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The ukraine war and godawful sources a problem
Samo Burja (sadly can't find the tweet) once said that we rely on defense ministries of the individual nations for information but at the same time lying about the state of affairs is considered respectable propaganda in a time of war.
Onto the sources
The Bad
Ukranian ministry of defense: These guy's obviously can't be trusted, they would totally lie about things if it means more american aid, lying about success in offensive operations, lying about goals and motives, or lying about defensive strategy, especially due to operational security concerns.
Russian ministry of defense: Exactly as untrustworhy as the UKR MoD but we hear less from them. What the UKR MoD and RU MoD agree on is likely "true".
Basically propaganda
The new york times: Something I wasn't expecting was how god awful the NYT's actual coverage of the ukraine war actually has been. reading their reports has been surprisingly low value. very little description of what is happening at any reasonable level. Maybe this shouldn't surprise me, the actual events of the war don't really improve how something looks narratively so you end up with little information about the facts on the ground
(this applies to most of the western print press and I won't mention any further, though Matthew chance of CNN was pretty good)
Better than most
Wikipedia: Wikipedia continues to keep winning. While it both does a good job explaining the history (talking about the invasion and conflict really starting in 2014) it also has some great parts that go unnoticed. Casualties? Reports vary widely what a great line to just throw out. Wikipedia's reporting is way above average and has better timelines than any reporting I've seen in the mainstream western press. They still have issues but sadly little actually can beat them. (I definitely find their UKR coverage worse because it's less contentious on english language groups than say their isreal gaza coverage but thankfully i'm not forecasting isreal gaza so i don't have to worry about it)
The institute for the study of war This is probably the most accurate source that you can call "respectable". Unlike other sources they do a good job of citing their sources and their citations stem from far more credible sources than the UKR MoD. The main problem with them is Bias, General David Petreus is a pretty solid general overall and while I tend to like the reports, I find the reports are slightly more anti-russian than the facts on the ground typically indicate. But unlike other reporters they actually accurately report the facts on the ground to a degree that nobody else except 1 group does. I may dislike sentences like "We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting." because they really should have just deleted the word Russian in that sentence. overall I like these guys and think they are the best reporting I can get regularly
The best (but so infrequent)
The AUSTRIAN ARMY Youtube channel The austrian army's reporting on the battlefield situation is top notch, I think that since they only post updates every 6 months or so their reporting tends to be a lot better at not missing the larger scale operations. Of course it's harder to cite the austrian army youtube channel and call it "respectable" but many probably would accept it.
Analysis and speculation
William spaniel While mostly a channel about strategic implications he actually does a pretty good job talking about how leaders can actually think. The Naval war college regularly cites him so I consider him much more credible than average. (though the naval war college also plays Polis to discuss the Peloponnesian war so they're definitely more willing to be a little less hinged than you'd expect)
Perun IDK how this guy got so big but /r/credibledefense loves him and I like his powerpoints.
So onto the actual conflict.
Right now the big story is that the russian army is making a move from the north while Ukraine is slowly losing territory on the southeast, not much to be sure, if this were mar 2022 you'd call the approach a massive slowdown. However the long slow push of russia into ukr territory is happening after a failed UKR 2023 counteroffensive. The war continues with what I would call world war 1 tactics with 2024 weapons. Trenches, Artillery, and spotters dominate the war, while in WW1 it was biplanes, in the Ukraine russian war it's the drone. The drone is creating this weird war where visibility is at an all time high, if you look at the survivability onion you'll notice that stealth comprimises most of the survival tactics Evasive manuvers are almost a last resort. This means it's much harder to conduct certain operations without getting troops killed. I wonder how much the conflict will change in the coming months, the 1 prediction which tends to hold true is that almost nothing happens because this is the second coming of world war 1
Wikipedia is full of Ukrainian partisans. They waited about 6-9 months after Ukraine lost Bakhmut to declare it a victory for Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Battle_of_Bakhmut/Archive_5#Result
The ISW put out a report (written by two Ukrainians and a neocon) saying that Russia's only chance of victory was its efforts to manipulate our perceptions of Ukraine and that we can and should mobilize our economic resources to win Ukraine the war. They cite a nominal GDP graph to back up this point. This is pretty dubious - despite a high GDP the West apparently lacks the industrial power needed to compete with Russia in munitions production. A lot of our GDP is in services, finance and real estate, not heavy industry.
Furthermore, Russia has thousands of tactical nukes. The US seriously considered using nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, peripheral wars with fairly low stakes. Why should we assume that Russia would not go nuclear in a much more serious conflict in its core area of interest, should it seem that they were on the back foot?
Besides the contested logic of the matter, it's pretty perverse for two Ukrainians to be writing an article decrying Russian propaganda narratives and psy-ops while asking for unconditional, near-blind faith in Ukraine.
https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1772941705903313328
I don't know about the other sources but I recommend serious caution on wikipedia and ISW. This is a hard war for anyone to be objective on.
