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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.
I dislike percentages as a means of numeric false certainty, but I'll make a few predictions.
I expect the war to continue into 2024, barring a Putin death scenario leading to a Russian withdrawal. As long as Putin lives and the Russian army is not comprehensively destroyed in the field, I do not see him withdrawing from Ukraine before a fall of Crimea, which I do not see in 2024 barring major Russian conventional defeats in eastern Ukraine.
I expect both a Russian and Ukrainian this spring after the mud-season, with Russia's prioritizing the Donbas. Ukraine's will be aimed at advancing a southern corridor to cut the land-bridge to Crimea, though it may be also/instead intended to cut at the Russian southern supply lines for the Donbas offensive.
I expect this year's Russian strategic goal to secure the administrative boundaries of the Donbas and other eastern regions, with some additional buffer as possible, before transitioning to a posture of strategic defense and trying to present fully-occupied province annexations as fait accompli and basis for armistice lines while trying to exhaust European support. I do not expect the Russians to seriously press for all the claimed annex territories, ie. reclaim Kherson, and I expect that the Russians will be unable to sustain broad-front operations despite mobilization due to attrition of precision fires and modern maneuver equipment.
I expect this year's Ukrainian strategy to cut the land-bridge to Crimea, and as possible start of a logistical siege of Crimea by the end of the year while forcing Russia to relocate forces from mid-eastern Ukraine to south-eastern. The Ukrainian goal will be to continue to attrit Russian maneuver warfare capabilities, especially in modernized mechanized and precision fires, while developing their own maneuver warfare capability.
I expect the Russians will at least temporarily cancel the agriculture shipping deal, and attempt to use the disruption to agricultural exports to pressure Europeans to reduce support for Ukraine / end Russian sanctions. I do not expect this to succeed, even as I do expect middle eastern instability as a result. The russian disruption will likely be most relevant in the context of preventing Ukrainian agriculture from being planted, even if it allows a resumption of the deal.
I expect Russian economic resiliance to sharply deteriorate by mid-year as European energy and insurance sanctions take sharper bites and the short-term Russian economic controls are extended indefinitely. I think it is possible, but not necessarily likely, that China starts subsidizing the Russian economy to allow it to sustain a long-term war footing, including monetary loans and sale of ammunition. I expect Putin to continue the war regardless of economic deterioration, or Chinese (and other) terms of sale.
I expect European willingness to continue to support Ukraine economically to continue. Opportunistic actors like Orban will leverage vetos on Ukrainian aid to enable their position, but current political dynamics continue to make it easier for European states to leverage that for moderating sanctions for compromises than to simply block Ukrainian support. In key European nations (Germany, Italy, and France), pro-Russian political interests will remain easy political targets for domestic political rivals, meaning that pro-Russian coalition politics will continue to be undermined or sold out on case-by-case benefits.
I expect NATO countries to consider expanding aircraft support in earnest this summer, based on the results of the Spring offensives. I expect pressures and war economics will support drones over manned air-superiority fighters. If a fighter is sent, it will likely be in the role of a missile-bus for long-range fires.
I expect that Zelensky will continue to remain in power in Ukraine, barring an assassination. I expect Zelensky to use the context of the war, western pressures, and European Union ascession criteria to justify counter-corruption purges of the Ukrainian government. These will likely catch genuinely corrupt officials, but also have secondary effects of functionally purging suspected pro-Russian oligarchs, and undermine the formation of a counter-Zelensky oligarch coalition party. Opposition parties in the 2024 election will most likely form behind other war leaders/heroes on an anti-Russian axis, not in a pro-Russian fifth columnist, and direct criticism of Zelensky (barring personal scandal) will be muted.
I expect Zelensky to run for re-election, and to be the leading candidate bar personal involvement in corruption scandals. I expect end-of-year strategic priorities (during the next winter/mud season) to be the increased defense of, or attempt to liberate, a 'major' urban area in order to include it in the March 2024 election process.
I expect NATO weapon shipments to hit a qualitative and quantitative critical mass by late 2023 that makes Ukraine favored/expected to launch an offensive, in the early 2024, barring escalating Chinese support for Russia in the form of material.
I do not expect any nuclear weapon use.
I agree with your assessment of the Ukrainian goals. It's their only obvious angle of attack, barring insane stuff like invading Russia itself. What I don't expect is to guess this year's Russian strategic goal. The rumor mill keeps saying Putin's now making all the decisions himself, like Nicholas II at the Stavka, and I haven't been able to guess his next move since 2014. The most logical move would be to pre-empt the Ukrainian offensive on the southern front by an earlier offensive of his own. But this requires a better-trained army, which Putin doesn't really have.
