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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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