Yeah I'll agree that both are flawed in the same direction, it's just that every other source is even more flawed aside from the austrian army.
The us naval war college doesn't post reports anywhere for example. I sometimes read Russia today but while I get info from them I find it more dubious than ISW stuff (though it's useful corroboration).
The austrian army is the best source but they are so infrequent when I need updates roughly once a week/month for forecasting reasons. I have to rely on the ISW and Wikipedia mainly. do you have any suggestions other than the ones mentioned above?
RAND reports (rather than commentary) are decent, they're long form ebook analytical things rather than short-term news. I'm most interested in the big picture rather than little villages being captured or recaptured. Mariupol, Kherson, those are important places that well-educated people can point to on a zoomed-out map. Who'd ever heard of Bakhmut before the war? Let alone all those other places where people are talking about the salt mine or the slag pit...
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?q=ukraine+war&content_type_s=Report&rows=24
I think Mearsheimer was also a good thinker generally, he predicted this whole war back in 2014, that Russia would move to wreck Ukraine but lacked the strength to conquer the whole country. Mearsheimer is a very high level thinker, I don't think he knows or cares about the little towns on the map either and his writing does lack the ground level detail you may be looking for. However, I think he's useful because he gets things right. He was also one of the original opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, putting him head and shoulders above much of the West's top brass: https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine
In his famous 201 lecture Mearshimer predicted that it would be too stupid for Russia to invade Ukraine because it would look bad for Russia. Mearshimer did not consider Russia to be militarily capable of accomolishing a fait accompli, and thus ruled out Russian hostility as a given. In fact if you look up Mearshimers work prior to the 2022 war, Mearshimer keeps banging on that the USA should focus against China and that securing Russia as an ally was - and still is - of paramount importance. I view his hostility to Ukraine as part of his larger crusade against perceived misplaced priorities of the state department combined with an extremely ruthless calculus of relative power focus: it is inefficient to support weak corrupt states in Russias proximate orbit and it is better to husband resources if not spending it to bribe/secure Russias allegiance.
Mearshimers military analysis is, unfortunately, severely lacking. In his rush to get the west (really just USA) to refocus against China, he emphasizes that Russia is winning and in the face of such inevitability the west should stop wasting time. His sources for Russian inevitable victory are ridiculous retards like Scott Ritter, ArmchairW, BigSerge and fucking moonofalabama. It is an echo chamber of 'russia stronk!' vatniks that stand in contrast to the nafo chuds, and unfortunately for Mearshimer the inevitable victory of Russia is neither evident nor imminent. The longer Russia stumbles over its slow grind in Ukraines east, the more time is wasted on debating artillery shells instead of nuking Chinas island chain airbases.
Weak and corrupt states.
Like Poland 20 years ago.
Which is now arguably our strongest military ally in the region.
There is a seperate argument that Russias idiotic revanchism was the impetus for Poland, the Baltics and even Ukraine to aggressively pursue the anti corruption, judicial reform and and democratization policies that would allow them to enter NATO in the first place. Poland in particular has exercised excessive agency in forcing their inclusion into NATO, this video at the 18 minute mark
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVmmASrAL-Q&t=1520s&pp=ygUSc2h1dCB1cCBhYm91dCBuYXRv
documents the history of Polands active manipulation of polish american voters to force USA to include poland into NATO.
I do not mean to impugn Poland for their current status as if they were unworthy of joining NATO due to corruption, I am merely articulating the observed pattern of Mearshimers flavor of great power realism causing his disdain for building alliances against Russia. I'll find some other reason to diss poles later, wanted to mock their food but potato pierogis are just carb-on-carb hate (British toast sandwiches take the cake for sadness there) and kielbasa is the best of all european sausages, so I gotta think on it.
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Mearsheimer's argument is not complex:
Unlike 'experts' like General Petraeus or Ben Hodges, Mearsheimer actually gets things right. Back in mid-2023 when he wrote that article everyone was hyping the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it promptly sank like a stone because they lacked the mass and firepower to beat the Russians. The war has continued according to Mearsheimer's prognosis. There's no magic trick to achieve victory, you just need mass and firepower. The Russians have it, the Ukrainians have much less. By the way, in 2014 he wrote that while Russia wasn't eager to get immersed in Ukraine and they lacked the power to easily conquer the country. However, Russia would devastate and wreck Ukraine if we continued leading them down the primrose path: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Lo and behold, he's been proven totally correct on Russian capabilities (they certainly haven't easily conquered the country) and on causal logic, if we keep immersing ourselves in Ukraine Russia will have a very bad reaction and wreck the country.
