that they'd have to actively go out of their way to do so.
Now, if your argument will shift to that Russia really needs to be able to nuke non-nuclear members like Turkey, I will grant you that Ukraine would help defend Turkey... but now we are conceding that the Russians need to act based on threats not actually in Ukraine, and not nuclear-driven in the first place. And while Russia certain had war plans to nuke most non-nuclear states it could come into conflict with in NATO, that mentality was rather a significant part as to why they wanted to be in NATO under a nuclear umbrella.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
Whether the Russian Black Sea fleet is known for excellence, they were the original impetus for the strategic value of the Crimean peninsula as a naval base, and this was considered a major key to support Russian power projection despite the Black Sea being cut off from Syria or other allies regardless of how many AEGIS-equipped systems are in the Black Sea by virtue that the Black Sea is controlled by the Turkish straight.
Ukraine provides no advantage for the Russians to expand power-projection abilities into the Middle East, unless you hand-waive Turkey out of the way. Crimea is a prestige port, not an enabling port for out-of-blacksea activities.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
Based on history to date, Putin publicly claims it doesn't change anything and Russia doesn't care anyway and continues not to attack a NATO power and the NATO powers continue not to attack Russia because no one involved- least of all the US- wants the expense or hassle of attacking Russia.
Peace, in other words.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this.
NATO training and integration leadup are not joining NATO, and there is no position that NATO cannot work with willing candidates in preparation for the time that they resolve the territorial disputes- the resolution of which was the official Russian of 2014 through 2022 and even now.
And, of course, this goes back to why this matters, which amounts to pretending that Russian nuclear deterrence doesn't exist and that 80 seconds of travel time is somehow what is preventing the US from unleashing a nuclear genocide opening against the Russians.
Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
This would unironically be a net gain for the average Russian, and would have been a major strategic gain for the Russian defense interest had it been done years ago. The average Russian would no longer be on the hook for subsidizing a broke mafia statelet that has been responsible for tens of thousands of Russian deaths to date with more to come, and had it been abandoned years ago the Russians wouldn't have crippled their northern flank's very viable option for a significant military victory against the NATO alliance, it wouldn't have reinvigorated NATO at a time where the Americans and Europeans were openly discussing strategic divorce over the lack of a perceived shared security interests, and not only would tens of thousands of Russian military-aged men by alive and 10% of the Russian IT workforce still in the country, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment wouldn't have been lost in the sunk cost fallacy over a failed popular uprising that primarily had the effect of taking the pro-Russian demographic out of the Ukrainian electorate and accelerating Ukraine's political reorientation from wanting to to be a part of the European Union but militarily neutral to the most anti-Russian demographic this side of Poland.
NovaRussia was a Russian strategic blunder in the great power competition year before the Ukraine War turned the Russian military into a mid-cold war army and made the Russians synonymous with cope cages for years to come.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Furthermore furthermore, it's a basic known fact of history that great powers who repeatedly attack their neighbors drive their neighbors into alliance groups by their own hostility, and that if the goal is to not drive neighbors into hostile alliance groups, a great power should not result to repeated armed interventions. Russia was indeed extremely unhappy that its former subjects feared it like a battered wife might fear a drunken Husband, and yet Russia continued to attempt to coerce and threaten and hit its former subjects into compliance.
This is, in strategic lexicon, an 'own goal.'
Furthermore furthermore furthermore, it's an even more basic strategic principle that great powers who pick stupid wars get stupid prizes. The eras of empires of conquest ended years ago not merely because most of the Europeans realized it was morally abhorrent, but also because it was economically and militarily ruinous due to the technologies (that russian enabled and widely spread) for cost-effective resistance. The ability of minor powers to disproportionately hit back against an invader so long as they were willing to fight and had foreign support was the hallmark of many of the wars of the Cold War, and Russia's belief that they would be greeted as liberators was as stupid for them as it was for the Americans in Iraq.
