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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 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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