Dean
5hr ago
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
Do you have links to this polling?
While there's nothing I know of that can't be dismissed if you really want to, this is probably the best / most current public polling that covers this subject.
This is Feb 24 polling conducted by CISR - the Center for Insights in Survey Research- which is the research arm of IRI - the International Republican Institute - which is a non-profit funded by the US government- with this specific research funded by USAID. That does mean it's US-govt funded research, but IRI isn't a US government organ as such- it's actually part of a pair of organizations, with its counterpart being the NDI (National Democratic Institute)- with the board members of each respective organization being drawn from the American Republican and Democratic parties respectively, making it a govt-funded partisan research organization of sorts. That makes it close enough to the US government if you want to insist anything that US government funding touches is propaganda, but it's (a) Republican party propaganda during a period where Republicans as an institution are far from aligned with the US government position on Ukraine, and (b) that's not reason enough to reject all data. The IRI (and similar institutions) may have interests, but they also have an interest in understanding the data to support further policy creation, and aren't exactly organs who present data to drive public policy. Pick fights over the data methodology if you'd like...
...which is described on page 2, with demographics on page 3. Computer-assisted telephonic survey, n = 2000 Ukrainians, nearly 900 men vs 1100 women, response rate of 14% until they got the 2000, etc. etc. Responses are broken down by gender / age, but also by regional breakdowns, but not necessarily gender & age breakdowns. (You'd probably need to request access to the research data directly for more nuanced breakdowns.)
In other words, typical telephonic polling with typical telephonic polling strengths and weaknesses. Sufficiently motivated people will find excuses to reject it, but in lieu of alternative more authoritative polling data, it can serve as a ballpark.
Now for what you're most interested in, go to page 22, 'How do you feel about the current level of mobilization in Ukraine'. (Remember that conscription is functionally synonymous with mobilization as mobilization is just the euphism treadmill for the process provided by conscription.)
If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
It doesn't show that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented- because it actually shows a plurality of Ukrainian men in Ukraine believe there isn't enough conscription (36%) with almost as many believing the current level of mobilization is just right (31%), while only 17% of men believe there is too much.
While there's a notable age bias implicit in that- with about 30% of under-30s (male and female) believing there is too much mobilization compared to 10% of the too-old-for-conscription 60+ pops- even the under-30 bracket is decisively in favor of as-much-or-more mobilization (65% to 29%). The next 3 conscriptable brackets are even more decisively in favor of the current level of mobilization or more, with 'we need more mobilization' increasing as you go up the age bracket, and 'too much mobilization' decreasing as you go older as well.
Does this mean that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription 'as implemented'? Well, 50-stalins criticism is still criticism. And someone interested in cross-linguistic semantic quibling, there's things you can quibble on.
But there's also an interesting question that was posed, shown on slide 51, which is rather relevant to the conscription-is-unpopular / the most important thing is Ukrainian lives / the West is forcing Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian arguments.
Q: If Ukraine is only able to accomplish one of the following objectives, which do you think is the most important for our country to achieve? "Freezing the conflict at the present lines to stop the loss of more Ukrainian lives" is... 19%.
Which is, admittedly, ahead of full EU membership (11%), but also behind full NATO membership (23%), and less than half (39%) of the dominant answer of what Ukrainians think is the most important objective.
Full-scale war to recapture all lands included in the 1991 borders.
They don't think that's going to be quick or easy, either.
People who think the Ukrainians are war-weary reluctants forced to fight against their will by western powers are woefully unaware. The Ukraine War is a war of nationalism, and the Ukrainians are nuts.
Dean
1d ago
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
I find it interesting in another direction, such as why you believe it's a foregone conclusion, as opposed to a dismissed propaganda narrative that outran its legs.
We have numbers to use, and the war attrition of the Ukraine War is nowhere near that Ukraine is being attrited to such a degree in population terms. The early-war narratives to that effect required the inclusion of the capture of major demographic centers in the east during the early war and projected that forward, but in the time sense Russia hasn't captured the demographics previously associated with the territory, and the combat attrition rates- even factoring in some of the more incredible Russian claims- are nowhere near enough to warrant a demographic-level narrative. Ukraine may be struggling with the manpower to resist the russian manpower, but that's a balance of scale and desire to mobilize available population, not running out of population.
