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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 WWII-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.
Why are you telling those rules to me? You can send a letter to Putin with all those rules. Also include the info that you're not american and you'll totally take Karelia and Konigsberg from him! With all those russians who are living there now. You can also attach some pictures of what will you do to them. It's justifiable as obviously Putin can't do what US of A are doing while having GDP of Italy, you're against that. And those are the rules you just made up.
You seemed to have difficulty comprehending why a vague fear of future invasion is a poor justification for an invasion. The invasion of Karelia and Königsberg is just an example of the principle of land phobia applied to the richer neighbours of russia, presently united in their fear and/or dislike of russia. I of course oppose the principle, and therefore the EU invasion of these lands on those grounds, no matter how important for our security they may be, or how solid the historical claims are.
If you do get it now, then I‘m sure Putin will understand when I explain it to him later.
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