Imagine calling these guys ridiculous retards with severely lacking analysis and then watching as they're proven right for making the most obvious, straightforward arguments imaginable.
And why should we nuke China's island bases? Our strategy is clearly defensive, it's far easier to present the war to third parties and voters as defensive if we're not the ones attacking. A nuclear first strike against essentially peripheral targets is certainly an interesting proposal, however I'm not quite sure it advances our position.
If you ignore the things Mearsheimer actually got wrong and ignore things that Petraeus or Hodges actually got right, this would indeed be a compelling line of argument. But if we don't, it's not, and little more than cherry picking.
The war's progression defied multiple of Mearsheimer's prognosis, starting from whether it would start, to how it would last. Other parts of Mearsheimer's prognosis that have been born out- like Ukraine being wrecked- were never contested in the first place. Even the tools of prognosis have repeatedly been exposed as lacking- the crux of Mearsheimer's analysis on inevitable attrition has rested on artillery advantage, even as the late/post-23 trends have demonstrated that the artillery was far more circumstantial, while he's regularly made arguments on capabilities (such as Russia eviscerating Ukrainian air defenses) that have been more than a little overreaching. There's a reason that Russia's turn to airpower has hinged on glide bombs from the ranges they have.
You like to appeal back to 2014 for Mearsheimer, but I see no reason not to go further to the 1990's- as early as 1992- when Mearsheimer was on record advocating for nuclear proliferation to the Germans and Japanese, aka historic Russian strategic rivals, which would have brought permanent nuclear presence to the border of the Russian sphere of influence that Mearsheimer called for respecting... which has been part of the nominal cassus belli for Russian intervention on grounds of proximate nuclear threat.
In other words, Mearsheimer has been advocating crossing contemporary Russian narratives of security red lines for about as long as the Soviet Union's been dead. He's just done it in different forms, but not forms that would escape a revanchist narrative of malign activity of western encroachment.
Mearsheimer is as deserving as the 'expert' title as anyone else, and unsurprisingly not any more impressive outside his field of actual expertise than anyone else. People just tend to forget his field of expertise is international relations theory as a political scientist, not international relations in action, or in policy, or anything particularly to do with the military in general, or as any kind of analyst of the countries he opines on.
I tend not to ask, but what nationality are you for the 'we'?
For whatever reason- admittedly perhaps conflating you with someone else- I thought you presented yourself as a German in the past, or at least European, which wouldn't make sense in this more recent context unless the 'we' is rather expansive. And in the inverse, there are enough Europeans on this forum that 'we' would also be awkward in this context.
The US already had nuclear weapons based in Germany and Japan in the Cold War and still has them based in Turkey. Nuclearization isn't a major change like NATO expansion eastwards towards Georgia and Ukraine, it only alters deterrence logic for those countries themselves. A nuclear Japan could be useful in countering China (another area where Mearsheimer was a decade or so ahead of the curve). Anyway, nuclear threat from Japan and Germany is less than from Turkey and far less than from Ukraine or the Baltics.
Mearsheimer did not say that a Russo-Ukrainian war wouldn't start, he described the conditions under which it would start if US/NATO foreign policy wasn't changed. He described the limitations of Russian power and the difficulties of occupying a whole country. He says that Russia will withstand considerable pain to pursue its security (this was before sanction-proofing) and that it will devastate Ukraine if the West doesn't change its policy, that logically implies war. Where did he say that Russia wouldn't go to war with Ukraine?
He even foresaw the war back in 1992, advocating that Ukraine should acquire nuclear weapons since the West was hardly likely to extend nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. He raises Crimea, mixed populations and nationalism on either side, control of the Black Sea Fleet, the fact that the Russians are always going to be stronger conventionally, historical antipathy... all factors we're dealing with decades later! He thought the Ukrainians would be less willing to bow to US pressure than they were, yet surely his predictive value is high.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mearsheimer-Case-for-Ukrainian-Nuclear-Deterrent.pdf
Meanwhile, what have all the talented NATO Ukraine hands and generals gotten us? Hodges seemed to think the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed, despite being a telegraphed attack into a fortified and well-prepared enemy who has air superiority. Petraeus was in the same camp! What were they thinking?
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-breakthrough-could-come-weeks-former-us-general-says-1823389
And then there's the whole 'Putin's Russia is so weak that we can head them off by giving Ukraine more arms but so strong that he'll invade NATO if he wins' camp that is so well-represented in think tanks and media output, especially ISW. Which is it?
I maintain that Mearsheimer has been far more useful on the course of this war than the credentialed experts who seem to be hyping Ukraine.
Australian, we do show up for even the silliest US wars and will presumably be called in against China. What is the point of AUKUS if not to tie our fates together?
Okay, I believe the Australian claim off this alone, definitely not a European-attuned perspective.
