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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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In Ukraine news: Russia to withdraw from city of Kherson

As said in the article, this seems like big news, since Kherson was the only "big city" Russia has conquered in this period of war. Even the pro-Russian sources I follow on Twitter aren't trying to spin this ("Feint! Planned withdrawal! Actually good for Russia!") any more.

Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?

Update: Ukrainian Troops in the town square of Kherson as of two hours ago (about 15:00 local time)

edit: @ZorbaTHut, is theMotte redirecting mirror links to twitter-actual intended behavior? If I wanted to link to twitter I wouldn't be using a mirror.

There's this complicated knot of code that takes a bunch of common redirectors for various sites and changes them based on user preference. There's actually a setting in your preferences that makes it redirect all Twitter or Nitter links to Nitter, if you prefer. I think it's sort of a cool idea, but it's also badly coded and not very extensible; I've mostly just left it alone while I think about what I want to do with it.

Try nitter.ca.

Armchair divisions on both sides were screaming treason yesterday, Russians mad about surrendering territory without a fight, Ukrainians mad about not getting enough footage for their new AMV. Which is probably not the worst possible outcome: if someone managed to negotiate the withdrawal with the leadership of both countries, then a diplomatic solution is a little bit more likely now.

EDIT: looks like someone has forgotten to negotiate a withdrawal with Ukraine or they altered the deal

Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?

Kherson, because bar any un-announced agreement between the Russians and Ukrains over the terms of withdrawal, this will be a fighting retreat. It remains in the Ukrainian interest to force the Russians to retreat under fire rather than in relatively good order. Some of the main crossings are within 10km from being in 'normal' artillery range, which would greatly increase the pain to the Russian retreat.

But for the rest of this winter? I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's much lower tempo/scale meant to make the Russian conscripts miserable rather than make a major breakthrough. Winter is well and here, and while it's not been the worst winter, the Ukrainians have been having as much trouble as anyone else in the relatively favorable southern terrain. There's also plenty of media of the Ukrainians having shot through their artillery barrels from over-use, they have indeed taken significant attrition in the units that were committed to Kherson that will need to be reorganized/reset/retrained, and so on. Plus, it's November. I wouldn't say it will be a quiet winter, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Ukrainians take an operational pause of about a month just to reset from Kherson, and then they'll face the decision of starting something in the middle of winter before Christmas, and of course the potential season of mud.

Given the timelines, and the ongoing western training/equipping pipelines, I wouldn't be surprised for a major offensive after the season of mud (which is not the same across the country, and would support an earlier offensive in the south than the north).

More interesting to me is the Russian side of this.

For one, Putin actually capitulated to his leadership advocating the retreat. This was probably the influence of General Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russian forces in Syria and who had (or retained) a good reputation with Putin and was brought in to take over last month. Surovikin succeeding where the Defense Ministry had failed for some time, but also overcoming the hardliners who had insisted escalation (which had included conscription) were needed to avoid the appearance of future defeats, is revealing.

For a second, just as the Ukrainians have reason for an overall pause, so do the Russians. The Russians have put conscripts around the fronts already, but many have also been put into training regimines as the Russians try to re-build their training organization infrastructure. A few months of relative lull can get the Russians from the embarassment of totally untrained conscripts to a maybe minimally trained, and have basic defenses prepared through the winter, etc.

Third and finally, an operational lull is likely the last/best chance Putin will have to force an armistice/truce/peace and turn this into a frozen conflict along post-Kherson lines. The Russians have been targetting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and are likely to continue, which hasn't yet caused a grid collapse but eventually would/could if they keep throwing enough drones at it. While the European energy card has failed to meet the pre-war expectations of what a cutoff would entail, being a major pain instead of a catastrophe, breaking the Ukrainian energy grid and leveraging that with other options might be seen as a way to compel the unicorn of European forcing a pro-Russia settlement at a point when Russia probably has the most relevant territory it has going forward.

This is a window, however, and I admit to being bear-ish on its prospects, because as the Europeans bring more energy and energy import infrastructure online in the coming months, the Russian leverage drops.

It currently doesn't seem to be a fighting retreat.