This also turns on the motte-and-bailey of what negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict entails. The Russian terms from the start of the conflict- including the narrative that the West forced Ukraine to cancel a near-deal- have consistently been terms that were, shall we say, not conducive to a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, as opposed to obvious set-ups for a fourth continuation war to greater Russian advantage by demanding dismantling of Ukraine's means to resist any future invasion and providing Russia a veto over any external support in case of a future Russian invasion. The Russians have been rather consistent on that front, and have further expanded their claims since, and so it generally falls on the advocates of a negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict as to argue as to how the Russian position is compatible with a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, which itself was the third unprovoked continuation war in a decade.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
Why would you feel it's hellishly dystopian, when it's a positively banal part of the international system and has been for longer than you've been alive? As long as you claim citizenship of Country X, you have reciprocal obligations with country X, and while countries Y-Z often don't go along in enforcing other countries laws regarding those obligations, they often practice similar practices. This ranges from conscription- I've personally met Koreans who left Ivy League colleges to serve their service time- to taxation abroad, to extradition treaties, and so on.
Conscription is not some international abnormality, and neither is it being gender-restricted. If a normality comes off as dystopian, that implies more about the standard of dystopia than the nature.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
If you lack numbers of draft dodgers to make any judgement on relative numbers, why would you believe the conflict is being sustained by Western pressure as opposed to authentic homegrown opinion? Especially when you already have access to now years of Ukrainian opinion polling by a multitude of actors that go beyond Ukrainian capacity to control?
It's not exactly impossible to do polling in Ukraine without Ukrainian government approval, and the polling efforts that survive scrutiny are generally consistent. Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
I'm more curious as to what you think the alleged Western pressure on the Ukrainians to keep fighting is. Typically that refers to the early 2022 breakdown of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which actors claimed were 'close to agreement', but reporting on actual contents of the negotiations include revealed rather significant gaps in position like-
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).
And included Russians provisions like-
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.
I don't think anyone has seriously argued that refusing terms like these requires external pressure, given the rather logical implications for one's prospects for a peaceful future if the current invader insists that they must agree to any international assistance to you in case they invade again after you dismantle your means to resist.
Given that the current Ukraine War is at least the third continuation war in a decade after the occupation of Crimea (the first continuation war being the NovaRussia campaign that was intended to start a mass uprising, and the second continuation war being the conventional Russian military intervention to preserve the enclaves as separatists when the NovaRussia campaign failed), peace talks really do have to address the prospects of future wars, and not treat the current war as one in isolation. Especially as multiple Russian claims as to why their invasion was justified would retain for future use would not be resolved in any near-term ceasefire.
Dean
1d ago
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
Dean
1d ago
Thanks!
Ye are welcome.
I didn't realize it had gotten that bad in the last few decades. I'd assumed that the Israeli left had come up with a different vision, but it sounds like they never did?
There's always going to be different visions, but there's also a reason that Israeli politics over the last several years began to center around removing Netanyahu as an individual than on the security front. Even in that the Left is damaged goods in that while Netanyahu is almost certainly corrupt, there's nothing particularly partisan-unique about it. Olmert, the guy who was PM for 2006-2009 as sort of the last gasp of the Israeli left, was under corruption prosecution and convicted in a prolonged chain of events that lasted until 2017, making that a non-contrast per see.
Ultimately, the Israeli left's different vision on the security front has always been the importance of the Two State solution both as a matter of appropriateness, as an argued necessity for normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world, and as key to maintaining relations with the West. However, there again history and the right did no favors: Oct 7 dissuades that a truly autonomous Palestinian polity wouldn't use said autonomy to attack, and one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma. Which leaves the claim of being necessary to maintain relations with the west, which is a fair bit more contentious and starts going into your perspective of the effectiveness of the Israel lobbying and Palestinian protest movements in the West especially since Oct 7.
I'd heard talk about Netanyahu being unpopular and his coalition being shaky, prior to Oct 7, but from what you say it doesn't seem like there's anything coherent that could replace him? It's just "stomp hard" or "stomp harder"... :-(
Before or after 7 October?
