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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?
It sounds like you have been absorbing the narrative instead of looking at the concrete facts. In the big picture, nothing has changed. Russia has superior manpower and production. In a war of attrition Russia will eventually win unless the government collapses.
This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine, NATO wants regime change in Russia. It stands to reason that this coup attempt was in some capacity supported by NATO. If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD. Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig. We may never know. My prediction is that Prig lives for at least a few years.
I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.
Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.
I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.
I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.
Russia has a population of around 150 mil while Ukraine's population is around 40 mil. Russia simply has much deeper reserves to pull from. It is true that NATO is committing some production capacity to the Ukraine war, but it is still a fraction of what Russia is willing to commit. The Russian regime will fight the war of attrition until the regime collapse.
If Russia is able to consolidate on its territorial gains, this is decisively a win for Russia. It is not the total victory that they originally hoped for, but it is still a clear win based on the instigating causes of the war.
A lot of my favorite anon Twitter accounts said that the rebellion was overblown from the beginning and was a nothingburger. But still, it went farther than most people would have thought possible the day before. Given that NATO's win condition is regime change in Russia, the reason for suspicion is obvious.
It seems like Russia has more manpower reserves to pull from, but Ukraine is willing to pull deeper.
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