tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
doglatine
1yr ago
It's definitely going to be a tough winter, but in terms of total demand reduction, there's probably quite a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, whether it's turning down the thermostat 1 degree, turning it off for longer periods, waiting till later in the year to turn it on. Much of that will happen organically as people see their gas bills. Of course, that won't directly help people who are already struggling to pay their bills, nor will it help industrial processes that are reliant on gas, so some state intervention will be required. However, I'm less worried than I was a month ago, and encouraged both by how quickly Europe has filled its storage and the trends in euro gas futures (now down to their lowest since July... still high, but the worm may have turned). As for next year, we'll hopefully have more infrastructure in place, like the floating LNG terminals in Germany, more renewables, more heat pumps, more insulation, etc..
doglatine
1yr ago
Strong agree. Recall that non-proliferation has succeeded partly because we've managed to effectively taboo nukes' use; South American and Africa are 'nuclear-free zones'. The reaction of almost every non-nuclear power in the world should be to either condemn the use of a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear power in the harshest possible terms, or nuclearise as quickly as possible.
doglatine
1yr ago
tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field
Most people probably overestimate the efficacy of tactical nukes against armoured formations. No-one knows for sure, of course, but there was a lot of analysis done in the Cold War when it was assumed that NATO would need to use tactical weapons to blunt any Soviet invasion of Western Europe. There are two big problems with using them in a battlefield capacity. The first is that most armoured units aren't conveniently bunched up in very tight proximity like buildings in cities, so the same kind of bomb that would devastate an urban area might only knock out a dozen tanks. The second is that armoured vehicles are very good at surviving heat and blast effects - one Cold War study found that tanks require approximately 45 psi of overpressure to be reliably rendered inoperable. The 10kT warheads on Russia's SSC-8 creates a fireball approximately 400m in diameter (probably fatal to tanks in the affected area), but once you get half a click away, overpressure has already dropped to 20 psi.
On top of these inherent limitations to battlefield use of small yield nuclear armaments, it's also worth remembering that the battlefield situation in Ukraine is VERY different from that which NATO was facing in 1970. Back then, NATO expected to be dealing with massed armoured columns attacking in accordance with Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine. The topography of Germany means that the majority of these would be funneled through a few relatively narrow corridors, most famously the Fulda Gap, thus creating favourable conditions for the use of battlefield nukes. Additionally, even if tank columns survived the nukes themselves, the expectation was that the roads, bridges, and infrastructure near the blast would be damaged so as to slow the progress of subsequent reinforcing units. All of this is very different from Ukraine, where the actual number of troops and armoured vehicles involved have been comparatively small, and largely dispersed across a massive front.
Ultimately, the best way way to use small-yield nuclear weapons to obtain results on the battlefield is to use them to systematically knock out an opposing force's command and control and logistics capacities within the theatre of operations by targeting communications, bridges, airfields, power supplies, etc., essentially doing with nukes what America did to Iraq with precision bombs in Desert Storm. However, this kind of effort is unlikely to be effective in piecemeal form; in order to permanently degrade Ukraine's ability to wage war in a given theatre of operations, Russia would need to be looking at the use of multiple bombs, perhaps more than a dozen. And since many of the relevant targets would be located in or close to built-up civilian areas, casualties among the civilian population would be high (the human body, unlike tanks, doesn't tend to do well with 20 psi of overpressure).
All of which is to say that a handful of small-yield nuclear bombs used exclusively against military targets is unlikely to create sustained military advantage for Russia, while incurring significant diplomatic penalty. In order to be decisive even within a theatre of operations such as the Kharkiv front, Russia would need to use multiple weapons and target military infrastructure and supporting civilian infrastructure, with attendant massive diplomatic costs. If they adopted this second strategy, they could almost certainly obtain a decisive advantage in the short-term, but the cost would be complete international opprobrium and the breaking of the nuclear taboo (this latter ultimately being advantageous for Russia as one of the five official nuclear powers). Moreover, it is likely that there would be overwhelming political pressure at that point for the United States to intervene at least conventionally in the conflict, significantly raising the risks of escalation to general (nuclear) war between Russia and the United States.
There are no easy nuclear options for Russia.
doglatine
1yr ago
LNG isn't as cheap as pipelines, but it's how a majority of the world imports their gas (Japan, China, India, South Korea....). And it's only a medium-term solution for Germany.
Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work
You seem to be operating with outdated information. In 2021, renewables provided 250 TW/h out of Germany's electricity production of 600 TW/h, about the same proportion as fossil fuels, the remainder being made up by nuclear power. In fact wind power alone was the single biggest source of electricity production if one separates out lignite and hard coal as fuels.