Before 7 October, the argument was (and still is) that Netanyahu was preventing the two state solution from solving the issue, so the alternative was to re-commit to the two state solution process. This was just part of the host of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which included the 'I'm strong on defense but not as corrupt' alternative, the 'Israel should be more secular' perspective, and so on. But no, there was no particular coherent alternative on, say, the West Bank issue, where the politics and the various military / strategic / ideological rationals for the settlements have their own mass and inertia in Israeli politics, but the left wasn't going to do a unilateral withdrawal after how the much smaller Gaza strip worked out.
After 7 October, the main differentiating question is what to do with the Gaza Strip after anti-Hamas operations conclude, which itself is going to depend on what specific context they conclude under. There is anything from outright military occupation, to turning it back over to the PLO eventually, to a multinational security force to keep the peace. There are downsides to all of these, but I also don't believe there's anything coherent enough to match a left/right divide, not least because it's still not clear what context the war will end in.
Dean
1d ago
I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.
There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.
Dean
1d ago
It's kind of an old conventional wisdom at this point, but the basic point is that late last century, the Israeli right and left were significantly divided by the question of how to deal with the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli left was discredited when withdrawal from militarily occupying Gaza led to its takeover and militarization by Hamas, ruining the Israeli-left security policy that peace could be achieved by making unilateral concessions to the Palestinians in the name of peace.
For a more extended version-
When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future. This is what happened with the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt, but for various reasons did not happen with the other territories.
Said reasons variously involved the fracturing of Pan-Arabism and the growing divides between the Palestinians and regional Arab states.
During the early cold war pan-arabism was a movement for a common Arab state which even saw some states voluntarily try to associate/join eachother, but ultimately inter-elite disagreements and the shocks of the Arab-Israeli wars fractured that movement to the point that Egypt, which had been one of the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement earlier, refused to take the Gaza Strip when it regained the Sinai as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Egyptian position was that it's refusal was because it had never held Gaza as part of Egypt before the war, but a not-uncommon belief is that this was because Egypt didn't want the trouble of governing gaza / having to deal with the Palestinians / it made a useful thorn in Israel's side.
In the West Bank, Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank (which it had previously annexed) in the aftermath of the Black September civil war, when the PLO (who was present in Israeli-occupied Israel as well as Jordan) attempted to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. The Kingdom of Jordan won that, but the PLO remained in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in 1974, the Arab Leage recognized the PLO- and not Jordan- as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and compelled Jordan to recognize a Palestinian independent of Jordan. Jordan would later formally renounce claims in 1988, as part of cutting monetary expenditures and dissolving a lower house of legislature that was half composed of constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, i.e. Palestinians. Jordan and Israel would go on to establish relations in 1994, without needing any sort of concession of the West Bank back to Jordan, who it had been captured from in the first war.
What this meant is that come the 90s, when the Cold War was ending and there was no US-Soviet context to the middle east conflict, Israel had achieved peace with its immediate neighbors it had conquered Palestinian territory from, without having actually to trade back Palestinian territory as part of the deal. However, this peace between states wasn't the same as peace: the First Intifada at about the 20 year anniversary of the 1967 war in 1987-1990 was years of violence / murders / increased unrest, and it was clear that it could happen again. As a result, Israeli politics shifted to a question of how to resolve the Palestinian issue. This was the... not start, but how the Two State solution took new life in the post-Cold War environment, with the Left and the Right disagreeing on how to approach it, or whether even if it should.
An oversimplification of this is that the Israeli left was vehemently onboard with the two state solution, and more associated with making compromises- or even unilateral concessions- to advance negotiations. The Israeli right was far more skeptical, alternatively wanting terms that would functionally limit Palestinian sovereignty in their own state (no military allowed, right for Israeli incursion against groups attacking from Palestinian soil) or not wanting to have to do it at all. Then there was how settler politics played into both parties, as settlers were both a way to secure territory that might not have to be returned due to changing facts on the ground (the Israeli right), but also a bargaining chip that could be traded away at the negotiating table (the Israeli left), and of course an actor in their own right.