You can try to argue that Mearsheimer didn't deny a different war would start, but the war Mearsheimer argued against on grounds of Russian limitations- that Russia wouldn't try to conquer all of Ukraine- is precisely the kind of war Russia launched. It failed, Russia was incompetent, but it is an illustration of Mearsheimer not actually recognizing or acknowledging Russian divergences from his predictions, and the later retreat to semantics of what degree of invasion is / is not conquest of all of Ukraine.
Basic motte and bailey.
Not really, and this goes back to the point of Mearsheimer's limitations outside of his field, in this part how the Europeans view nuclear proliferation.
Setting aside the contextual inaccuracy- Ukraine wasn't in a position to acquire nuclear weapons in 1992, it was in a position to negotiate away the nuclear weapons it had already inherited by 1996, this is ignoring what Russia wanted in this context, and why, and how such a policy pursued by Mearsheimer could be reflected in the current Putin-imperialist zeitgeist, as well as what doing such a policy would have naturally lead to in terms of American involvement with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer was not someone who was advocating foreign policy prescriptions that actually recognized and respected Russian security concerns for their own sake. Mearsheimer is someone who is selective in which security concerns he recognizes as valid, and treats them as transactional devices while downplaying or ignoring the relevance of security concerns he doesn't recognize the validity of. Nuclear proliferation is one of these blind spots.
Put another way, Mearsheimer is someone who believes in great powers dividing spheres of influence and horse-trading power blocks, without realizing he's less an Bismark and more of a Wilhelm at coalition building.
A Ukraine that continues to exist more than two years after nearly all observers thought the state would collapse in two weeks, a Russia that having destroyed its modernized force is in the process of face-tanking its reactivated Soviet stocks while humiliating its pre-war martial reputation, a NATO with a significantly stronger Baltic position and significantly greater available manpower and material capacity, European defense recapitalization as a policy consensus, and the strongest constituent member support for NATO in the last quarter century, and for the EU since before the 2009 Financial Crisis. This is without other things like the changes to the international arms market via displacing Russia, the value of discrediting territorial irridentalist wars of aggression, the confluence of the US and Europeans against China as a second-order effect of China's alignment with Russia, and so on.
I'm surprised you walked into that cluster.
Also, misuse of 'us', since you're not in NATO not part of the NATO constituency interests.
Come now, as a native English speaker, you know the difference between could and would.
Your source is a newsweek article where Hodges doesn't say he believes the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed. It says Hodges says a breakthrough could happen, after Hodges says he ('we' in a context including himself) didn't know the accurate situation to make a conclusion.
Probably, among other things, that the Russians didn't have air superiority, which their tactics over the last years have validated given their reliance to behind-the-lines glide bombing, and that there's no such thing in major wars as a non-telegraphed offensive thanks to the satellite imagery easily available of buildup. These words do not mean what you appear to think they mean.
Otherwise, the question doesn't really make sense unless you didn't mean it. The answer is directly in the article: an offensive gain southward that went far enough could expand direct fires coverage to the E-W routes of the Crimean land bridge, complicating the Russian position in Crimea substantially.
By your ! and ? and emotional tone, I suspect you feel this was obviously a bad idea. It's less clear what you think was actually the cost incurred, the chances of success, or what you'd concede were the benefits possible.
E+U > R > E
Both. There's no contradiction unless you reject the Europeans a right to their own perspective of their relative power versus Russia.
Russia can have more military power than Europe, but not more than Ukraine with European support. If Russia were to compel / achieve a victory over Ukraine, then depending on the form it could take those forces locked down in Ukraine and move them to other potential areas. If a Russian victory meant that the Russians could move through Ukraine to the Balkans, a Russian intervention wouldn't even trigger NATO depending on the country.
Okay, but it's a silly maintenance. The guy's a goober you'd be lambasting had he had his way based on your past history of other American impositions, which he is by no means opposed to, which makes the utility far more of a stopped clock dynamic than I think you recognize.
Mearsheimer is not a person who's a fan of restrained American conduct for its own sake. In another era, he'd be an overt American imperialist. Much of the media around him in the last years is basic university tenure politics of old professors protecting their original thesis that are the basis of their reputation.
Depends on if you think that's a silly one. Mearsheimer doesn't, except in so much that his views of the Russian sphere of interest was transactional to get them on board for a land war in Asia.
It is a reach bordering on consensus building for you to use 'us' or 'we' to make common position with Americans or Europeans on things the Australians aren't immediate party to and which you do not share common views of, such as NATO, so I will be noting that more often going forward.
The post-Brexit British capitalizing on Australian disgruntlement with the French military arms deal tendencies which were weakening Australia's ability to contribute/support a US-based anti-China coalition without French support despite increasing divergences in the French and Australian government perspectives on China, after the French spent several years having a shadow-feud with the British over the execution of Brexit.
Also, long-term technology transfer.
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