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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.
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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