The so-what here is that in the late 90s, the Israeli left had an politically ascendant moment. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party came into office, at the same time that Bill Clinton was still in office, and they were relatively like-minded enough to put together the Camp David Summit... whose failure was one of the triggering events for the Second Intifada. The exact reasons why it failed are subject to dispute / position / your belief on what Yasser Arafat could actually deliver on behalf of the PLO, but from a more common Israeli perspective, this was a sincere effort with politically-damaging offers at the sort of land-swaps that had been a functional base of negotiations for a good while, and it not only failed, but it blew up into another 5 years of violence.
Part of what ended the 5 years of violence was the Israeli-PLO Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005, where President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority- the same Abbas still in power today- had assumed power from Arafat. And this was in part because not only had Arafat died in 2004- and so robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its unifying figures- but in 2004 the Israelis had also done a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
While the Second Intifada was a blow to the credibility of the Israeli left, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is what I'd consider to have been the fatal blow to the Israeli left.
While it was conducted by Ariel Sharon- who at the time was part of the conservative/right-wing Likud party- it was so controversial a policy that Sharon's faction left Likud and established the central-liberal Kadima party, which attracted a number of the Labour party members as well. It was as such a policy that was identified with the left/center-left in spirit and practice, as not only was it's proponents the dominant leftist political force of the era, but it was a quid done for no quo. Israeli infrastructure was left behind, including things like greenhouses, and while for awhile it could have been argued that it set conditions for the cease fire the year after, which probably had something to do with Kadima's victory in 2006 to top the government- i.e. the political reward for ending the Second Intifada through good leftist political wisdom, bravery, and...
...and a year later, in 2007, Hamas completed its takeover of Gaza Strip after its own 2006 electoral victory by throwing PLO officials off of skyscrapers, and began a sustained rocket campaign into Israel. By January 2008, it was up to hundreds of rockets a month. The rocket campaign would more or less go on until the Gaza War of 2009-2010, after which the rockets... never went away, but were more varying, and a constant source of tension and unease. For as bad as the Intifada was, it wasn't that degree of regularity in rocket attacks on a weekly basis.
As a result, in Israeli politics, the Gaza Withdrawal became the political kryptonite of the left, a sort of feckless concession that made things worse. Prime Minister Netanyahu first assumed power in 2009 as a result of running on a tough-on-security policy, and ever since the decades of 1990s and 2000s have been the death knell of the Israeli left. After running and winning on the post-cold-war optimism of the 90s, the ideological basis of the leftest approach to Palestinian negotiation/conciliation was discredited. Not only were perceived-as-sincere offers of trades and concessions not only rejected but answered with an Intifada, but further unilateral concessions to amoliate even that only served to facilitate even more violence by even more dedicated partisans.
The Israeli left, associated with both conciliatory approach to the Palestinians (that visibly failed) and a commitment to a two-state solution lost a political generation as Netanyahu spun in power. In so much as they could define themselves still as an alternative to the right, the Israeli left was still defined by its commitment to a Two State solution, and thus as the respectable political faction that outsiders (like various US administrations) could like and work with...
And Oct 7 has rendered even that an albatross, because arguments for a two-state solution with the people who relished in their own ISIS-level brutality doesn't go down well with the electorate. For all that Netanyahu is unpopular and is unlikely to survive the death of his reputation as an effective security providor, Netanyahu is unpopular as a man. The two state solution is now unpopular as even an idea, and that is practically the most defining distinction of the Israeli left in some circles.
Or so the story goes. Perspectives and recollections may differ.
Dean
1d ago
There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.
Dean
6d 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.
Dean
6d ago
That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.
I'll disagree, and maintain my criticism of your previous post.
On one level, the charge of hyperagency / hypoagency framework isn't a strawman as I'm not saying it's the argument being made, it's what I am characterizing the argument's form as in a meta-contextual description. And I made this point- and stand by it- because the characterization of reasonings for why Ukraine would continue fighting was because Borris Johnson screamed at them- a pejorative framing with connotations of aggression by the screamer and victimhood/submission by the target who acquiesces to it in an imposition of will- rather than multiple extremely more relevant factors. Like, say, Borris Johnson communicating the intend of the UK government to continue supporting Ukraine, and thus allowing the Ukrainians to make a more informed choice as to whether continuing to fight or submitting to the current terms offered by the Russians was better.