Indeed. It appears the fighting retreat was what was happening the last few weeks. And egg on my face for not raising that possibility either, despite some (admittedly contradictory) reports of partial withdrawals. It remains to be see how much was/was not withdrawn- there seems to be indications that some conscripts brought in to buffer the more experienced elements were left behind and told to basically do whatever, with many of them donning civilians and trying to go to ground in the city, but the consolidation of the west bank seems to be going on quickly. It remains to be seen how much was left behind, but... well, we shall see.

bar any un-announced agreement

That's a pretty big bar. It's the single best explanation for this combination of maneuver and publicity.

My guess is that it's part of initial secret diplomacy. The best evidence will be the ferocity (or lack thereof) of the Ukrainian attack now. If they smash the bridges and run six divisions into Kherson, capturing/killing large numbers of Russians, I'm wrong. If the fighting is light, but the Ukrainians make steady progress, then it's more likely talks.

That's a pretty big bar. It's the single best explanation for this combination of maneuver and publicity.

I caution against the strength of this assessment. What we're seeing is compatible with this assessment, and it's not an unreasonable assessment, but it's also compatible with Russia having learned an important lesson from the retreat at Izyum, where they lost control of the narrative and received much more damage from an obviously pending issue because no one official could say what was obvious in the social media space, that the position was untenable. This combination of maneuver and publicity is absolutely taking control of the narrative in a way the Russians consistently try to influence, without the making-it-up-as-they-go-along that was a large part of what made Izyum a catastrophe.

A point to be made is that even if Kherson wasn't about to fall immediately but in the coming months, its nature of it as an untenable position has been generally recognized for some time. If even Putin can be made to recognize that- and implicitly this is a shared assumption in the negotiation hypothesis or else Putin wouldn't have a need to make a deal there- then even in the lack of an agreement, there would need to be maneuver and publicity to exit in as good order and with as much damage control as possible.

My guess is that it's part of initial secret diplomacy. The best evidence will be the ferocity (or lack thereof) of the Ukrainian attack now. If they smash the bridges and run six divisions into Kherson, capturing/killing large numbers of Russians, I'm wrong. If the fighting is light, but the Ukrainians make steady progress, then it's more likely talks.

The issue with this test is that smashing and running six divicisions into Kherson may not be within their capability. The Ukrainians weren't exactly days or maybe even weeks from breaking into Kherson before this announcement, and have been trying to smash the bridges for months with mixed effects at best.

There is also a domestic Ukrainian political consideration to consider. Kherson has been a significant meat-grinder for some time, and while the Ukrainians have made it work (as obvious output is now obvious), there's always a balance between pure military optimization (destroy as many Russians as fast as possible), and military-political strategy (not lose political support, by politicians or public, increasing the casualties of an already 'won' engagement that won't end the war). If the Ukrainians ran six divisions at Kherson, and got a bloody nose for the trouble but no appreciable change to the strategic balance of power, that would be both an internal liability, but also an external diplomatic liability.

And this is without the third level of meta-strategy on how to deal with the people who do want to try and leverage this into talks/peace settlements. Regardless of whether this evacuation is part of a deal, there are significant parts of the Western governments backing Ukraine who will seek to make it the basis of a deal and compel an armistice. This goes into a rabbit hole of competing theories/counter-theories and distinction of positions, but a point here is that if you are a Ukrainian maximalist, the key to success in the longer war isn't destroying the Russian forces located in Kherson now, but to sustain Western support long enough for a long war, and so operational maximalism is in tension with strategic optimization.

but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed

The Russian army managed to proceed westwards under literally Stalin, so I don't really think you can characterise the Russian infantryman as a creature with great susceptibility to morale damage. Lose: concentration camp. Win: gulag!

Stalin, yes. But also Zhukov, Chuikov, Rokossovsky, Vasilevsky, Vatutin, Konev...the Red Army leadership corps was worlds better than the current corrupt clique of yes-men the Russians seem to have.

I think you're wrong here on several levels: both in terms of their objective competence and in terms of their troops' perception of their competence (which is the relevant factor for morale). Consider that Russia's WW2 generals were:

  • Predominantly literal peasants because those were the only people the commies would promote, cough epigenetics cough

  • Predominantly the bottom of their respective military academy classes because all the good ones had been shot 1936-1939

  • Recently guilty of the immense fuck-up of having been totally unprepared for Barbarossa (modern historians might be inclined to attribute this failure exclusively to Stalin personally, but one suspects that the median contemporary Russian would have begun to harbour suspicions about the entire military command, especially given all the pro-Stalin-personally agitprop)

  • Many of the commanders you mentioned were repeatedly demoted for incompetence, e.g. Zukhov in July 1941. Rokossovsky had only recently been fished out of NKVD prison for being a foreign spy and shoved into a uniform, talk about scraping the barrel ffs. Are you really gonna have high morale when fighting under that?

