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Notes -
Strelkov, who for all his craziness seems to me to have demonstrated the best intuition regarding the dynamics of this war and the modes of operation and capabilities of each side so far, advanced a theory I thought interesting on Telegram yesterday. According to him, the Western coalition is deliberately trying to bait Russia into believing that the next two weeks are a now-or-never window to start another offensive - the failure of Ukraine to start any serious large-scale counterattacks, the published timelines for the delivery of the next packages of Western weaponry, the inexplicable publicity of the US supposedly strongly advising Ukraine to pull out of Bakhmut already, and the show of Scholz still refusing to send Ukraine tanks but it only being a matter of time until he has to bow to pressure all are meant to create a picture that now is a high point of the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian preparedness and from March onwards Ukrainian conventional firepower is on track to eclipse Russia's for good. (...and for some reason we may never now all details of, proactive nuclear escalation by Russia has been taken off the table.) All of these are inconsistent with a posture you would adopt if you were actually going through a concerning stretch of weakness, and so this would suggest that the West believes that it can win against whatever Russia throws at it now (and all things equal we may be past the "more war = more free economic stimulus" point and winning sooner is better).
Interesting perspective, but that's almost certainly attributing more coordination and Machiavellian aptitude to the organization than NATO actually has. It's still the traditional worry about "escalation", along with Germany's domestic politics making it a perpetual stick-in-the-mud.
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