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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.
Given how Putin sat at the far end of these comically huge conference room tables during COVID, one can surmise he is afraid of death. I believe the US made it clear to him if he uses nuclear weapons they will assure his death.
Being afraid of random death from something as unglorious as a bad flu doesn't necessarily entail being afraid of dying under any circumstances including a civilisational nuclear showdown.
Well, as bad as this is for Ukraine, I think the best outcome for the world is for Russia to be stuck in a frustrating, endless simmering war in Ukraine that's just a black hole for resources that they neither win nor lose that falls out of the news.
I believe the US knows handing Russia a resounding defeat means they're at risk of launching nukes so they go down in a blaze of glory. But if it's just an endless frozen super boring conflict? The heroic "last stand" time never arrives.
But could the current level of Western support actually be maintained if it falls out of the news? It seems that the Western leadership may be stuck riding the tiger of public opinion here - they have to keep people sufficiently engaged and enraged that redirecting those resources elsewhere does not become a winning proposition, but not so much so that escalation and making a more serious effort to hand Russia a resounding defeat does. Even in the cynical environment of this forum, carefully maintaining the meat grinder at sous-vide temperature seems to be a position that it pains people to endorse - and there is always the question of Ukrainian morale, which may not in fact be in infinite supply.
This conflict really rhymes quite well with Vietnam (before the US came in), where at some point the motley coalition of inept French, decadent Southern leadership, genuine anti-Communist locals and peasants that were tentatively accepting the proposition that they will have a better life under the West started fraying as 2 and 4 were only willing to give so much for 1 and 3 and the US faced the choice between full commitment and humiliation.
Well, yes, I'm not saying this war was good, but if Russia was hell-bent on capturing Ukraine anyway, making it as incredibly high cost yet still as drawn out and miserable as possible without giving them any rousing good story for using nukes is a good, relatively safe card to play.
Peter Zeihan, a global strategist, argues that Russia's victory in Ukraine may lead them to march on Poland and threaten nukes there if we don't acquiesce. I don't quite understand why we would but that's not a great escalation if they feel emboldened from winning in Ukraine and using Ukrainian territory and resources and people as cannon fodder. Again, this would have happened either way I guess.
I don't know, I read some of Zeihan's books ("Disunited Nations" and "The Accidental Superpower") before this conflict and found them to consist more of riveting just-so tales than compelling reasoning. The idea that Russia will attack Poland next seems like another just-so story, which just happens to be very convenient for the current American agenda ("Why should you pour money and participate in sanctions to defend this unrelated country? Because if you let Russia win, they will come for you next!"). Do you, or does Zeihan, have a persuasive argument as to why Russia would do that?
The colourful "Ukrainians as cannon fodder" detail seems to go even further in that direction ("...and by the way, if any Ukrainian readers think that you should just stop fighting and make an arrangement with Russia because better red than dead, let it be known that the Russians will kill you anyway"). As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
His rationale is that Russia is paranoid about being invaded by land and they sense the future of their state power is waning and this is their last chance to really build some buffer states. He says it's not really sane because the odds of the West invading Russia are nil but not exactly a guarantee that this can never happen in the future. I don't know how much I believe it but... it explains invading Ukraine better than anything else? Especially if they thought conquering Ukraine would be easy.
I simply meant that a pro-tracted war with Ukraine would bleed Russia dry if they didn't succeed. But if they do succeed they could add an entire nation to its balance sheet. A successful conquest of Ukraine makes them more dangerous in a lot of ways.
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I don't agree with the Zeihan-style argument of mass-conscripting the Ukrainians, but I will note the RFERL isn't making the more relevant point of volunteers in the occupied Donbas.
Namely, that conscription was already used significantly in the separatist statelets, to a degree that various pre-war analysis indicated they were functionally bled white in having already conscripted the most relevant males, and that was in a far more favorable environment than trying to mass-conscript the more recently occupied territories. 2022 was a major shock to the Russians on the Ukrainian mentality, and so while there's been relatively low-scale conscription / coerced labor (including of POWs), the bigger deterent is honestly political reliability / trust. If someone volunteers, they probably won't frag the officers, but conscription is risky in a different way. Even at their 'best', the separatist forces in 2022 summer offensive were notably less enthused / proactive when tasked to fronts outside of their immediate home turf. Political reliability of the forces is a significant thing on the Russian side in Ukraine.
Persuasive is a load-bearing word here- basically a caveat that retreats to the motte of subjectivity, and most people wouldn't and didn't find the argument that Russia would invade Ukraine three years ago persuasive- but there is an argument for Russia continuing forward, which is that if it is in an ability to do so in the next two years, that is likely it's best chance to do anything in Europe vis-a-vis the next 20, and that if it wants to seriously overturn the European security architecture vis-a-vis NATO it's best chance is now.
The basic short version of why in ideological terms is that Russia's invasion in Ukraine wasn't cast in terms unique to Ukraine, but in framings / justifications that applied to much of the former Soviet Pact as well. In so much that the Russian position can be trusted to signal intent (the 'why'), the reasons Russia used for Ukraine are as valid for places like Estonia or Lithuania too. Oppressed russian minority narrative, former territories of the Russian empire improperly released by the Soviets, culturally divergent Russians, and so on. Russia was demanding a retraction of all post-Cold War NATO forces from eastern european members who joined after the Soviet Union, not just demands about Ukraine.
The short version in opportunity terms is that if Russia is in a position to make any move against NATO countries in the next two years, it's (a) because it somehow managed to beat Ukraine into some form of submission (or else the war would still go on), and (b) did so because it was able to do so before the European military-industrial recapitalization outproduced Russia on an economic level. Russia won't be able to economically compete with the European recapitalization in the longer term due to economies of scale, but in this hypothetical it will still have on hand the military mobilization that beat the immature European/NATO support in the immediate term, meaning there is a window of opportunity in which Russia can act with advantage. As Russia's mobilized 'victorious' army is dependent on cold-war reactivated systems, with extremely limited capabilities vis-a-vis potential European outputs, this period of advantage is limited, and thus a use-or-lose prospect.
The short version in the locational terms are the Baltics or the Balkans. In the Baltics, the old form is that the Russians could blitz the northern Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) due to them bordering Russia (direct mobilization) or Belarus (which let Russia use it for the Ukraine invasion), and seize them fast enough to force a fait accompli by threatening nuclear deterrence card and prevent a major NATO reinforcement/counter-attack. (This has gotten considerably harder with Finland and Sweden entering NATO, but it's not impossible).
Alternatively- and this would depend on a Russian victory over Ukraine that allows Russian forces to move through, which was a goal of the original Russian coup de main objective of the entire country- would be an incursion into the Balkans. If you get into western Ukraine, then you have the separatists in Moldova (which Russia tried to coup a few years ago), start setting conditions to intervene in Serbia, and otherwise have a variety of options to throw the Balkans into a messy chaos to distract NATO, especially if you can bribe/support/whatever Orban and Hungary for an even bigger wrench. Note here that a direct NATO-Russia conflict isn't even necessary, just a Russia-EU conflict, as the Balkans have a number of points where the Americans would not be treaty-obligated to get involved, and the Balkan-politics being what they are offer a lot of ways to ruin fragile EU consensus issues.
Ultimately, whether it's the Russian's own casus belli rationalizations for Ukraine, or ways for Putin to try and destabilize the NATO/European Union which he's viewed himself in conflict with, a victorious Russia in Ukraine would, by extension, have capabilities that have a limited viability lifespan, and they'd be at the behest of a generally aggressive Putin who will have just come off of a war he won with all the leader self-validation of opinion that brings.
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