As such, I stick to my guns that Russian morale in 2022 is basically guaranteed to be higher than Russian morale in 1943.

It's worth adding that the Soviet casualties in the early and mid parts of the war ranged from 2-4 times as high as the German. Even during the end when the Soviets outnumbered the Germans 4 to 1 with better equipment, more fuel, and total air superiority, the Soviets usually only achieved around 1 to 1 casualty ratios. Not only is it hard to believe the Russians had much faith in their leadership, its hard to actually call Zhukov et al better than what the Russians are putting out now. They were just in a much more favorable situation materially.

I'd suggest that item two had a whole lot more to do with it than item one given that many of the western allies armies were similarly lower-class affairs.

The RKKA had British and American lend-lease instead of sanctions, though.

The United States delivered to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the aviation fuel including nearly 90 percent of high-octane fuel used, 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic consumption.

I note here a rather egregious goalpost shift from "morale" to "ordinance".

Fighting a war on your own territory with plentiful supplies works wonder for the morale. Fighting on the enemy territory with shit supplies tends to undermine it.

The Russia of WW2 doesn't exist anymore than the US of that day does.

The Russian people will put up with a lot, but I don't think the modern state has anything approaching the capabilities of 1940s USSR.

Literally Stalin's regime, at least as far as I can judge from people's mood today, had better propaganda and uniting myth than Putin.

Objective milestone that decidedly disproves, along with the izyum-lyman offensive, the main claim from russia bulls, that russia would keep gaining territory at the expense of ukraine indefinitely. Specifically I remember a claim that Kharkov would fall to russia before Kherson falls to ukraine. And Kherson falling was one of Karlin’s conditions for being proven wrong. Where are all you people now ? You owe us an update, an apology, a delta, or something.

Where were those people before? I don't recall seeing that position in posts here, though it's of course possible that they were simply rendered invisible by excessive downvotes.

There's also this guy, among others, who would take similar positions without making concrete predictions or taking any kind of responsibility for being wrong. I want to say the deleted user was Navalgazer420xx, but I could be mistaken. You can follow the links in that post for other people making that argument.

I suspect most of the people who were notorious for taking this position changed their username when moving to the new site based on posting styles.

Please, see some of the responses to my request for Ukraine prediction in July for people that may need to update their priors.

For example, someone said there was less than a 5% chance that Ukraine would conquer more than Russia in the following 2 months and that there was less than a 5% chance that Ukraine would make ANY significant gains.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/w1s5b7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_18_2022/ih9i22f/?context=3

That seems to be Shakesneer, the one person it does seem this discussion is converging towards seeing as being likely very miscalibrated regarding Russian prospects as of three months ago. No other predictions in there strike me as declaring the reality we since observed particularly unlikely.

Interesting to review though, thanks for the link.

HlynkaCG had the best prediction on the old Motte that I am aware of, though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wda188/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_01_2022/iiq2xzd/?context=3

Thanks but I also predicted that Putin wouldn't invade.

My pleasure.

The other one of note is Bearjew saying that Ukraine having a 35% of holding Kramatorsk through the end of the year was optimistic, implying that there was more than a 65% that Russia would take it.

They were legion and upvoted. shakesneer, cullis, parsnip, difficult ad, jkf, igi, etc.

Could you actually link an example post?

Shakesneer:

But Russia clearly is continuing to acquire territory on the ground, and Ukraine has yet to do much of anything in response.

Claim repeated by jkf downthread.

I think the claims in that post seem to be measured, reasonably well-hedged and a plausible impression to arrive at based on the situation on the ground back then (even if developments since then have shown that the poster's apparent expectation that the situation will continue turned out wrong). I think there is nothing to apologise for here, and demands for an update appear to be an isolated demand for rigour as I for instance don't see anything like it leveled against the posters who backed mainstream predictions of imminent Russian economic collapse. Do you actually think that the post you linked is guilty of greater epistemological vices than the ambient level of this forum, or is it that you have a specific beef because you think the side you support was unjustly robbed of energy/hype/confidence there?