When the only relevant factor provided for a party's decision making is another party's verbal harassment, this is an agency framework that reserves true agency to the person who is the true decision maker, and subordinates agency of the other. Were the other relevant factors included and a less pejorative framing used, then the Ukrainians would have been presented as making a choice: the Ukrainians could consider what the Russians demanded (conditions following an unprovoked invasion that increasing risk of a follow on invasions with even worse terms should Russia choose to fight a fourth continuation war to complete the cassus belli war goals that this negotiation did not provide them), versus prospects of fighting on with external support. That would be a choice, even if someone disagrees that it was the better choice. But submitting to screaming is not a choice- it is an imposition of someone else's will.
Similarly, and equally relevant, is the movement of the onus of negotiation failure to the US and UK rather than Russia. The US and UK did not move to put the Ukrainians in a position where war seemed the better than Russian terms- the Russians did, multiple times. The Russians did so by launching an unprovoked invasion on false pretenses (the false-flag attempts of Ukrainian provocations that were leaked before they even occured, the false narratives on the Ukrainian suppression of the Russian-speaking minorities), the Russians also did so by conducting massacres like the Bucha massacre that demonstrated how they would treat the Ukrainians from a position of occupation, and the Russians did so by demanding terms that would directly facilitate the future occupation of Ukraine via demands that would cripple Ukraine's ability to resist occupation in exchange for a cease fire that did not meet Russia's stated or underlying goals when it initiated this war. Additionally, the Russians put Ukraine in this position because the current Ukraine War is no less than the third Russian intervention in Ukraine in less than a decade, and each one of those was a Russian choice.
Attributing the geopolitical context the Ukrainians found themselves in to the US and UK, rather than the Russians, is another form of the hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that subordinates Russian agency- and thus responsibility for the situation- to the Americans and Brits. They are not responding to Russian agency to launch a second continuation war into Ukraine- rather, the Russian position and actions are treated as forces of natures that simply have to be dealt with pragmatically, and the US/UK actions are imposing an immoral choice on the Ukrainians instead. This is aligned with the previous choice of pejorative- Borris screaming- as the determinative factor, and that framework's issues with hyper- and hypo-agency.
Even framing the negotiations as 'the US and UK made war seem the best of all possible worlds' is a negation of the other parties agencies. The recent Afghan war quite nicely demonstrated that the US aid can't make people who don't want to fight actually fight- and thus it's not the agent as to why Ukrainians formed in the streets of Kyiv to make molotov cocktails in mass in the opening month rather than Ukrainians protesting against fighting the Russians like Putin thought would happen. Nor can the Americans dictate the other side of the table, the harms Russia could do in war. No one in the region is unfamiliar with what Grozny refers to, and the Russian treatment of temporarily occupied areas was already entering awareness. All the Americans could do is offer military support for the Ukrainians to fight if they already wanted to, they couldn't dictate the cost-perception of the Ukrainians continuing to fight.
But the Russians could- and did- both by the content of their negotiations and the conduct of their forces. I made a point a few years ago- I believe on the old site- that Bucha was a disaster for the Russians whose cost was nowhere near worth whatever benefit was perceived at the time, and this is why. Bucha was a demonstration of what the Russians were willing to do if in a position of military superiority, and Russian terms were to dismantle Ukraine's ability to resist a future incursion where it could be done again. The US did not put Ukraine in a position where future Buchas were an easily foreseeable consequence of avoiding the war at hand: Russia did. That Russia might continue to further areas by continuing this war did not change that Russia's alternatives were to set conditions for Russia to claim more more easily going forward. And the perception that Russia might fight a third continuation war in Ukraine, and thus diminishing the value of peace talks in this war that would make a fourth Russian intervention even easier, is solely a result of Russia's repeated choices.
Dean
7d 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.
I frame it as absurd to think the US was responsible for the Ukrainian point of view when there is no indication the Ukrainians changed positions at all, other than claims generally fronted by Russian-originated sources which had every incentive to claim that the onus of the war continuing was on the Americans / Brits.
