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Then it's very clever of Russia to throw the remaining male population of those areas into combat: with continued Western support for Ukraine, they'll keep lining up against that wall and falling there.
I think the collapse of Russian war effort and probably government can come with little fanfare and forewarning, certainly no nuclear option.
On this note, what do you think about Kadyrov's retirement announcement?
Kadyrov is back
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I don't know how much combat deaths will actually matter demographically at the current mode of warfare. Losses are still counted in (tens of) thousands, whereas the populations of the DNR (Ukraine) are counted in (tens of) millions, and, well, there isn't a lot of human capital in that entire region anyway. Both parties are still squarely in the "spend materiel, preserve people" phase of systemic warfare, where on the margin being willing to preserve people a bit less benefits you because it lets you spend your remaining materiel much more effectively.
Anything could happen, of course, but the likelihood of this strikes me as grossly overstated. I don't think that nukes are likely in absolute terms, but my modal expectation of the situation in a year is an uneasy stalemate on a frontline that doesn't look too different from the current one, not the ideas of widespread collapse of any organised externally-directed violence that seem to be based on a Western conception that Russians will wake up and realise how their narrative is largely wrong and the Western one is obviously correct any moment now.
No opinion; I've only seen it filtered through so many non-neutral intermediaries that I couldn't discern whether it was really made, let alone any subtleties about how it was made if it was.
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