It’s not an isolated, random claim. Ukraine’s relative lack of ground gained at that point(ignoring the kiev retreat) was the keystone of the russia bull thesis, repeated again and again in these discussions, as can be seen in the linked thread. And understandably so: it’s a simple, objective argument to just look at the changes in the colored areas of the map.

But when the keystone collapses, I expect repercussions on the general thesis. No one needs to apologize, being wrong isn’t a crime, that was just needling to get a response. But this event should change their minds, and if not they should at least explain why it hasn’t. Karlin, for all his faults, recognized this when he put kherson falling as one of his conditions. Claims of russian economic collapse by contrast are marginal to the russian bear thesis.

Shakesneer seems to hedge, yes, but upthread he gives credit to what later events have conclusively proven to be an absolute clown: will shriver. He claimed after the first days of izyum that the UA was destroyed and would never again be in a position to mount an offensive, etc.

I said: Kharkov will not fall. They said: kherson will not fall. Is it an isolated demand for rigor for me to question them when kherson falls?

No one needs to apologize, being wrong isn’t a crime, that was just needling to get a response.

How about just addressing those people if they make posts again that indicate they did not change their opinion, instead of polluting the commons with heat-raising rhetoric? You didn't even ping any of the people in question, so how was anyone supposed to know you meant them with your hyperbolic insinuations of confident wrongness?

Claims of russian economic collapse by contrast are marginal to the russian bear thesis.

I don't get the sense that they were in the first few months.

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They're measured and well hedged because that thread is from 2 months ago and thier confident predictions of "the Ukrainian military will collapse within days" had long since gone the way of "two weeks to flatten the curve". In contrast, here's the original CW thread from the week of the initial invasion.

I see nothing of the kind in the thread you linked, and only a little in the associated "Ukraine Invasion Megathread" from the sticky. Unrolling more than halfway through the thread, all I found was this this single comment from Shakesneer, which still is quite hedged, and his immediate response from a user I have no recollection of, who still gives a timeline of six months rather than "days", and then another from @FCfromSSC. On the other hand, here is a post uncritically echoing a claim that Russian aviation will collapse within a matter of weeks (still looks fine on flightradar24 to me), and I scrolled by another one linking a video with similar claims about the rest of the economy (which I unfortunately lost again to the sea of Javascript before copying the link). The vast majority of posts are not making confident predictions of any kind that didn't pan out, and either way a week or two into a war that was this far out of our usual models of how the world works is not really a time window in which I would expect most people to exhibit superforecaster-level clarity on it.

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He'll probably re-adjust to 90% russian victory at the first good omen like the last time his busted predictions forced a downgrade.

That would fit with a Russian strategy of hammering Ukrainian-Ukraine and then retreating to a more defensible position of just the majority ethnic Russian regions.

Russia already had taken pretty much all the majority-ethnic-Russian (as opposed to Russian-speaking Ukrainian) regions before Feb 2022.

I've heard some ambiguous reports of Ukraine having moderate successes pushing against the line of contact near Lisichansk, but otherwise it seems that the holy grail for them would be to push downward to cut the land connection to Crimea around Melitopol.

I find it curious to see the contrast between how every city Russia captured from Ukraine was a month-long slog and massive drain on manpower and operational resources (consider Mariupol, where between logistics and the alignment of the local population the situation was very close to as good as they could hope for, and the struggles for Severodonetsk/Lisichansk and Liman later, not to mention that they still haven't cracked Avdeevka which is basically a suburb of Donetsk), and every city they surrendered so far was given up with barely a fight. What stopped them from digging in somewhere in Kherson and giving Ukraine its own Mariupol? Do they simply not have any sufficiently capable or fanatical troops willing to fight to the death under miserable conditions like Azov did, are they still thinking of saving them for some hypothetical more important future engagement, or do they figure Ukraine would have an easier time smoking them out for one reason or another? (I did already wonder why Russia struggled so much in Mariupol; do they just not have adequate bunker-buster bombs, or did they not want to use them because of the civilians sheltered with the Azovites? My read of the Russian public sphere was that sympathy for those civilians, most of whom were probably spouses/children of Azov fighters, was rather low, so in that case it really would have had to be about Western PR or "red lines".)