Or perhaps even more stupid. The Americans were initially welcomed by the Shia, but then stuck around and tried to stop the follow-on civil war that was initially ignorring them. The Russians planned to have torture facilities and kill lists from the start.
Regardless, I return to a long-stood by claim that appeals to strategic principles are misaimed when it comes to Russia, because Putin has demonstrated his strategic incompetence for over a decade at this point.
since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Which I do not for the same reason that you don't want to admit the rather inconvenient but uncontested context of Yanukovych's departure: that he was not escorted out of the country by the military or security forces, but rather fled before he could be arrested and tried for crimes against the nation after the military and broader security forces refused orders to follow along in shooting civilians in the streets after he granted himself the power and began to do so without legislative consent while his government executed a sniper campaign to justify the crackdown.
No one in the 'it was a coup!' camp ever really addresses what the level of impeachable conduct is that might warrant a legislature moving against an executive without being a coup, but in other contexts they generally concede that the executive granting themselves the right to shoot their political opponents at foreign behest typically qualifies as a legitimate rather than illegal basis for removing a president.
Dean
3d ago
Rebuilding doesn't take that long.
Militarily? It certainly can. An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build, and much of Russia's institutional experience was razed and the current crop have been resorting to much lower-level operational designs than previously done- the current generation of new direct leaders is going to have to unlearn trench infantry tactics to relearn actual Russian manevuer warfare doctrine. Similarly, building up a cold war's worth of artillery ammunition stockpiles took the Soviets literal decades, and the Russians don't have the Soviet industrial base to do so with.
Military hardware wise, also yes, in various categories. The Russian production rates of aircraft are, well, bad, and while the drone economy is a booming, it doesn't exactly enable the sort of deep-strike operations that Russia started the war off with. The naval losses will take a similarly long time to build. And while Russia can absolutely bring out raw numbers of reactivated obsolescent tanks to pad the numbers, this is the reminder that they weren't even able to get a meaningful production run of the Armata before it went back behind the lines to hide out the war. Any production run of modern tanks will be from a much deeper pit than they hadn't gotten out of before they started digging themselves into the war.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry. It's been struggling for awhile, and appears to be cratering to a bare select few clients since, especially as the Russians have had clear trouble both honoring various contracts in favor of supplying their own forces. Given both the role that Russian arms exports plays in its foreign policy, and the long trail times for being displaced, one of the key Russian funding models for managing the costs of the industry is going out the window, with the longer it's out the worse it will be. Russia's ability to rebuild its arms market share is... probably dead, as people with needs will have gone elsewhere, and people with resources will have more promising partners to work with. Rather than the post-cold-war T-72 sales and such, expect Russia to be one of many drone providers, a much less lucrative and much more crowded market.
Dean
3d ago
Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.
It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.
The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.
However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.
Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.
Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.
Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.
All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.
More in the short term, less in the long term.
In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.
On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.
As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).
This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.
Are you, “… uh … ”, aware that America and Israel have funded insurgency groups in Iran’s backyards for more than a decade now?
Considering how I posted multiple times over the years on various external supporters for groups in the Syrian Civil War, sure.
Just as you are no doubt aware that Iran was supporting insurgency and terrorist groups to attack its geopolitical enemies for decades before the Syrian Civil War, and as such the Israeli/US involvement in the Syrian civil war was neither the instigating factor nor the basis for Iran adopting such a tactic.
Groups that went on to kill civilians in Iran?
Per your own citation excerpt- and what's not hidden behind a subscription wall- the groups supported by Israel did not, but rather had members who defected to other groups, which were not being funded or directed by the US or Israel to do such.
In fact, the correlation in the citation- of group members who defected to the Islamic State- is a notable contrast with the policy purpose- which was for groups to fight the Islamic State and keep it from the Israeli borders. While a conflation of groups is indeed a convenient and common policy to try an critique Israeli and US policy in Syrai, as far as the policy purpose of 'funding insurgency groups', the rather clear purpose here is not 'to attack Iran.'