Energy storage is still a problem, but one that we're making great progress on. Gas and nuclear can cover base load medium-term, and there's exciting stuff also happening in geothermal. Ultimately the answer will be integrated global energy grids and lots of redundant electricity storage capacity (maybe fusion too), but we'll be waiting a while for that.
doglatine
1yr ago
How about things like VLMs inadvertently putting out black Donald Trumps? Or more broadly, if I use a model to generate “Republican Senator”, what’s the ideal number of black or other ethnic minority faces to produce? Are we going to keep up with the liberal facade that a Senator is a Senator, regardless of political alignment, and thus we should see a diverse representation of races? Or will we instead accept that “Republican Senators are privileged white guys” and turn out a distribution of faces that supports the progressive narrative? These are points of tension within the modern left, so the only winning move is not to play. And before you suggest “just show the accurate racial distribution for a given prompt”, consider that the liberals at least still have to pretend to care about consistency, so committing to “actual truth above normative truth” as a principle is an invitation to embarrassment when the same principle is applied to other domains, eg, CEOs or nurses.
doglatine
1yr ago
Couldn’t an employer concerned about meeting diversity targets without compromising performance actively recruit from highly skilled West Africans and get them H1Bs? Or at the very least, make a special effort to recruit from US citizens who are first or second generation West African migrants? These groups seem to outperform ADOSs by pretty much every metric, from skills to income to educational attainment, and - in the UK at least - some West African groups outperform White British on standardised tests. Obviously this is to some extent an immigrant-filter effect, but then why not take advantage of that as an employer by e.g. advertising job vacancies in Nigerian media?
doglatine
1yr ago
I largely agree, but the normative framework of contemporary corporate anti-racism is that of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and I think suggestions like mine can be framed as satisfying that. What they don't satisfy is a murkier (but probably more important) set of anti-racist principles concerning something like restorative justice and fairness; I can imagine an ADOS looking at these diversity efforts and not unreasonably saying something like -
My ancestors were sold into slavery and we have been subjected to generations of mistreatment, exclusion, and abuse, resulting in us being a damaged and vulnerable community to this day. Puritanical whites then looked at our suffering and decide to repent by implementing a system in which people who superficially look like me but don't come from my community and haven't been subject to our suffering are brought in to assuage their consciences! What outrage, what insult. It's like trying to assuage your guilt about the suffering of the meat you just ate by letting your dog chew on the bones!
And they would have a damn good point. This is NOT restorative justice by any measure. On the other hand, I have some mild-Bryan Kaplanesque sympathy for systems that can attract the best of global talent from around the world and provide opportunity to bright and ambitious people in the developing world, so I do like this aspect of the policy on those grounds.
doglatine
1yr ago
On the one hand, I think the power imbalance line is largely accurate. I have been in multiple workplaces where a specific woman has been given advantages courtesy of being the romantic partner of the boss (it doesn’t have to be gendered like this, but it always has been in my limited experience). Everyone resents that woman, and everyone recognises the unfairness. A world in which workplace relationships are subject to lots of scrutiny is a fairer one.
On the other hand, humans be humans, yo. We are prosocial sexually promiscuous apes. Expecting people in a hierarchical organisation to just turn off their sexual feelings or even not act on them… it’s unrealistic. And I’d flag that many of the same fairness issues that arise from sexual relationships in the workplace also arise from friendships in the workplace (eg the boss is friends with Dave but not friends with Elsa; this leads to the boss giving more opportunities to Dave). And surely you can’t ban those.
Still, as a young, straight, married man keen to climb the professional ladder, I approve of stricter standards concerning workplace relationships. They should be tolerated, but there should be a ton of oversight, so that talented junior overperformers (cough) don’t get passed over for promotion in favour of less talented people that the boss happens to be fucking.
doglatine
1yr ago
A few figures that might help contextualise discussion.
(1) Italy's population is 60 million, Hungary's population is 10 million
(2) Italy has a total GDP (nominal) of 1.9 trillion USD, Hungary of 155 billion USD.
(3) Italy is a net contributor to the EU to the tune of 7 billion USD per year. Hungary is a net recipient of approximately 5 billion USD per year.
Any sane organisation has ample reason to treat the two countries very differently.
doglatine
1yr ago
For what it's worth, speaking as a Brit, I have little sympathy for Meghan. When you marry into the Royal family (or any British aristocratic family), you're buying into a whole host of complex norms and customs, and it's on you to conform to them, at least if you want to enjoy the benefits that come with Royal status. The key specific norm here is noblesse oblige - as a member of the Royal family, you need to be more generous, more magnanimous, more gracious than would be expected of a member of the general public, and this should be reflected in your dealings with your personal staff. Deep down, most Brits regard the Royal family as servants of the people, whose persistent anomalous status and privileges are continually earned via service. This extends to treating those in your employment with special gentleness and care. Of course, not all British royals live up to this standard, but those who don't tend to be judged harshly for it by the public in much the same way as Meghan.