In related weird news, the Russian-appointed deputy governor of Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, was reported to have died "in a traffic accident" today. I mean, who knows, maybe he really did just run a red light in front of a tank trying to get to the other shore faster, but given the timing and scarcity of information this seems like a likely cover story; more likely in my eyes that it was an assassination or that he even committed suicide in light of the situation. (edit, some relevant telegrams just now started circulating a picture of a thoroughly wrecked car on a road near Novaya Kakhovka (the city with the dam across the Dnepr northeast of Kherson) claiming it to be his.)

I think a mistake that a lot of commentators (both in Russia and the West) have made is conflating Yanukovych's "Party of Regions" Ukraine with Euromaidan Ukraine. Back in 2019 I was in Poland for a few months, helping set up local training/maintenance pipelines for the Polish DoD, and had the opportunity to talk to a few UAF guys who were cross-training with them.

According to them Ukraine had been trying very hard since 2014 to crackdown on corruption and rebuild their military and economy along more western lines. They described the war in Donbas as "a wake-up call" and were quite adamant about having no desire to be soviets again. Granted, guys being sent to cross-train are almost certainly going to be the cream of the crop/those already flagged for promotion but still... Reading about the alleged persecution of Russian speakers in Ukraine I found myself wondering just how much of it was "racial animus" vs "genuine attempts to fight corruption". It's probably impossible to ever know for sure, but my impression at the time was that the Euromaidan government enjoyed a much broader base of support than many were giving it credit for that the UAF was quite serious about getting it's act together. Accordingly my prediction back when this all kicked of was that any attempt by Russia to push into western Ukraine was likely to end in a blood-soaked clusterfuck. Id say that prediction has been borne out.

My suspicion now is much the same as it was in April, that this will play out similarly to the Russo-Finish war, with Russia ultimately "winning" on paper by gaining some minor territorial concession but loosing in most of the ways that actually matter. IE suffering outsize casualties and utterly destroying any future chance of bringing Helsinki Kiev back into the empire.

While conviction certainly plays a part, it's not particularly confusing if you look at the geography. To turn Kherson into a grinding urban conflict like Mariupol would mean Ukrainian forces entering the city. This would mean Ukraine separating Kherson from the Antonivka Road Bridge that is the only point of supply or evacuation. Any notional preparations to fight a siege in Kherson would therefore only be relevant if Russians had reached the point where they had lost this key bridgehead. Any Russian forces staying in Kherson would be doing so with the knowledge that they would either die or be captured there, once Ukraine closed in.

The timing also makes sense. Given recent Ukrainian advances, there was only about 5km left until Ukraine could comfortably saturate the sole escape route with M777 or 155mm equivalents, after which withdrawal would become much more dicey.

My personal copium is that Russia is focused on debilitating Ukraine’s economy, then killing their troops at a higher rate than they kill Russian troops, while implementing cheap drones in combat. This is the most cost effective way to win the war. Russia has to pay for a few hundred thousand troops next door, while NATO has to pay for all of Ukraine’s military plus some significant part of twenty million citizens still in Ukraine. Russia gets to knock the electricity in Kyiv and elsewhere to prevent a semblance of a modern economy, and harass in other costly ways. For every dollar Russia spends, NATO will have to pay 10 to 30. The limiting factor of Ukraine is the economy and men. In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.

In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.

A withdrawal from Kherson would have the exact opposite effect, as falling back behind the natural boundary of the Dnieper will effectively shorten the front and enable both sides to redistribute any forces West of the Zaporizhzhia-Melitopol axis.

Well, one of the reasons might indeed be that there were considerable advantages for Ukraine for holding Mariupol: it kept Russian troops tied and away from the Donetsk front at a crucial time, and the bravery of the troops at Mariupol also served as an obvious inspiration at a dark period for Ukraine and offered propagandistic material, both internally and externally. This holding action got Ukraine through to the period in the summer when Western aid started showing up and making some difference.

More to the point, though... maybe it is true, the Russians really just don't have the sufficient spirit to do it?

