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What the hell is going on in Russia?
I've been following the Russo-Ukrainian war since the livestreaming of the first tank that spooked some poor border guard, and frankly speaking the whole affair has been great for calibrating my epistemics.
Did I expect the "3 days to Kiev" thing to work out? Yes. I thought Ukraine was fucked.
I was also wrong about the duration of the war, for reasons little more than vibes going off war exhaustion, I expected the fighting to wrap up in a year. Still going.
Did I expect the UA counteroffensive to be a success? Yes, I was sufficiently inundated with pro-Ukrainian memes and their anti-Russian counterparts that I thought the Russians would fold to a stiff breeze.
Turns out that attacking is a lot harder than defending, especially when the offensive was widely telegraphed and even your relatively incompetent adversary had plenty of time to prepare accordingly.
My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect. I wanted Ukraine to win, and badly, and not only was this desire reflected in the sources of news I peruse, but the sheer hatred for the Russian side was sufficient to bury most evidence of them ever doing anything right. The Just World fallacy is hard to avoid personally if all your sources of information fall prey to it.
On /r/CombatFootage, anything remotely pro-Russian, or even depicting their success without obvious bias, gets buried. While I'm fond of /r/NonCredibleDefense, its NAFO sympathies make a honest calibration impossible, and as the name suggests, its members aren't particularly focused on academic rigor or epistemics.
But with that said, the whole Wagner affair confuses me.
Prigozhin managed to get within 2 hours of Moscow, prompting a panicked evacuation, and then suddenly stopped and took his ball home.
What the fuck? In normal circumstances, I'd say he just signed his death warrant, is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup? Wagner shot down around 7 Russian aircraft in the process!
And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?
It's not like the dust has settled, even leaving aside more questionable rumors, I've seen footage of the VDV cartel-killing one of their own for expressing sympathies for Wagner. Even if Prigozhin himself manages to avoid most consequences of his actions, his men are going to be making their pants desert-camo'd.
So far, I've only come up with one model that I think reasonably fits the evidence, albeit it's more consistent with the era of warlords and medieval feudalism than what I expect to see even in a failed state today:
Prigozhin is actually loyal, or at least he thinks of himself that way, and came to believe that Putin, like the well-meaning Emperor kept in the dark by a coterie of eunuchs (Shoigu and Co), simply wasn't involved in the attempts by the Russian MOD to swallow up Wagner whole.
Thus, he embarked on his crusade more as a demonstration of his ability to perform a coup, rather than a genuine desire to do so. Like an indecisive general crossing the Rubicon, shaking his fist in the direction of Rome and then high-tailing it back.
Cause some chaos and embarrassment, but stopping before what he thinks the red lines are, namely an occupation of Moscow.
I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect, or rather Putin's power has declined relatively, such that he can credibly offer to shelter Prigozhin and fend off the dogs.
As far as I can tell, his gambit only partially worked, because Shoigu hasn't gone anywhere, and Prigozhin ended up like a dog that finally caught that damn car but isn't sure what to do with it.
"Sure, let's try and Thunder Run to Moscow, I'm sure we'll run into some real resistance along the way, and we can both rattle sabres at each other and go home."
"Huh. This is awkward, everyone is just giving up and letting us walk right past them. Might as well shoot down a few helicopters, they're the only things that have directly engaged us."
"Uh.. We're about two hours away from Moscow. Now what?"
I'm not going to weight my assessment heavily since I claim no particular expertise, but I'm outlining it here for the more knowledgeable to poke at.
I'd like to see everyone at least attempt to make concrete predictions about the near future. Does Prig make it out of this alive and with his power base intact? Does Putin slip him some unusually heavy and radioactive teabags?
I know the feeling. I was also surprised that Russia wasn't able to even get to Kiev with the main body of it's forces. Miles-long convoys, a dominant air force, and an underprepared defender should have, one thinks, enabled a Thunder Run to the Capital and they should have been able to at least temporarily control the territory.
It's like if the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and could only penetrate about 100 miles from their own border before bogging down. But then again, if China was providing ample material support to the Mexican fighters maybe that is what would happen.
But man, there's simply no systemic way to exercise good rationality here for various reasons:
Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game. Being confident that Russia is lying or withholding the truth doesn't actually help you determine the real truth.
War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.
Ukraine has massive incentive to lie about stuff too (Ghost of Kiev, etc.) and will exaggerate Russian 'atrocities' and casualties as a matter of course.
The "Russia is evil empire, Ukraine is brave freedom fighters" narrative is firmly locked-in, so anything that makes Ukraine look bad or weak will be downplayed and ignored whilst likewise Russia's 'wins' will be minimized by Western media.
As seen from the Wagner situation, the nature of the conflict can shift unexpectedly on a dime, so any prediction over the medium-long term is eminently susceptible to black swans.