Characterizing negotiations breakdown as a result of the UK 'screaming at them until they stopped,' as opposed to the Russians demanding terms that would have prevented the Ukrainians from pulling a similar defense of the country in the future even as Russian atrocities were being recognized, is a silly when put in the context of what the state of negotiations were when they ended, and thus also silly when said terms and contexts aren't being acknowledged.
That the US had any way of influencing Ukrainians is truism: that's a bar so low you have to dig to not walk over it. That the US influence (by proxy, no less) was the determining factor is an appeal to the hyperagency/hypoagency framework that's a consistent flaw in understanding international affairs and especially the Ukraine conflict, which for nearly a decade has been a consistent series of Putin's Russia not recognizing Ukrainian agency and trying to attribute responsibility for resistance on others.
Dean
8d ago
I offer you two choices.
On one hand, you can own it and start chanting variations of 'Germany Number 1!'
On the other hand, I invite you to Blame Canada.
Dean
8d 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.
Dean
8d ago
I do appreciate the disagreements, for what it's worth. You argue straight and clearly, and even if I remain stubborn, it tends to be the kind of disagreement that triggers some introspection.
I mean it as a compliment when I say the same in turn. You are among the posters here who I've bookmarked simply to see what you're commenting on, simply because even when I disagree I appreciate having to justify to myself why. (I do try not to argue with you on anything I spot from your page directly, though. That would be creepy!)
And in any case laughing at my jokes will always trump disagreement.
Lol!
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day,
True, but perhaps not in the way many think.
Ironically, one of the back-channel complaints from the US in that time was a frustration with the Germans in particular for doing so much to set conditions for Euromaidan, but then dropping the ball and refusing to take any leadership role in negotiations on behalf of Europe despite being one of the key backers of the foundational infrastructure of Euromaidan politics (as in, the EU-funded networks that the US was also supporting). US policy in Ukraine before Euromaidan was basically supporting the European Union's association and social movement efforts, and the key driver and funder of that was the Germans, who had invested heavily in the Ukrainian media space and elsewhere in the decades leading up to it. For the Germans Ukraine was an economic interest and part of their post-Soviet soviet space influence links, and the US was supporting the European desire because why not.
There was a dynamic of that the US was frustrated not because the Europeans wouldn't align with the US, but that there wasn't a coherent European position for the US to align itself with, due to the Germans dropping their previous lead and distancing themselves from the Euromaidan architecture they'd set up. Between the German whip lash and the lack of European consensus, Nuland took steps in a relative void where the Germans had turned self-sabotaging and the Russians were attempting various spoiler efforts to keep the Ukrainians from associating with the EU.
Had the EU operated on its own- which is to say, had the EU actually operated on a consistent position and been willing to stand by its previous decade of messaging- Nuland would likely have been known as little more than a European backer.
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
8d ago
Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.
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.
Dean
8d ago
I don't have anything approaching a retort, just a smile and appreciation.
Yes, I do value the trilogy structure and design more than the worldbuilding (in part because worldbuilding is easy to find, but good series are hard). I find that good story structure is indicative of good writing more than a good character dynamic, but that's because I've seen far too many movies or shows with an interesting premise fall apart for lack of planning after winging it. Good character writing can exist regardless, but good narrative design will elevate. (I will stand by that Mordin's Tuchanka arc was one of the best moments of the series, as it was simultaneously against part of his theme in ME2 but also a natural progression of his obvious guilt, and a natural integration into how to recruit allies into the war.)
I also agree that ME2 could have absolutely evaded the pitfalls ME1 set up for lack of planning. I personally view them as one and the same and that the onus is on ME1 to write for the sake of the sequel if it was designed as a trilogy to start, but the nature of that is that nothing required tethering the sequels to a trilogy character arc. Rather, a personal favorite proposal I once read was one that every ME game in the trilogy have a separate focus character: Commander Shepard in ME1 as the 'public face' of Humanity for what it does as a galactic hero, but then PC!Jacob Taylor could have been the ME2 player character for a 'what Humanity is in the dark' thematic contrast, while not!Vega in ME3 could have been the Rising War Hero for the Reaper War. Each player character an independent character with reflections observing differences rather than 'hey, remember me Shepard?!' cameos, and in each game the previous player character is their own character characterized by the key decisions of the previous game.