I think there's a broader cultural divide here too. I remember on one occasion when my mum visited me in the US, she was appalled at the way that she heard some people treat servers in restaurants and assistants in shops, essentially barking demands at them. From an American standpoint, that makes a fair amount of sense - he who pays the piper (or pays the tip) picks the tune. By contrast, in the UK, there is much less of an overt hierarchical relationship between customer and service provider - there are strong norms of politeness and deferentiality on both sides. You don't say, "Hey, excuse me, this steak isn't properly cooked," you say, "Sorry to bother you, but is it possible that this steak is a little undercooked? If so, would you mind giving it a few more minutes on the grill?" Of course, as is always the case in the UK, there are class differences in how this kind of interaction would play out, but across the board there would be a greater expectation of graciousness in client-provider interactions. I don't know how much this carries over to white-collar office work, but there are definitely strong elements of it in British academia. I suspect that large multinational companies have their own globalised standards, though.
I don't know whether Meghan is just a bit bitchy, or whether Harry failed to adequately prepare her for the expectations that would be placed on her shoulders. However, things like the Oprah interview played out terribly with most Britons; going on American TV and airing the dirty laundry of the Royal Family leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
doglatine
1yr ago
I don't necessarily agree with all these points, but the overall conclusion - that it's been a good year geopolitically for the US - seems sound to me. I could add to your list NATO expansion, collapse of Russian influence, Western military expansion, and China deterred from Taiwan adventurism. It's also been a big boost to renewable energy, partly because Europe is investing a lot more in the wake of the Russian gas crisis, but also because the whole debacle has illustrated the dangers of relying on energy imports.
As for where I disagree, I think characterising the US's ideology as a neoliberal/leftist hybrid is pretty reductionist. The US is not an ideological monolith. It's a pluralistic society with a whole host of competing thinkers and ideas, and whatever ideologies come next, they'll probably come from the US. Moreover, actual leftism seems pretty thin on the ground in the US these days, especially compared to the 2011-2014 period when Occupy was in full swing. And social progressivism seems to have had a relatively quiet year - too soon to call it a slowing down, let alone a reverse, but at least slightly reassuring.
doglatine
1yr ago
Eh, feels more like milquetoast centre-leftism to me. A giveaway to the middle classes. At least when I use the term "progressivism", I mean to refer specifically to the complex of identity politics movements.
(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)
Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.
What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.
What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.
What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.
Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.
doglatine
1yr ago
China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.
doglatine
1yr ago
Absolutely - the deterrent effect of a missile shield isn't to protect against a general nuclear war in which Russia, China, or the US decides to hit the big red button. Given the constraints of MAD, I'd like to think that no state would rationally launch a first strike at scale. The point of the shield is to prevent countries engaging in low-level nuclear bullying, or attempts to use nuclear weapons to gain a limited battlefield advantage. Existing MAD doctrine doesn't really cover these kinds of contingency: the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.
doglatine
1yr ago
Simple suggestion: is there a charity whose work with indigenous Canadians you respect and think is valuable? If so, make a donation to them - maybe as little as $10. Do not wear the shirt. If anyone asks you, grumble that you feel there's too much performative politics, and instead you chose to mark this day by making a donation, as you think that's far more meaningful.
doglatine
1yr ago
If there's one area where AI has struggled to make serious progress, it's in low-cost situated soft-robotics. The kind of robot that can work around existing human environments safely, do things like clean a grill or scrub a toilet or prepare a sandwich. I suspect that when we find workarounds to the current problems, progress in this area will be extremely fast, but we're not there yet. Consequently, the jobs of burger-flippers (and it's never just burger-flipping, it's all the ancillary tasks around that) will be relatively safe for the time-being.
doglatine
1yr ago
One simple way for twitter to monetise would be to charge for Blue Checkmarks. Maybe offer some power-tools in response (e.g., analytics). Maybe you could even charge different amounts for different tiers of Bluecheck.
doglatine
1yr ago
Yeah, I think this is right. If you’re a Jack Donaghy Republican who invites her to fancy galas and dinners in the Hamptons then you’ll get away with it with most women.
doglatine
1yr ago
I think there’s some truth to this advice, but I also worry that some readers might implement it poorly, especially the peacocking metaphor. As a general rule, you don’t want to be the guy who talks about politics all the time or starts arguments about it, and that’s true regardless of political alignment. That’s partly because young men in general are more interested than young women in debating politics in the first place. There are also tacit norms in many situations against getting deep into politics in the first place, and people who bring it up inappropriately can code as socially awkward.
So I wouldn’t flaunt your politics, regardless of political alignment. Just don’t attempt to hide them or get defensive about them, and be ready to engage in relaxed and good-natured justification if challenged.
doglatine
1yr ago
Would wearing a MAGA hat mark you out as a sperg? I feel that’s an example of something that very few men would get away with while trying to date liberal women. I guess that’s partly because it’s associated with so many low-status attributes.
I'll definitely try that formula! I just plugged it into Terminator: Resistance (a game that I've been massively enjoying of late, but which got mediocre reviews) and it came out at 91%, which matches my experience.
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