The situation on the ground is subject to information you simply cannot get. Local knowledge which can't be easily summarized and translated.
So you can't understand a situation this complex and dynamic simply by absorbing all possible information you can find. You have no way to verify said information, and the information you DON'T have will probably end up being critical to accurate predictions anyway. And the good info will become outdated rapidly. Adjust your confidence levels accordingly.
In lieu of making predictions on week-to-week occurrences I've tried my best to understand the broad-strokes motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of the relevant parties. A few things I'm relatively confident about:
'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion. Further, they are now beginning a terminal decline in demographics. Beyond anything else, they'll never have as many fighting-age males as they do now. So they are committed to see this through and will throw bodies at the problem as long as it can.
Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.
Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.
Even the U.S. Manufacturing capacity isn't quite filling the gap, however.
What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.
This is flatly wrong. Russia could leave whenever it wanted to and their security situation would not change significantly, even if Ukraine joined NATO (which is very much still an open question, not a done deal by any means). The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China. The invasion of Ukraine has always been about Russian influence, not security.
Russian logistics are performing reasonably well actually. There are problems of course, and they're not up to US standards, but that's pretty high bar.
I was always under the impression that it was precisely nuclear security that had Russia concerned, specifically NATO missile interdiction systems, which was one of the motivating factors behind their development of hypersonic weaponry. Beyond that, security and influence are heavily tied together - good luck selling all your fossil fuels to Europe if you can't stop your pipelines from getting blown up.
US missile shields could never credibly protect from most, or even just many Russian nukes. They can protect from single strikes which eliminates some of the bargaining power of nuclear blackmail, because you'll be hemmed into all-or-nothing strats even more than normal. Again, it's about influence, not security.
Security and influence are two distinct concepts. They can interact in some cases, but it's not like Belgium fears getting invaded by Germany or France these days if it doesn't maintain Belgian Influence in those countries. Russian pipelines weren't getting bombed until the war started.
A missile shield doesn't even have to credibly protect most of the US. All it needs to do is give US decision-makers the false belief that they could survive or win an exchange and then the world is in such catastrophic danger that it would be worth letting the holocaust happen twice over in order to prevent it. That's the threat that the Russians are concerned with, and my estimation of American politicians is such that the Russians are absolutely correct to be concerned about what Bill Kristol wants for them.
Your position is not backed up by recent evidence. If US politicians thought the missile shield would give them an overwhelming advantage, why were they so cagey against Russia's invasion? Why did Biden come out so quickly against sending US troops or establishing a no-fly zone? Why have people like Jake Sullivan had so much influence to make each weapon system like pulling teeth when it came to sending them to Ukraine (e.g. HIMARS, MBTs, Patriots, F16s). The cautious tiptoeing does not strike me as US politicians being blinded by hubris.
If anything, the endless Pascal's Muggings that have occurred around discussions of Russia's nukes have been one of the clearest incentives towards proliferation that we've seen in decades. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be absolutely terrible, but that doesn't mean the reaction should thus be to always back down in the face of nuclear blackmail. Doing so means vastly more nukes in the world in the long term, which means the likelihood of an eventual nuclear exchange goes up by orders of magnitude.
The missile shield system is not actually in place yet - do you think the US military is setting up large anti missile defence batteries in the middle of Ukraine right now? They presently do not have confidence that they would survive a nuclear exchange, and we are not actually in the position that Russia was so scared of (in no small part due to the invasion). As for why the US has been so cagey, that's an incredibly complicated question with an equally complicated answer. The short answer is that the US absolutely does not wish to be seen as the instigator of the conflict - they will be unable to muster popular support for military intervention, both domestically and among the international community. Their usual strategy for this is to manufacture or make up an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin, and that's a lot harder to do in the modern day. As for why they are so cagey with specific weapons, there's a lot of reasons for that too - they don't want Moscow getting hit with missiles covered in American flags that say MADE IN THE USA, they don't want their fancier weapons getting visibly and public shown up on the battlefield while wielded by undertrained conscripts, etc etc.
Actually I think the clearest incentive was what the US did to Libya, but what Russia did to Ukraine is another. Both the US and Russia have made it clear that if you get rid of your nuclear weapons your security is irreparably harmed. But this isn't a case of Pascal's mugging - nuclear war is absolutely a world-ending event and that threat should be taken extremely seriously. The idea that you should just ignore the legitimate security concerns of a nation like Russia and trigger a nuclear exchange that ends all life on earth that isn't a cockroach or bacteria because you don't want to make them think that they can stand up to the US is such a dangerous proposition that I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. A nuclear power is a nuclear power and while I agree that having more of them is a bad thing, the US and Russia together have made it clear that if you disarm you are going to cease to be a legitimate state in short order.
Having more nuclear powers in the world does indeed make a nuclear exchange more risky - but I don't think just starting the nuclear exchange right away and setting the probability to 1 is a better outcome.
