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Since it seems that the situation has settled into another quite period while the sides sort their shit out, any other other DISGUSTING GEAR FUCKERS want to make predictions about the Special Operation?
Last time, I did better than most but still got blown the fuck out 'cause of shocking aggression from Ukraine and surprising incompetence from Russia, but Russia is running out of easy room to be incompetent and Ukraine is reaching the limits of easy aggression.
That said: Newest aid packages to Ukraine add capabilities that they did not have before, eg, a tank with a computer in it that was designed after the end of the cold war that doesn't explode if you sneeze on it, and Russia just dismissed the dude that organized the super clean double retreat across the dnipro (which was shocking; I wasn't sure it would happen but if it happened I thought it would be some combination of snafu and bloodbath).
None of this might matter given the fact that Russians are settles/behind a river.
Even with all this, it seems like the war will not end for the foreseeable future baring Putin dying of cancer and maybe not even then.
95% the war continues into 2024 in some regard
GIVEN PUTIN DIES in the next 5 months: 80% the war continues into 2024 in some regard
85% the war is HOT into 2024
90% no major territorial changes in the next 1 months
70% no major territorial changes in the next 3 months
40% no major territorial changes in the next 11 months
99% no nuclear action taken by Russia over the next 11 months.
60% Ukraine gets ATACMS in the next 3 months.
Back in January of '22 when the Russian build-up of troops along the border I stated my belief that it was likely a feint and/or just more saber-rattling because it seemed pretty clear to me that any attempt to take western Ukraine by force was likely to end badly for the Russians, and I just kind of assumed that Putin and the rest of the Russian Government/Military would've arrived at a similar conclusion.
I subsequently predicted back in April that the Russians would not be able to hold on to any of their gains west of the Dnieper and that if the war ended before the year was out it would be with Kharkiv, Kherson, and Odessa all unquestionably in Ukrainian (Euromaidan Party) hands. This was subsequently dismissed by many users here as a "bold take".
While I may have gotten the initial invasion call wrong, Overall I feel like my priors have been pretty well vindicated. I also can't help but take a bit of perverse pride/schadenfreude in noticing that a lot of those users who were giving me shit for predicting anything less than total Russian victory back in March and April, IE Cimafara, Motteposting, Difficult_Ad, BearJew, april_6th_1488_bc (or whatever the exact date was) have all either deleted their accounts or been silent on the topic since.
Solely for the sake of balance, I was going to note that sansampersamp also had dropped off, but then here they are.
I do think an amount of this has more to do with the community migration from reddit than Ulterior Motives, but also general evaporative cooling. Things that might have been more justifiable to believe 7-8 months ago are less so now, and so people dropping their previous positions should, hopefully, be what we'd expect.
Overall, I think the Russia-skeptic takes from the early war have been most validated, and continue to be generally reliable. That's not the same as the Ukraine-uber-allies, but Russia Stronk memeplex has been thoroughly discredited to 'maybe Russia still wins, technically, by exhaustion' in most of the internet.
Ackowledging I suffer from epistemic learned helplessness, have you considered that western propaganda is just that good? It’s easy to dismiss obvious propaganda in the opening weeks and months of the war. But when you have the entire western media ecosystem singing the same pro Ukraine tune for a whole year, I think most people just shrug and say “I guess Russia is a joke after all”
I’m not even saying Russia is doing well. I’m just suggesting that a year long propaganda campaign can work on even the most skeptical people.
Russia is not a joke. People kept thinking that Russian supersoldiers are 3m high supergiants. Now some think that they are stunted 1.2m high mentally-disabled midgets.
Both are wrong, Russia continues to have more soldiers and overall more weaponry. If they manage to collect themselves - then they can attrit Ukrainian army at about 1:1 ration which is highly favorable to them.
Obviously, no war at all would be even better but...
And some correction was needed, but beware of overcorrection.
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I think most of the, shall we say, war-watching types who were not out-and-out Russia Kool-Aid drinkers concluded "I guess Russia is a joke after all" (and, contrariwise, that Ukraine is not the joke it was during Crimea) quite shortly after the initial shock phase bogged down. I've personally tried to consciously adjust my reflective Russia-is-a-joke reaction to more "neutral" several times, which has led to me underpredicting Ukrainian advances in, say, Kharkiv and Herson. Generally speaking "Russia is a joke and the specific operations they are trying will probably fail or at most result to very minor victories" has been the safest prediction throughout the war.
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Basically what @Dean said. As one of those "blob-adjacent boomer types with a Jane's subscription" I was skeptical that the Russian Army, which prior to 2022 had not concentrated and deployed in anything larger than division strength since the early 90s, had the personnel, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to pacify a country of 45 million people. I remember a conversation where a pro-Russian poster was touting the effectiveness of the "filtration camp" model in Chechnya, and asking how exactly the Russian government planned to forcibly inter, and subsequently feed/house/transport 4 - 5 million people because that was the scale of the project he was suggesting if he wanted to achieve a proportional effect. I never got an answer.
Meanwhile on the Ukrainian side, my impression just following regional politics was that 2014 had lit a fire under the asses of the Ukrainian nationalists and that the Ukrainian Government/Military had put bunch of effort in the intervening years into tamping down corruption in the armed forces and generally "getting their shit together". Accordingly I predicted that the UAF were likely a lot more capable of and willing to put up a fight than many were giving them credit for.
Finally Ukraine's growing economic and cultural ties with Poland and Romania suggested to me that popular sentiment in Ukraine was genuinely on the side of further European integration, which in turn made me skeptical of Russian claims that their troops would be welcomed as liberators anywhere outside the regions they already de facto controlled (IE Crimea and the separatist regions of the Donbass).
Near as I can tell none of these impressions can were really based on "western propaganda" or assuming that "Russia was/is a joke" they were simply extrapolations based on a combination of available information and prior-experience
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The flippant answer would be 'Sure, and then I watch American news media,' a more meta answer would be this is prone to non-falsifiability because 'have you ever considered that you're just wrong and being manipulated' is as much a framing question as 'have you considered not beating your wife?', and a temporal answer would be 'I'm not talking about positions after a year, but Russia-skeptic points from a year ago.' Points such as the military manning issues for occupying a country the size of Ukraine, the implications of NATO provision of weapons to those willing to resist, and the consequences of doing so for Russian positions and interests in Europe were all raised a year ago, and have stood the test of time.
I am not the entire western media ecosystem (thank god), nor have I been arguing that Russia is a joke. Doomed to failure, unable to achieve it's strategic ends, already having suffered a critical strategic defeat that it can't reverse into a meaningful triumph, yes. But not a joke.
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