Strictly speaking, they could try and sweep the eastern border before turning towards crimea, with the goal of prioritizing Donbas first and foremost. The issue here is that if the Ukrainians retook the Donbas, a lot European support would start to waver if they could get the 'back to February 2022 lines' as an armistice condition, and they might cut back support there in a way they wouldn't if Ukraine was still in a 'we're fighting to hold on!' narrative on the eastern front. Winning the east means ending the only likely European support that might make retaking crimea possible.
I am not arguing that Ukraine intended to let the Russians advance at Bahkmut, but the boomerang effect of 'the more you publicizing a heroic resistance, the more it hurts when it fails' only hurts you on the return if it actually hurts you. At this point, my read of European politics is that European support will increase, not decrease, if Russia makes advances in the Donbas, meaning the Ukrainians have a... not incentive, but silver-lining, to lean on to prioritize other efforts. While there are certainly some western advocates who would use any Ukrainian setback to argue for an armistice, these people were pretty discredited last year during the height of Russian advances, and that was before western categories of aid began to expand to heavy offensive weapon categories.
I hate to resort to Kreminology, but my read is that Putin has been doubling down on a bet that he can make the Europeans, but especially the Germans, stop supporting Ukraine / stop sanctioning Russia before the Russian economy starts consuming itself in earnest, or at least cause a fundamental political rift between Germany and the Atlanticist/NATO alliance.
A lot of not just last year, but the years before, suggests the Putin sees Europe, and especially Germany, as the political center of gravity for resolving Ukraine. As much as Putin's narrative has focused on NATO and the US, Putin caused the Maidan crisis as a result of German-led European influence in rising Ukraine, engaged in the Minsk talks with Germany and France, attempted to leverage Nord Stream 2 gas over Germany, threatened German government formation with the Polish-Belarus migrant crisis, tried to raise German advancement of Nord Stream 2 as the pre-war way to avoid war, attempted this winter's gas shortages to make Germany more than anyone else buckle, played to German fears to block arms shipments, and various other German-minded framings. Even the Ukrainian electricity grid targetting and the Ukrainian food disruption have arguable German-tailored narrative targeting- destroying the Ukrainian grid is a threat to the disproportionately German investments in Ukraine, a significant risk to a country whose government is as industry-interest-driven as Germany, while Ukrainian food shortage fan the flames of middle eastern migrant crisis that, well, have driven many years of German policy. This would provide a more meaningful political goal to the power grid attacks than 'hope to terrorize Ukraine into submission,' as while terror bombing has never really worked, frightening investors has.
In this read, Putin thinks he can win- or at least get a win worth continuing the pain- if he can break the German-Atlanticist alliance. If Germany and the pro-Ukraine coalition decisively split, it breaks the American-NATO alliance at a foundational level, breaks EU politics at a fundamental level, and presumably places Germany in a position to re-connect to Russia economically and break the counter-Russian alliance in the west as Germany turns from a cornerstone into a key problem who, by its mass, drags a lot of its most integrated neighbors along with it. Even if you accept you've already lost the military war, breaking your enemy coalition at least gives you time to lick your wounds.
I think this is a flawed and almost certain to fail, overestimating Russian ability to shape the perceptions of other countries, but then I have for many years said I believe Putin is a strategic mediocrity, not a strategic genius. (My expectation is that the route of pro-Russian interest groups in Europe will continue, with being 'soft on Russia' a political poison that coalition parties seek to use against eachother, and that German industrial interests will be more interested in maintaining European and American economic ties than Russian ties.)
Another line of effort for Putin, though this I'm less convinced on, is that Putin believe he can continue fighting with Chinese support. If he can frame the conflict as a major interest for China, then he might be able to get gradually progressing aid from China, to the point that he can counter the superior NATO industrial/economic support to Ukraine with industrial/economic support to Russia. This would presumably be in the form of Chinese ammunition and investments in the Russian industrial complex, not Chinese tanks, but hey, desperation.
(Again, I don't think this would work. China is pretty clearly already prioritizing European market ties over supporting Russian military success.)
Regardless, the Russian strategy since late last year, and at least the power grid attacks, has pretty clearly been political-based, not military-exclusive. The annexations were maximalist, but also a pretty clear framing device to shape subsequent negotiations, while the (lack of) Russian escalation-response following them would be a far better signal of flexibility for the negotiations than the decidedly less impressive alternative, that the Russians were seriously floating the prospect of tactical nuclear response and were shut down hard.
First of all, it would be as hard for Ukrainians to take Russia-controlled Donbass as it's hard for Russia to take Ukraine-controlled Donbass. It's a patchwork of towns and industrial zones with several well-established lines of defense. Second, if they somehow succeed, they'll have to dedicate more and more troops to guarding the border turned frontline. That's probably why they aren't really trying to retake the Starobelsk area.
I agree with you. I don't think a Donbas offensive by Ukraine over a drive to the coast would be a good idea, but it would certainly an idea some of their more reluctant backers would prefer over any attempt at Crimea.
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