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I'll point to the demographics issue as a key factor once again. They're going to run lower and lower on fighting-age males over the coming decades.
It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.
To me this presents a really simple calculus: either commit to an aggressive offense now, with hopes of shoring up your defensive posture (i.e. making it possible to defend your land with fewer people and less equipment) or risk being parceled up 15-30 years down the line as you lose the means to hold the territory you claim.
You have to make the call now because even if your people suddenly start popping out kids en masse today it'll be 18 or so years before they grow into a useful fighting force.
Considering they're apparently not even palletizing their equipment for shipment, I guess.
I would assert that they would have lost this war a long way back if the territory they're fighting in wasn't right across the border. So poor logistics doesn't doom their efforts so long as they can shovel enough weapons and men to the front without losing most in transit.
Because for comparison I'm looking at the United States' ability to maintain a conflict in Iraq, which it doesn't even share a continent with, for years.
Which? Estonia? Finland? Georgia? Mongolia taking their shot at it again?
The only credible threat to Russia is China, but it's indeed some 6d chess — to attack Ukraine in order to be better prepared for a possible war in the Far East.
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The impact of population is becoming less and less of a factor for militaries as technology advances. Modern soldiers are so ridiculously lethal that wars are fought with a fraction of the manpower that previous wars were. A nation's economy, human capital, and technology base are going to be far more important in wars to come, and all of these have been damaged in Russia's case due to this conflict. Future wars won't be won by conscripting a horde of musketeers like it's the 1700s.
Also, this completely ignored the points about nukes and the rise of China.
The US's logistical capacity flatly outmatches every other country by far, so it's not a great comparison for a nation like Russia who's mostly going to be focused on conflicts near its borders. Russia's ability to supply absurd numbers of artillery shells to its units has been a key driver of Ukrainian casualties, and doing so while under fire was a big reason why the Kherson offensive took as long as it did.
Good luck maintaining a technologically advanced military without the people to maintain the increasingly complicated systems said militaries rely upon.
We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.
And it's looking a lot like standard trench warfare with some fun additions like kamikaze drones.
Allow me to do a reducio ad absurdum.
Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000 soldiers who are limited to WII-era weaponry?
There's clearly a tradeoff here, where the sheer weight of manpower allows attrition against a technologically superior foe.
Especially if the foe has their own population issues.
I mean we can get into all of this but I don't think it really changes the calculus from Russia's POV.
Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.
So again, either Russia establishes geographical security as fast as possible or it risks getting parceled up.
Ukraine vs Russia is mostly fighting using old Cold War tech on both sides, and the troop concentrations are still far lower than they were in Barbarossa.
Bad example since population levels aren't falling by 99.99% like in this scenario. they're falling by around 20% in the most extreme cases by the end of the century.
I'm not saying population doesn't matter; rather, I'm saying it matters mostly in the economic and technological spheres. If Russia loses 20 million people over the next century then that impacts its ability to have a large economy to produce extremely lethal modern weapons. Worrying about population in terms of "nobody will be around to hold the guns" on the other hand is not particularly credible.
This is a non-sequitur. Priggy's revolt was a case of internal Russian factionalism boiling over. There are some pro-Russian cheerleaders who think Prigozhin was a NATO plant in some 4D chess sort of way, but that's not particularly credible.
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I disagree with that, alongside the majority of russians i believe. Situations change, opportunities arise, provocations happen, things change and if west at some point decides that now can be a good opportunity to solve its Russia problems with some sudden strike or occupation or anything else - noone really thinks that you won't use it because you're "good guys". I can easily imagine those good guys can easily kill 150mil people and spend the rest of their days writing books and directing TV shows how it was necessary, lesser evil and it saved much more lives so it was totally justified (and what's worse - some soldiers had PTSD pressing buttons killing everyone, so they're sad now!). And i'm as far from being Putin's supporter as you can imagine. So no matter what you think about the possibility of that, being good guys and all that, it's not an obviously ludicrous fear. Consequently it is definitely a factor, or at least can be named as a casus belli in the invasion of Ukraine.
If you want to handwave nukes and the geopolitical impact of the rise of China and everything else, then maybe, but at that point you could handwave everything with "maybe it will change at some point in the future, perhaps". That's a blank check to invade all neighbors at all times... which is arguably Russia's MO for most of its history. It's completely understandable for people outside of Russia to look at that and say that's unjustified.