Now, while there is certainly an argument to be made for responsibility for unintended/undesired consequences of policy, that argument would be far broader and also self-incriminating to Iran itself given the influence it and its proxies had in kickstarting ISIS. Which, while interesting, negates any real relevance to why Iran is supplying and helping direct hundreds of missile strikes into Israel over the last 6 months, and why that context shouldn't be relevant to why a country might retaliate to that.
Iran is no more responsible for Hezbollah as Israel is to the insurgent terrorist groups that attack them domestically.
If Israel were to arm and direct insurgent terrorist groups for the purpose of attacking Iran to the degree that tens of thousands of Iranians were displaced by conflict, they would indeed be deemed responsible by most reasonable persons.
Now, unless you intend to argue that Iran is to be deemed less responsible for what it has done than Israel is to be in your hypothetical, I'm pleased to see we have a consensus that Iran is no more, and no less, and indeed just as responsible as Israel would be were Israel to pursue an equivalent policy of provocation.
Now, as Israel did not pursue such a policy, but Iran has and is...
Dean
1d ago
That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.
Dean
1d ago
What's your ingroup?
Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.
And yet, far less so than ignoring nuclear weapons as a deterrent for invasion.
The argument that Russia was not under threat from the US axis is not made on the basis that the US wouldn't if it could beat Russia in a conventional war- not least because nothing about the Ukraine war changed the underlying reality of Russia's conventional deficit vis-a-vis the US and has only made it worse- but rather that beating Russia in a nuclear war wouldn't be worthwhile when the cost is measured not in divisions, but cities.
The Russian national security argument for invading Ukraine has always fallen to the point that it does not change the actual nuclear balance of power against the US in any conflict, and that it has been nuclear deterrence that Russia had, and all those others have not.
Dean
5d ago
...you, uh, are aware that Iranian-aligned and supplied groups have been shooting rockets into northern Israel for months now, right? Like, well into the hundreds of rockets. To a degree that 60,000 Israelis were mandatorily evacuated from parts of northern Israel due to the ongoing campaign.
And you are aware that one of the main groups doing so, Hezbollah, is regionally seen and understood as an Iranian proxy-ally, with significant degrees of coordination / support / direct armaments?
And you are aware that the primary agency of Iran that conducts this coordination/arming is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose commander was the one targeted in the strike?
This is really not a mystery. Iran has been participating in the Gaza conflict for several months. It has been directly instrumental in its efforts to expand the conflict to a second front in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which it has been arming and coordinating with via its positions Syria. It's not even the first effort to cause a multi-front war, which date to the start of the conflict.
The metaphor of kicking a hornet's nest relies on the implicit pre-state that the hornets are not already out and trying to sting you.
Dean
1d ago
Among other things-
-Basically no one in the world has as artillery-centric an army as the Russians, and the implications of drones and precision munitions to throttle artillery at scale mean no one else is going to want to due to the logistical throttling they enable. Russia is using artillery in its current fashion to brute-force the offense because that's what it has on hand and can procure the ammo for, not because the artillery is doing more than alternative investments would have. Even Russia post-war is far more likely to focus on drone power expansion and precision munitions than restocking dumb rounds by the billions.
-Drone and aerial siege warfare is atypical because Russia has benefited from a political, not practical, barrier that wouldn't apply in NATO conflicts. The Russians have, for example, benefited greatly from having air-standoff superiority and both in terms of air-delivered munitions and for being able and willing to use drones to target civil infrastructure while their enemies wouldn't. The Russians would not have the former in a NATO conflict, and the later one-sided nature is due to the restrictions NATO countries impose on the Ukrainians, not restrictions NATO countries impose on themselves. A great deal of Russia's economic-destruction warfare siege alternatively would not work (heavy glide bombs) or would not be unilateral advantages in the economic struggle (infrastructure targetting), but it's the 'what worked' of the current generation.