I don't disagree with your criticisms of Andromeda on a lore-technical level, but I just smile and wave vaguely to the deliberately campiness of what was, at heart, a sort of first contact story. When comedy is a deliberate goal, I can overlook a lot of functional-efficiency things, and I suppose I just accept that as part of the buy-in.
(If I wanted to pick at realism, the role of Spectre as a shooting-game protagonist also doesn't make sense as presented in the trilogy. Council Space doesn't need it when legal violence is so readily available, and non-Council space doesn't respect it. Spectre status Soldiers wouldn't be useful in a setting where legally-sanctioned blackops are everywhere and legal violence is so common- the real benefitors of Spectre status would be a Volus tax-accountant who can use the status to cut through bureaucratic red tape to unroot financial crimes threatening the galactic economy, and using that Spectre status to keep a band of mercenaries as his muscle.)
(Give me biotic god pencile pusher, doom of tax evaders and counterfeit e-zero smugglers!)
Dean
8d 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.
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.
And yet you didn't articulate it directly.
Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-and this was your evasion of that context.
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.
You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia.
This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.
It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.
You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.
Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.
Well, I'll let you keep your good opinion a little longer, but I do have my irritation points. But in the spirit of trying to good faith questions-
One of the dominant trends of Arab/Muslim resistance movements over the last few decades has been a general commitment to blend-end strategies where rather than clearly identifiable uniforms insurgents will wear civilian clothes so they can pass for harmless civilians as soon as they ditch the weapons and adjust their clothes, and one of the trends of this conflict in particular is that Hamas has a strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by various forms. Hamas has a long habit of using human shield strategies in various ways, whether from launching rocket attacks from civilian residences while preventing the civilians from fleeing (so that Israel would be blamed for killing civilians in their homes if they counter-fire) to using civilians as couriers / carriers / observors supporting the armed members, and so on. The purpose of these types of strategies are exploit rules of engagement restricting fires in order to gain asymetric advantages, and to generate/exploit propaganda when the other side shoots back. To be clear- shooting people who appear to be harmless civilians is not actually against the laws of war if they are assisting a belligerant power, and there are tactics to deliberately conflate the categories.
There is no Abu-Ghraib-level scandal because this is a very well established, and not at all novel, tactic, and one which Hamas and the supporters of Hamas regularly acknowledge even as it obviously leads to more risk to civilians who might actually be honest neutrals. The Pro-Palestinian position is that the onus is on the Israelis to distinguish, even as the pro-Israeli position is that the onus is on the Palestinians to not deliberately obfusicate the differences. And given that the Hamas strategy as a whole is to run up the civilian casualty count in order to drive an international response against Israel, and that they will continue to do so, there's no real point to viewing it as a Abu-Ghraib scandal when no amount of Israel discretion will prevent the opportunity for video propaganda to be generated.
Further- and in a broader sense- if you accept that you need to stop a person with a bad practice, you have to be willing to endure the bad practice which the opponent will invoke in order to deter you. This is the classic 'if you are known to succumb to blackmail, your blackmailer will continue to blackmail you' except with civilian collateral. The casualties become scandals more in the contexts of mindsets where Israel is not accepted to have a need/right to stop Hamas that justies tolerating casualties (that Hamas will generate as a matter of strategy).
Note that this makes no claim on the veracity of any videos you may have seen, or whether they are/are not war crimes. However, video propaganda is very easy to generate since the presenter is the one who gets to present context and can remove it via editing or simply lack other perspectives needed for context on specific issues. A X minute video will rarely provide insight as to what happened Y minutes before the video.
The answer to both is yes. This is what happens when major trauma shocks hit a national culture, and this was an expected and intended result of the Hamas attack planning, as the propaganda strategy of, during, and since has been tailored to incite Israeli retaliation.
I find it unpersuasive.
It is a common refrain that moves agency to the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, a hyperagency versus hypoagency issue where the hyperagent's influence is treated as far more significant than local agent actions reducing them to the role of recipient. It's politically convenient and a sort of emotional cope for Israeli political opponents in the aftermath of a demonstrated lack of control to claim the current situation is actually the result of control by bad leaders, and it's also politically convenient and a form of morality laundering for opponents of Israel in general to claim that the Palestinian actions on 7OCT is really the responsibility of Israel leaders with agency. Agency arguments are a format by which moral responsibility is reduced from the hypoagent not on the basis of their individual morality, but subordinating it to structural paradigms that allocate moral responsibility for hypoagents who, by their nature, have the agency to act.