Yes, and they are right fearing it too. Where's the error in any of those fears? People were genociding each other since forever, it's hard to justify that now suddenly we're free from that somehow. Even if it's not genocide, it can be bad and scary. It's enough to pose a big enough threat(existential threat is a fine term i guess) for you to start considering nukes/coups/inverventions/occupations and other nasty things which are completely justifiable from your point of view. And that other guy can think the same way and consider to do those things to you. That's what the whole cold war was about, remember? So how the hell is Russia's fears unjustifiable exactly? The only solution is to avoid escalation of the threat from both parties, but western elites thought it's no longer necessary after the cold war was won. Well, here we are. People fear each other with all the reasons to do so and eventually it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
You can reasonably fear an invasion, you‘re just not allowed to allay those fears by invading another country. Build a fort or something. Everyone fears invasion by their neighbours, and would love an extra one hundred km or two of defensible terrain. And if you think you‘re special because nukes: if we tolerate your invasion for that reason, soon every two-bit country will nuclearize, claim land phobia, and expect free real estate.
Glad that someone unambiguously lays the actual rules, finally! However i fear Putin already got the tip from Americans so he may think he still has a quota to invade 2-3 more countries, just like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and so on.
Whatever, I'm not american. I'm just telling you the rules for little fishes with an italy-size gdp. All the other little fishes in europe think your actions are unjustified, and if that's the way it's gonna be, they'd like karelia and königsberg back to allay their reasonable fear of russian invasion.
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I'm always puzzled by that statement. Let's just say russians have exactly the opposite point of view, no matter their affiliations. However what I do notice is that west gets constantly confused by their own propaganda narratives which often go against each other, which sometimes looks like Putin outsmarted everyone.While in practice it means your own previous propaganda narrative was wrong and it can't explain well what's happening. So someone comes up with some new bullshit explanation and everyone are suddenly experts on Russia for a while, until the next happening. Sometimes Russia tries to help some of those narratives, but i'm not sure those efforts convincing many.
I'm talking about stuff like Russia denying that there had been any missile strikes when the Moskva was sunk and indeed tried for a long time to deny that the ship had been sunk at all.
I don't even feel confident that it WASN'T just an accidental fire caused by incompetence.
Keep in mind that Russia is good enough at muddying waters that most people were betting against Russia actually invading Ukraine, even as they massed forces on the border.
I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.
It also isn't clear what the smart move would be if we assume that Russian goals (as defined by Putin) is to enhance the security of the country, avoid turning into a vassal of the West/America.
How do you maintain your functional independence in such a scenario?
Like, there was literally never going to be a better opportunity in the foreseeable future, with the rest of the world reeling from Covid and attendant supply chain and energy issues, and with Russia's supply of fight-age males about to enter a long period of decline.
So why would we expect Putin to wait for another few years?
No excusing the grievous miscalculation that they apparently expected to be able to seize Kiev in the opening moves of the war, of course, but I don't think they hinged their entire war plan on that.
I dunno, I think armed military conflicts tend to be stupid choices simply because they destroy the wealth of all involved nations, but if the alternative is to surrender to the Western Cultural blob and lose control of your country's own destiny, I think I can understand the logic.
I wonder what makes this line of thinking so tenacious that I have to keep having this conversation again and again. Maybe its time to compose a copypasta for this occasion or something...
Anyway, a state with a nuclear triad just doesn't suffer the same risks as Russia did during the times of Napoleon or Hitler. It's true that any state would prefer to not have potentially hostile neighbors on its doorstep, but for Russia, this train has departed long time ago. As for Ukraine, it didn't look like they would be invited to NATO anytime soon, especially not after annexation of Crimea. (I would say that, at least, was a well executed operation, but still argue that it did Russia more harm than good).
Moreover, let's say they seized Kiev, and everything to the east of Dnipro. Now what? You still got an aggressive "anti-Russian" half of Ukraine on your border. Let's say they conquered Ukraine in its entirety. It has to be pacified, at quite a steep cost. What is achieved? Security against Western land invasion (really outlandish scenario)? Not even that, there is still Baltic border, even closer to Moscow, and Kremlin would never have the balls to invade a NATO country.
As it is, I'm actually mad at Putin for not being able to present an alternative to the West, a multipolar world as he says. He had infinite money, common cultural heritage that he could leverage to expand influence in eastern Europe, instead he preferred to get high at his own supply, believing that Ukraine is a pseudo country that would collapse the moment Russian soldier's foot stepped into it, and that Ukrainians are Russians anyway, and decided to play conqueror.
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They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.
The world is awash in fossil fuels. The amount of natural gas and oil that can be extracted at an economical price is far in excess of the world's needs for at least the next 2-3 decades.
Perhaps Russia is that boneheaded, I don't know. But it feels unlikely. Similarly, the U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't about oil. For the cost of the war, we could have purchased the entirety of Iraq's oil reserves (more or less).
Oil is cheap.
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Neither the U.S. nor Russia are short on natural gas as of the moment.
Europe, maybe.
Europe's not short on natural gas either. In a pinch, they can revert to burning coal just like they did in 2022. And the world has centuries worth of coal that can be easily extracted.
Europe was only short on natural gas because they chose to be.
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