-The current war has underscored the importance of small short wars rather than long large wars to advance the national interest. Russia is continuing the war primarily because Putin made a series of strategic mistakes most countries do not make, and then doubled down on personal reasons. However, even Putin had aimed and intended a small short war, and the contrast to the long, expensive war that has lost Russia a multitude of strategic assets (military and otherwise) will drive home a lesson to planners in Russia and abroad to limit the scope of future conflicts of choice. However, the operational experience of the Russians in Ukraine will be precisely the opposite, as the small-nimble BTGs were destroyed and grinding attritional slog is what was inefficient but effective.
-The nuclear deterrence modeling and level of economic depence between relevant parties is atypical in general. Most conflicts, and most of Russia's more likely conflicts, are not cases where a nuclear-umbrella power is backing a non-nuclear state being invaded by a nuclear power. Most countries also don't have the backers of one party be economically dependent on imports from the opposing belligerent. Both of these factors significantly shaped the Western support for Ukraine, but either of these factors could easily change in both general conflicts and for Russian conflicts in particular (not least because Europe chose a strategic break from the Russian economic dependence).
A more typical conflict with correct lessons would include... probably not doing this at all, but at the very least a more precision-munition dependent strategy, smaller scope and scale, an emphasis on rapid movement rather than trench warfare, and not relying on nuclear/economic deterence against external backers of the opponent.
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't overthrown?
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't fleeing the country rather than being procedurally removed from office for granting himself the authority to shoot not only the supporters of his political opponents but also the supporters of his unity government partners that he brought into his own government, at the direct pressure of the foreign government that he fled to after his own party loyalists didn't want to conduct a bloodbath?
And are we going to pretend that giving yourself authority to shoot political opponents in the streets without legislative support wouldn't drive legislature retaliation against an Executive clearly bowing to foreign government pressure and incentives?
I am as familiar with the Yanukovych coup narratives as you, and probably a bit more familiar with various political events during Euromaidan, including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Perhaps you'd like to raise the protestor-sniper theories that justified the claim to shoot-to-kill authorities, which I might counter with the state sniper evidence and various security service suspect defections to Russia in the investigations after? Or perhaps you want to make the position that the protestors had no right to protest against the sovereign right of the government to join the Eurasian Union economic association, after Yanukovych made a rather abrupt about face on the already-sovereign-agreed to European Union association agreement that was followed by Russian pressure and incentive campaigns? Maybe you'd like to retreat to the defense of Eastern Russo-phile suppression of the Russian speakers, who were so uninterested in joining in the Russian novarussia campaign that the Russian millitary had to directly intervene to keep the separatist republics from collapsing?
Come now, there's so much history we can banter on!
Dean
3d ago
Eh. I don't intend to challenge your feelings / say that your enjoyment was in any way wrong, but I feel ME1's writing was in many respects emblematic of the problems the trilogy had a hole, which is to say a clear lack of planning.
In RPGs like Mass Effect, the 'critical path' refers to the series of must-make choices that the player cannot avoid. Sidequest choices may never be seen if you don't take a side quest, but you can't complete the main story and reach the sequel without the critical path. And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
And there was no plan- as seen in how ME2 picked up these choices- for what would follow if you actually killed someone (in several contexts, literally no content vis-a-vis a cameo of the surviving person), even as at the same time anyone who could be killed could no longer be relevant to the plot. As soon as you had the option to kill Wrex, every story arc Wrex could touch if he survived had to be carried forward if he was dead (because game development resources are limited if you weren't the Witcher 2 of the era), and this applied to everyone and everything. Later ME started to learn that not all choices needed to kill people off to suggest a difference- ME Andromeda actually had a good dynamic for its planets, like what sort of hive and scum and villainy would be the criminal underworld's dominant player- but from the start, ME1 didn't know how to build a choice structure to provide meaningful content contrasts. Especially with a penchant for choices too big to mutually co-exist as narrative drivers: the hyper-expansive rachni could only matter as much as they could exist in a narrative where they didn't exist at all, while the saved Council and the all-Human council could only lead to the same general location. No understanding that bigger choices aren't better.
