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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).
I feel like you are borderline nutpicking the "pro-Russian" side here, but then the nuts may be disproportionately visible because for the more realistic people on it there is nothing to be excited about. Therefore, let me just put down a prediction of "once again, nothing much will happen" for the upcoming quarter here. Maybe the Russians will finally grind their way through the rest of the ruins of Konstantinovka or Kupyansk (though the 90% confidence interval for that is more like 1 year from now), and maybe the Ukrainians will start yet another "successful" counteroffensive that will gain some 200-400km² to then be slowly rolled back over the course of the next 1-2 years at a great cost in life and treasure to Russia, Ukraine and the European taxpayer.
It is more likely that there will be some additional unpublicised backdoor decisions that will influence the longer-term trajectory of the war, such as the addition of further "gentlemen's agreements" about what sort of facilities may not be targeted by long-range bombings. From a purely military standpoint, I expect these to be detrimental to Russia (because from a purely military standpoint, I think the winning play for Russia more and more obviously amounts to escalation, now that NATO and Europe is further strained by Iran - blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians, send your own leadership to the bunkers, and absorb the retaliation in kind with your superior bulk), but I do not have anything resembling a complete picture of how thin a thread the Russian economy and internal control system is hanging by, and if any greater mobilisation or damage to their own civilian infrastructure would actually result in them collapsing (in which case they maybe have no better option than to sit and wait out their gradual decline and hope for some deus ex machina).
We've had evidence since WW2 and right now we see Iran and Gaza and Lebanon all being 'terror bombed', with civillian infrastructure destroyed. That shit never fucking works. People adapt and would rather eat dirt than surrender to someone far away. Until you've got a boot on the ground, and often not even that, populations can hold out. You need full governmental capitulation on top of military defeat to force the issue, and the Russians simply don't have the mass to actually move in. Their theory of victory seems... absent? Thats the kindest way I can put it.
On the other hand, WWII "terror bombing" is generally accepted to have been useful. I don't get the impression that Iran actually has been anything near "terror bombed"; Gaza for sure and Lebanon maybe, but I'm not convinced those could be compared to a hypothetical similar bombing of Ukraine because the baseline living standard in Ukraine is much higher and both surrender to Russia and emigration to Europe would be a significant carrot that is simply not available to Middle Easterners, whose neighbours can't be assed to help them and whose conquerors want to exterminate them.
Even then, I didn't mean to suggest that the optimal strategy involves terror bombing followed by a complete occupation; instead, what they could realistically hope for is terror bombing enabling occupation of some more adjacent parts (Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Sumy and the rest of Donbass are probably an upper bound on what they could achieve with a conventional terror bombing campaign against the whole country + final push without significant conscription) and the rest being so weakened and ruined that it will not be a net threat to them even if they can not extract any negotiated conditions. (EU and NATO could then repair and rearm what is left of Ukraine, but if that much population and resources are gone then doing so might wind up costing so much that it would actually weaken the bloc.)
Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway). Building a reputation for indiscriminate/vindictive bombing would probably dampen that enthusiasm.
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