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Notes -
What is the appropriate level for diplomatic discussion on twitter?
Recently Elon Musk has been heavily criticised for an admittedly naïve proposal for a negotiated peace in the Russian-Ukrainian war. His proposal:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000
Now this isn't how politics actually works, twitter polls are not actually binding instruments of diplomacy. Nor is a UN administered vote terribly helpful given how it'd just turn into a vote-rigging contest between the pro and anti-Russian forces within the UN and the Ukrainian state obviously wouldn't let the territories leave given the amount of blood that's been shed. They've threatened 15 year jail sentences for those who did vote in the most recent Russian referenda. It's also very hard to see why the Ukrainian govt would bind itself to allowing a Russian Crimea water since they dammed it off even before this war.
You can see from the replies that the objections aren't really on the object level, they're more on the 'go fuck yourself', 'educate yourself', 'you're using Putin talking points', 'Crimea is Ukraine'. All of this is essentially the official line of the Ukrainian state, as summarized by their ambassador to Germany: "Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply"
This seems rather ungrateful to me, as well as undiplomatic. As Elon reasonably argues, he has made a significant effort to assist the Ukrainian armed forces with communications via his satellites, paid from out of his own pocket:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577081450263769089
The fundamental power balance in this war is that Russia could obliterate the entirety of Ukraine in under an hour and still have plenty of nukes left to raze Europe and North America if they intervene. There are some people on this site who think that Russian nuclear forces probably don't work and so we can safely discount Russia's 2000 tactical nuclear weapons and 4000 strategic weapons. How they've come to that conclusion is beyond me, given that the technologies involved are fairly simple and old. The same people have been critiquing Russia for fighting a war with 1970s level technology - miniaturized thermonuclear weapons are 1970s technology! Yes, the tritium has a low half-life and needs to be replaced often. Yes, Russia doesn't have the best maintenance standards. But isn't it reasonable for them to prioritize their nuclear forces in terms of maintenance and development? Are we seriously prepared to risk tens if not hundreds of millions of our citizens dying in a full nuclear exchange if we are wrong about their nuclear preparedness? Their conventional tactical ballistic missiles work fine - doesn't it follow that their nuclear missiles work. This is the logic Musk is getting at. The penalty for emboldening dictators is not worse than the penalty for encouraging nuclear war, let alone losing a nuclear war by joining it.
I think this kind of hysterical diplomacy is dangerous and stupid, even from a Ukrainian-focused perspective. Why would you speak so rudely to a notoriously thin-skinned individual (remember when he called that diver 'pedo-guy') who has volunteered their services for your defence? One imagines Musk is seething with rage at his critics. The impression I get from Ukrainian media is that they are bent on getting back every scrap of territory and reparations to boot, won't suffer for anything less. This is the approach that is most likely to end with them getting nuked into submission.
Also, twitter should be for fun, not serious diplomacy.
These threads tend to be risk assessments, with some people thinking there is a serious risk of nuclear exchange, and some people seeming to discount that risk.
I'm curious about what kind of risk assessment people typically engage in.
Part of my job is identifying and defending against risks to the web service my company operates. It's impractical to defend against all possible risk, especially given our size, so we have to prioritize. This is somewhat done by gut feeling, but it's not merely defending against the most likely adverse events. Very unlikely events, but that if they happen would destroy everything, get more attention than the very-likely-but-not-existential-threat possibilities.
I guess that background informs my thoughts on this issue. Nuclear war is still a remote possibility, but it's Armageddon if it happens. Even if you survive, the world as we know it is over. I can't understand how anything can be worth increasing the chances of nuclear war. This is a giant existential risk. The web service equivalent of not backing up your database, or having an open backdoor hidden somewhere in leaked source code. It's not on fire right now, but if you wait until is, you're completely hosed. The only reason you shouldn't be working on those things immediately is if the site has already gone down.
In my opinion, one country suffering a terrible war is nowhere close to justifying the risk to the entire world that comes with prolonging that war and antagonizing the invader.
I don't believe that the use of nuclear arms means the world is over. It can cause a lot of damage but the impact on it is overestimated. Even if one believes argameddon, we don't really know what increases the risk. People are just unnecessary panicking. We just witnessed the same happened with covid pandemic. It just led to a lot of unnecessary lockdowns, travel restrictions, useless but dehumanising vaccine mandates etc.