Nor did it really understand how to do an ideology-morality system. Paragon was internally consistent in ME1- just defer to the Council when it's not literally the end of galactic civilization- but Renegade was just a mess. It couldn't decide whether it was human-first, Council-skeptic, xenophobic, utilitarian, sociopathic, or if it could tell a difference between them all. ME2 got even worse, as it would have the same argument positions flip sides of the morality wheel in the same conversation, but ME1 was the one to get to define a morality curve, and it couldn't.
I do agree that the writing strictly went downhill immediately after- the second game spent about a third of the trilogy introducing or reintroducing a character cast who could be dead by the end of it (thus guaranteeing they couldn't be plot-carrying characters for a game that didn't move forward the meta-plot)- and the ending of the trilogy is practically a case study for why you need to know how your story will end from the start so that you can work towards it.
Black sheep opinion as it is, but from a writing perspective my favorite games of the series were not quite ME3- which aside from the ending was actually quite solid as an apocalypse story- but actually Andromeda. While I fully accept and respect people who didn't like Andromeda's choice of tone for being campy, and the mechanical issues in presentation were real, the writing was trying to be both a deliberate sort of campy and a 'new introduction' spiritual reboot, and I honestly thought it worked better at that than ME1 did. There was enough deviations so that it was a spiritual reboot rather than a clone, even as it wrote itself out of the corner that the ME trilogy painted itself into with choices too big to ever properly reflect. Andromeda was much more judicious with its choices, leaning more on emotional relevance than 'massive geopolitical differences'- the sort of thing like which person is the hero-figure to a nation, rather than whether the nation would die or not- and these were things that were much better set up for being reflected in a sequel than the ME trilogy did. As far as writing for a trilogy, it was much better founded.
But, alas, it seems the next one will be in the Milky Way.
Dean
3d ago
And he tried exercising it to find more amicable solutions to the problem. That's what the Minsk Accords were.
The Minsk Accords were many things- including the functional erosion of national sovereignty by legislating an external power's veto by proxy- but an amicable solution they were not.
Why was the west encouraging Ukraine behind the scenes to give Russia a run around, while the west poured arms into the country to bolster its strength so the government could betray the terms of their agreement?
Why wouldn't the west encourage Ukraine not to submit to unreasonable Russian demands that the Russians knew were unreasonable and would not be accepted, while bolstering the ability to resist the military coercion that pushed the demands in the first place?
The demands were unreasonable, and were made at the end of a military intervention. Europeans, as with many other cultures, tend not to support those things against their neighbors lest it be applied to them.
What else could they do? Israel bombs their consulate and kills their people.
They could credibly signal they intend to no longer actively engage in proxy warfare and distance themselves from their proxies. They won't, but they could.
Israel bombed the Iranian consulate because the Iranian asymetric warfare commander who has been organizing a multi-month bombardment campaign of Northern Israel was at the consulate, where he was quite likely in the business of facilitating further bombardments because that literally was part of his job. Everyone with an understanding of the region understood that context as soon as the Iranians publicized and admitted it was the IRGC Commander, and that as such this was not a tit-for-tat provocation stand-alone incident where Iran was responding to an Israeli kinetic instigation, but a tat-for-tit-for-tat cycle where Iran would be responding to an Israeli response.
The difference is significant- and telling in how the Arab states responded- as the difference between responding to a response versus responding to an instigating response is that any game cyclic equilibrium will look at the response of the response for indications on whether the cycle will continue. People who believe that an Iranian non-response would be perceived as cowardliness and Israel believing it can act with impunity aren't familiar with the region. The accusations could come regardless- how Iran chose to respond is indicative of how it intends to continue with the policies that provoked the Israeli retaliation.
Dean
3d ago
I don't know how well read you are on the history of what happened...
Ah, I see we are going to play the pretend we don't know game, such as--
Seems we both agree at the outset that he was democratically elected, do we not? His overthrow was explicitly supported by the US and it's allies.
-that US support for Yanukovych stepping down followed Yanukovych starting to process of shooting protestors in the streets with government snipers.