Throughout the war, the pro-Russian side on the Internet has banged the drum about how Ukraine (as an entity separate from the Russian world) is FAKE FAKE FAKE, an invention of the Austrians and Poles and Germans, imagination of the exile communities, forcibly maintained by Nazi Banderites, an unsustainable made-up chimera, a "Reddit-ass country", "fighting for globohomo and Pride parades", a number of similar claims intended to bolster the idea that at any moment everything would just break and Russians would be received as liberators in the end and so on. Meanwhile, of course, Russia is a real country, the realest there is, and Russians would of course fight for it in the same way as in 1941 and would gladly just rather die in a nuclear hellfire than lose.

Well, the proof of the pudding etc., and the taste of the pudding would now seem to indicate that Ukrainians, individual cases indicating otherwise aside, are truly fighting like hell for their invented made-up Reddit Nazi globohomo country, while russians, individual cases indicating otherwise, are losing whatever spirit they might have had at some point, as indicated, for instance, the massive waves of exiles leaving the country at whatever indication there has been that they might be conscripted and have to fight.

Defending one's country is very different from participating in a bullshit war of aggression, even if one is the type to stan based $TEAM from the couch regardless of morality. And being forced by circumstance to defend your county makes this country more real in your mind. This is the issue Putin (and those loyalist commenters) have cynically and irrationally dismissed. In my opinion, Ukraine was a country of comparable «realness» with Russia before the war, but now it's a living movement. Nothing new since Machiavelli. All this pseudo-historical essentialist analysis about the origins of Ukraine, how could it persuade anyone that Ukrainians will fold? Nations are in fact imagined communities and so long as Ukrainians themselves don't imagine themselves to be meaningless Austro-Hungarian chimeras, they will act like people belonging to a nation.

That said, even back in 2013 there have been opinions stressing the fragility of Russian identity:

Washington political analyst Paul Gobl, the author of the blog Window on Eurasia, shared with the Russian service of Voice of America an analysis of the processes taking place in Russia and assessed American-Russian relations.

PG: When you observe the processes in Russia from a remote position, the unexpected growth of regionalism within the Russian Federation is striking. Revival and strengthening of Siberian identity, Eastern identity, Pomeranian - in the North, Cossack - throughout the south of Russia. This identity revolution reflects two important trends and points to a third.

First, this is a reflection of the fact that, contrary to the beliefs of most people, the Russian national identity is the weakest in Eurasia. Self-identification, for example, among Avars, Armenians or Ukrainians is much stronger than among Russians. In many ways, the Russians turned out to be the main victims of the state named after them. They were allowed to govern, but only at the cost of abandoning their own development as a nation. As a result, fragmentation occurs.

Geography and poor management are also contributing. You cannot drive by car from one end of the country to the other, because there are no normal highways, the railways are rusting, most airlines are squeezed out of business and are no longer functioning - huge parts of the country are isolated from each other. As a result, regional alliances are formed. The same type of regionalism that was brutally suppressed by Boris Yeltsin in the middle of the 1990s is being reanimated.

Combining and restraining the growth of regionalism and sub-ethnic Russian nationalism will be a serious challenge for the center. In the medium and long term, the growth of Russian sub-ethnic nationalism is a much more serious threat to Moscow’s ability to control the situation than any other “non-Russian” national movement.

(This is, of course, just wishful thinking. But in a way, it's gentle. Russians do not start to identify as «Siberians»: they just learn English and leave).

Eh, I think that read is a little too optimistic for the Ukrainian side too. Mariupol, in the end, was held by something as close to Nazi Banderites as it gets; the regulars in the city (who were holed up in the factory on its north) capitulated comparatively quickly. There's also the aspect that Ukraine seems to continue delivering unforced PR morsels to Russia (not that they make it far outside of Russian channels) with group photos of Zelenskiy's entourage or troops spearheading the recapture of territories regularly featuring someone in the background flashing swastika tattoos or SS uniform patches, which indicates to me that the neonazis are considered fairly indispensable as particularly trustworthy or otherwise "elite" units (in the case of the presidential entourage, perhaps even that the loyalty of anyone else is considered too questionable for safety). Perhaps the real lesson is that neonazis are the only ones (in this conflict, at least) who are really willing to keep up the fight "in the dark". It's not like Russia didn't try to establish their own unit of Nazi LARPers (Wagner), but the memeplex just doesn't work that well without a coherent ethnonationalist idea behind it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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