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Notes -
Your Quarterly Ukraine War check-in
Three and a half months ago, we checked in on the war in Ukraine. That post was itself a check in to follow up on dire predictions from the pro-Russia posters in fall of 2025 that the loss of Pokrovsk was heralding the collapse of Ukrainian front lines and encirclement of Ukrainian troops. Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts after the last check in, so I can only leave you with this:
I expected the Iran war to be a major tailwind for Russia (oil prices, sanctions relief, US distraction) but on the contrary, the western information space seems to argue that things will remain stalemated for the foreseeable future. Ukraine seems to be pumping out drones (is this all that matters now?), and has started hitting Russian oil refineries. People have been hyping up what seems to be a mostly symbolic bombing of Moscow. The map hasn't moved, supposedly Russian recruitment is down. The Russian spring offensive has been underway for several weeks and made no progress:
On the flip side, people write articles about how bad the Russian economy is, and then drop this line near the end:
I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has insight into the rhetoric on the Russian side or the pro-Russian perspective at the moment.
So - any new/modified predictions? We had @ABigGuy4U saying collapse in July-August (still a few months to go), @Lizzardspawn saying to look at the frequency of blackouts in Kiev (still unchanged at 6-8 hours a day afaict).
No mention of this?
Seems like Putin floating the trial balloon for negotiated settlement to me.
Interestingly there has also been a reported leak of the internal messaging Russia was planning on using to sell a climb down from their maximalist war goals to their population and supporters in the west. It seems plausible as a document, and has a few interesting elements.
First - their expected terms of peace:
We also have some good quotes on how they will message, including:
I'll leave it to the audience here to decide if those peace terms seem realistic (*edit - realistically acceptable to the Ukrainians and likely to end the war if proposed) - they don't for me, however this does seem to suggest that Russia is hurting enough to consider actually negotiating rather than just pretending to in order to keep Trump on side.
Meanwhile, following the very serious drone developments this year where Ukraine is now killing more Russians than are mobilized/replaced and stalling out their attacks, we have pro Russian military channels like notes_veterans saying
The situation is still very serious for Ukraine, and the timeline seems to be that the war will last at least into late this year, but Russia seems to be on the horns of a real dilemma here - take peace negotiations seriously, and accept that they are negotiating with Ukraine and not Trump, meaning they will need to make that deal sweet enough that Ukraine actually wants it. Or, option two, mass mobilize and try to break the Ukrainians somehow before that shakes apart the social contract.
Or, do a classic Putin procrastination, and end up in the same dilemma but a weaker position this time in the autumn/fall. I honestly think that might be what happens until something on one side or the other finally snaps.
There is no way Ukraine accepts any deal that does not include security guarantees. The risk of Russia regrouping and attacking again in the near future is just too high.
I am not sure what these mythical security guarantees should be. They can be anything including ineffective guarantees for South Vietnam ("respond with full force" by Nixon) which broke within months of enacting them. Or as in case of Afghanistan, where USA simply withdrew the guarantees and just asked Taliban to behave for 14 months needed to abandon their security partner.
I am not sure why either of those scenarios cannot happen at any time. Especially if there will be multiple countries doing that - e.g. USA, France, Germany and UK being the security partner. I can imagine a new US administration asking Ukraine for mineral resources rights in exchange of guarantees in 2029 and when denied, they will just say they are withdrawing them in 2 years or some such leaving everything up to France and UK and other countries who may do their traditional Munich Agreement solution to unwanted security guarantees.
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It seems realistic to me, which of course is different from stating that it's true.
Apologies, I meant that I don't think they'll realistically be the final terms Ukraine accepts absent a big change in the battlefield situation (and the lack of that is why we're here) or a loss of European support. Terms like that have a lot of Russian hopium baked in - especially seeing as that's pretty much the list Russia put forwards when they were stalling negotiations by being way too optimistic. I do however think it's realistic that that's a list of things Russia would like and could possibly sell internally if accepted.
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Yeah, there's no way of getting reliable information anymore, so it's all going to be seen in retrospect.
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