Are you not aware that there was even leaked audio of Victoria Nuland and the Ukraine's Ambassador that revealed deliberate planning of his overthrow?
Oh, hey, called it-
including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
NATO was never a European alliance of 'peace', it's an alliance that's aimed at destabilizing Eastern Europe, with the intention to weaken Russia
While this certainly nails your flag high, it doesn't really establish your awareness with Euromaiden-
Do forgive a homie for challenging American imperialism unipolarity.
-or that, as far as challening American imperialism unipolarity, Ukraine was such an own-goal by Russia.
This whole quagmire has absolutely zero to do with high minded moral idealism against the Next Hitler, who at the same time the media tells us is losing, running out of gas, is out of ammunition, is incompetent beyond belief; and simultaneously is preparing for world domination and his next target is going to be Poland or Scandinavia. It has everything to do with continued projecting of American and western geopolitical dominance across the planet.
Yawn. Like I said, I'd rather you build a competent historical metaphor, not your naval gazing. If your media is telling us Putin is Next Hitler, or running out of gas, or out of ammunition, pick better media, not other trash.
Dean
4d ago
I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
Whoah. I was just about to bring up Mass Effect as an example of popular bad sci-fi. Not simply for its ending, but from structural design perspective (a terribly managed/planned trilogy structure that led to the ending), an inability to stick to character arcs (many reoccuring characters flip from their initial story arcs to fit into the narrative / character appeal niches as needed), it's heavy power fantasy dynamic verging into sycophantism, the tendency to emotionally heal traumatized women by boning them, and so on. A good enough contrarian could even write an amusing spiel on it's fascistic themes and narrative style (though admittedly most who do aren't good enough to pull it off).
Dean
4d ago
Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.
For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-
The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).
-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-
Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.
In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.
Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.
Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.
But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.
Doesn't make for strange bedfellows when you understand the Minsk Accords mandated a similar relationship to Ukraine that the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period,
Which was not an amicable solution to negotiations, but a compulsory surrender punctuated by more than one nuclear weapon after years of unrestricted submarine warfare against an island that needed to import resources and firebombing of cities made of wood and paper... after the receiving country had launched a series of unprovoked invasions and a litany of warcrimes across the region.
The Minsk Accords were, again, many things, but the Pacific Campaign of WW2 they were not.
which remains today.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Also, the Russians aren't interested in dismantling a warmongering oligarchy as much as installing one.
Dean
3d ago
...?
By contrast, the power of Borris Johnson to coerce, compel, bewitch, or otherwise overturn the true desires of the Ukrainian political establishment was...?
Dean
5d ago
Which was also state terrorism.
Unless it was for the purpose of terror, especially against civilians, for political purposes, it really wasn't.
State terrorism isn't a catch-all term for any sort of lethal activity done by a state, or even illegal actions. And that, in turn, turns to the legality when a party is a military target.
If you want to make an international law argument of it, international laws of conflict absolutely do allow for the deliberate targeting of military commanders, which Soleimani and Zahedi were, of belligerent parties, which the IRGC is and has been.
If we're going to go the route of "political assassinations are okey-dokey", then you can't object to foreign countries attempting to assassinate American political and military figures on American soil.
There's never been a legal objection to parties in conflict killing eachother in the course of armed conflict. It's curious you think that is a retort.
Ultimately international law exists to regulate conflicts between nations by the mutual agreement of said nations, and the derivative force behind this is reciprocity, not external enforcement. The flip side is that if Country A attempts to assassinate Country B military and political figures, Country A doesn't get to claim any defense when struck back... and in this context, Iran has a long history of assassinating political and military figures, as well as targeting civilian targets.
The Americans killed Soleimani because Soleimani was involved in the business of killing Americans. Likewise, the Israelis killed Zahedi because Zahedi was in the business of killing Israelis. Under the laws of armed conflict- which do not require that either beligerrent declare a state of war- that made them legitimate military targets.