But the truth is nothing about what the Israels did in that theory dictated the results of 7OCT, or even that Hamas would win the Hamas-PLO power struggle by throwing PLO leaders off skyscrapers after a decisive electoral thumping when Gazan-Palestinians voted out a PLO broadly seen as corrupt and unpopular. There were many, many years of intervening choices, decisions, options, and failures by various actors that were required to reach the point. Selectively choosing to focus on one isn't particularly good analysis, even if it makes for good propaganda, because results and consequences are rarely so clear cut. (To be clear, they sometimes do- Osama Bin Laden directly changed his practices when a US Congressperson said on TV that the US was listening to his phone, which directly led to improved secrecy needed for 9-11, but these are much more often the exception than the norm in multi-agent problems.)
You are also using the much mis-used concept of blowback, which presents negative consequences in present times as a consequence of decisions in the past who are deemed bad because they resulted in negative consequences. However, blowback is banal when treated well, but can quickly become stupid when treated as something to avoid entirely because there is no such thing as major policies with no future costs. That framing of blowback is a bad decision analysis model, because it's retroactive rationalization that assumes clear causality (it judges people on how complex contexts turned out as if they should have known this would happen, when people don't actually make decisions with the benefit of knowing how all future things will unfold), because it negates the relevance of many other factors that contribute to a situation (Hamas was more popular than the PLO in the Gazan elections in part because running on a platform of genocide the jews is popular with the Gazan electorate, and in part because PLO was unpopular due to being corrupt, but not because Israel didn't target it as harshly decades ago- an alteranative genocide-the-jews party would still have had the conditions to succeed), and because it doesn't accept that even good / well justified strategies can deliver significant costs.
Just as a concept, think of strategy games with strategies which allow you to trade health / casualties / debuffs in exchange for potentially advantageous options: the costs and the benefits are both real, and inseparable, but the presence of costs doesn't mean it was an inferior option. You could expect to face equivalent of worse costs. However, pop-culture blowback analysis would be to fixate on the costs tied to the policy, and ignore / pretend that other costs wouldn't have happened if you chose the other options. To pick a video game trope, consider the habit of many players to not use their healing potions in RPGs because they might need it later in a tough boss fight. As a result, they either risk losing in a current fight for not using the resource, or they spend a lot of time grinding so they don't need the resource in the current fight when they could have spent the same time in a later area gaining more XP and better loot if they'd just pushed forward. Blowback analysis is the equivalent of critiquing the players who used the rare potion earlier because they did need one of those later, regardless of if they're in a better position or not (i.e. in an area where rare potions are easier to find with less grind).
To very much simplify how to evaluation policy decisions and strategies, the basis of merit of a choice isn't if bad results occur- it's whether more or worse bad results occur compared to the plausible alternative choices. Note that one of the points of a strategy for dividing the PLO would be so that no single Palestinian faction could cause a two-front war with a single call to uprising... and note that the current conflict is not a two front war. Would this have occurred if the nebulous organization of Hamas was defeated/absorbed into the PLO, creating a stronger for-war wing of the PLO? After the PLO was central Israeli in the first two Intifadas? You can't just assume that if the PLO had successfully absorbed the Hamas-minded parts of Palestinian society, it would have retained the same internal political balances that led to it's current status and avoided all the conflicts that Hamas wanted but it didn't.
To put it in different terms- is the current Gazan War an Israeli strategy failure, for there being a conflict, or a success, for a conflict being far smaller and more manageable than it would otherwise be?
And by similar alternatives: was the surprising success of Oct 7 and terribly delayed Iraeli response a Hamas strategic victory, for doing better than it expected, or was it in fact a strategic disaster, because it failed to ignite the regional conflict that they were aiming for in part due to the nature of the propaganda effect of doing better than expected?
Blowback analysis can't answer either of these, because it treats any blowback as proof of failure (or else it wouldn't be blowback), has no mechanism for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable costs, and no consistency for what it deems blowback to focus on.
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