That said, I totally understand Elon Musk's arguments. His first poll was unreasonable because it included the condition of Ukraine remaining neutral naively believing that it was a real reason why Russia attacked. The second poll is more reasonable. Despite all the blood and everything ultimately if most people in those areas prefer to stay with Russia, then it is wrong to force them eternally. The question is only how this transition should happen? I cannot imagine that the referendum during the war is appropriate. But if given a reasonable time, like in five years when the cities are rebuilt and the scars of war are more or less healed, then people can make a choice. The poll doesn't say anything about these conditions but many people are reading it in the context of the first poll and in the context of current politics instead taking it at the face value.
But there has, at no point, been any particular reason to believe that most of the annexed areas would want to be separate from Ukraine. I could believe that there's a majority for remaining separate from Ukraine (ie. part of Russia or (quasi-)independent) in Crimea and the pre-February 2022 occupied zones in Donetsk and Luhansk; these areas generally had majorities identifying as Russian (as opposed to being Russophone Ukrainians), and I could also imagine that the 8 years of tit-for-tat shelling and general evaporative cooling through population exchanges would create a firmly pro-Russia majority in the areas occupied by DPR/LPR groups.
However, when it comes to Kherson, Zaporizhizhia and the previously unoccupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, there's no real pre-war (or during-the-war, for that matter) indication of separating from Ukraine at any point; not in elections, not in polling, not in having successful autonomy or separation movements (whatever anti-Maidan occupations there were were damp squibs), and it strains me to imagine the current wartime conditions would create any special love regarding Russia, either.
This is not really a situation where there's much room to give the claims underlying Russian annexation any credence, and even this supposedly neutral referendum proposal does that.
I agree with you about this. My point was more about the negative attitude towards Elon Musk where he proposes "solutions" to end the war in Ukraine. I don't believe that calling names etc. is productive. I hear many people now saying that they no longer like Musk and his cars etc. as if he had joined the dark side now. I simply see a person who is a little bit too trustful to the narrative that the Ukraine merely needed to stay away from NATO and Russia wouldn't have attacked. I see in him someone who is obstinate but open to the truth and maybe an idealist who thinks that he has found a solution. We just need to explain why this view is wrong. It is difficult because the idea of Russian supremacy is harder to understand, it doesn't have that logical dimension that ”Ukraine neutrality” proposers have. But by becoming antagonistic we only make this task much harder.
This twitter sneering culture seems so wrong. I prefer dispassionate evaluations, something like this: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1577120229942910978
Something similar happened with covid. Interesting fact that most vaccine mandates were introduced after it was definitely proven that current covid vaccines do not stop the spread of infection. I thought that it was slowness and failure of institutions to percolate this information to policy makers. But maybe it was more about unwillingness to recognise the defeat. It was the refusal to believe that covid was never going to disappear and desperately trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Most of the vaccine mandates were actually framed (and, I believe, sincerely intended by most) to be a tool for returning to normalcy. Ie. allow access to previously denied services to the most and boost vaccine compliance in hopes that there would be less hospitalizations. Of course, it then became a culture war and thus also quickly led to a discourse where it became essentially a means to punish wrongdoers - antivaxxers - and implicitly also lead to "Covid hawks" assigning individual blame to antivaxxers for the disease still spreading instead of governments, a popular target for many hardline zero-covidists.
Vaccines were hoped to be a tool for normalcy, not vaccine mandates. And vaccines had quite an effect, they were the best, I would even say, the only real intervention that worked and were cheap and least restricting. Before the introduction of the mandates, most elderly people were already vaccinated, mortality from covid among vaccinated elderly people were about 8 times less than for unvaccinated and that was the maximum what we could achieve. Omicron reduced the risks even further but it was unrelated to the measures we took.
The problem was that the vaccines didn't stop the spread and as the most common metric was case counts which still remained quite high, and some residual covid mortality remained many people were not satisfied and considered it to be a failure. Chasing the illusion of achieving nearly zero covid, different governments started vaccine mandates, reintroduced masking, in some cases even light lockdowns. In the UK Christmas 2021 events were really discouraged but other countries had even more restrictions. It was all in vain.
Interesting that the voices demanding surrender and neutrality of Ukraine are only becoming louder when Ukraine is starting to show some serious gains on battlefield. It is still not an ideal situation because fighting leaves many people dead and injured, the final resolution is no-where in sight and probably will happen only when Putin is gone which is hard to predict when it will happen. Instead of accepting the potential Ukrainian victory over Russia with NATO weapons and giving due lesson to the aggressor, they want perfect solution where people don't get killed anymore and where Putin is appeased. They don't want to accept that such a solution is impossible in real life.
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