Unless you deny that the states involved were in a state of armed conflict- which is not prevented simply due to Iran working through proxies- that would make them valid military targets under the international laws of war. The same laws of war are constructed in such a way that when a valid military target moves into a location protected by laws of armed conflict, that location is no longer protected due to having a valid military target.
Ultimately, international law for armed conflicts is not nice, and does not have an 'It's okey-dokey for me to hit you, but no hit backs' requirement. States may voluntarily choose to refrain from retaliating militarily, but they are under no obligation to.
Dean
4d ago
The Jack romance certainly ends with a lovers relationship, and her romance is the only one where she makes meaningful emotional healing and interpersonal progression in ME2. Miranda is uniquely characterized as smiling in a way she never did before and is also only able to have a healthy emotional relationship solely if Shepard is the one to provide it (with their dick). Kelly Chambers, in so much as that one qualifies, resolves it's emotional catharsis by having her do stripper dances in your room after she was kidnapped, locked into a pod, and nearly turned into bio-goop. Tali is much less emotionally traumatized, but certainly emotionally questionable given that she risks death itself for the sake of the Shepard bone out of a mix of captain-crushing hero crush (and the fact that you covered up her father's cultural war crimes).
Ashley... is a more mature frank attraction in ME1, but Ashely's character arc also jumps to the point that the tomboy not-a-model gets a major model glow up come ME3, so who knows there.
Did you even read the content of the article?
Yup. And I even noticed it wasn't by the American State Department, whose own words you were claiming to link to, and then tried to defend not referring to in favor of a detractor's take before taking issue for positions not being accurately reflected.
The article was less interesting than the irony, and not particularly relevant to the post the citation was meant to refute.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
A common mistake you make, I'm sure.
Lol. Okay.
Okay indeed.
Now, would you like to drop further points to a more defensible motte, or just try one more time for a last word? There aren't many more positions left for you to abandon in the face of challenge, but I doubt I'll see more than a downvote.
Given that Ukrainian opinions on European Union affiliation were a matter of public record, it certainly would be a far reach to deny that the EU was popular for the Ukrainians.
Just as the political controversy of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot protestors after public Russian pressure was also a well-apparent fact at the time. Just a mite consequential, when your own government is composed of people backed by those protestors.
But feel free to fluff up the American importance in things that weren't really about the Americans. I understand they feel insecure these days, and it makes both them and their haters feel better if they're the hyperagents in a Ukrainian political movement literally named after the Euro.
The US was not exactly thrilled by hostile forces extending their influence into its hemisphere during the Cold War (or any other time really), especially the forward basing of missiles. It's expected that great powers will try to avoid this.
It's also expected that Russia can read a map and is aware that it is already in the position regardless of Ukraine- so invading Ukraine to keep it out of NATO doesn't change the missile threat, and thus does not serve as a sensible rational. If NATO wanted to place missiles in range of Moscow, they don't need Ukraine to do so.
Likewise, it's also well known that the US is in range of Russian missile bases in... Russia. Russia gets no nuclear posture advantage by advancing nuclear bases into Ukraine.
The Cuban Missile Crisis logic stopped making any sort of strategic sense within two decades of it happening. The US did not need to maintain nuclear missiles in Turkey for the sake of ranging Russia, and the Russians did not need missiles based in Cuba to range the US. ICBMs and SLBMs largely rendered the role of IRBMs irrelevant, which is why they were an easy-to-negotiate away weapon in the nuclear arms control treaties as a trust-building measure.
Sensors and missiles based in Ukraine are relevant to nuclear warfare, as are Ukraine's claims to Donbass and Crimea.
Not really. The sensors and missiles that can nuke Russia can do so from the continental united states and orbit. The nuclear deterrence argument continues to fail because the technology levels involved are not the 1950s or 60s or even 70s.
If you want to argue that Ukraine is the key to a potential NATO nuclear decapitation strike of Russia, you need to establish what Ukraine brings to the table that the Baltic countries don't... and why Russia's second-strike deterrent capability only works in the invade-Ukraine scenario but not in the other.
It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
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