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Elon Musk's Shadow Rule
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
Most of this article is just a biography of Musk. While it's somewhat interesting, I would have liked to hear more about how he's become embedded in the world of national security.
He had a really bad PR oopsie a while back where he was indeed parroting Putin's propaganda, and he basically called for Ukraine to unilaterally surrender and run "referenda" in areas that the Russians have been aggressively ethnically cleansing. He rightfully received pushback for that. The bit about him being a "traitor to the US" is just you bashing a strawman.
how long will it take ukraine to take back those disputed regions, if ever? at some point concessions will probably have to be made on both sides. even if you disagree, these questions are legitimate
While the current counteroffensive is certainly very lackluster, it's silly to just extrapolate a straight line on the rate of progress and thereafter assume nothing will change.
Also, sliders is correct: Putin has not offered peace on the current lines. Any ceasefire would essentially necessitate Ukraine's unilateral surrender, which would mean giving up lots of territory they currently control.
You're right that it would be silly to just find the angle of the line on the chart and zoom off into infinity - but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Serious people who are interested in these kinds of conflicts can actually take the historical context and modern situation into account when doing their extrapolations... it's just that when you do that you tend to arrive at conclusions unpopular with the PMC. Conclusions like "Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war", "The counteroffensive was a massive failure that wasted lots of Ukrainian lives" and "Putin's propaganda is substantially less effective at influencing popular opinion in the west than western propaganda". People have been advocating for peace and negotiation rather than continued conflict because they (correctly) view the continuing bloodshed as futile, and throwing more Ukrainian lives into the blender is just going to make things worse when the fighting comes to an end. If I actually hated Ukrainians, I'd encourage the US military to send them more fancy toys to encourage them to fight to the death in a suicidally quixotic quest to maximise shareholder returns in the US military industrial complex and degrade Russian military capability.
And just to show that I'm serious about these claims, I'll throw 200 USD in monero into escrow with the bet that Ukraine does not regain Crimea and the breakaway republics by the end of hostilities. If I'm just swallowing Putin's propaganda then this is free money sitting on the table, just waiting for you to pick it up and take it. But I will note that I haven't encountered a single person who believes the western propaganda enough to actually put any money on the line - to me it feels remarkably similar to people talking about how awful racism is then moving their children into 90% white suburbs.
Anyone who thinks they can say with absolute 100% certainty which way this war will end isn't doing serious analysis. After Putin's thunder-run towards Kiev sputtered, the war has come down to the question of "who has the advantage in a drawn out conflict?" This is something that nobody has answered convincingly, despite claims of doing so from both sides. Russia has the benefits of a larger population and the political cohesion of a single dictatorship, while the West has a far larger economic base and Ukraine has motivation. Put another way, the outcome of this war will be almost totally decided by the West's political willingness to send equipment. The concern-trolling argument of "Western equipment does nothing but kill more Ukrainians as they faceplant against the invincible Russian Bear" was trotted out before Kharkov and Kherson as well, and it was just as silly then as it is today.
At this point, I personally judge the outcomes as something like the following:
10% chance that Russia wins big and takes far more than what it currently occupies.
40% chance that things stalemate with only minor additional changes to occupation lines (say, Russia gains or loses less than +/-50% of what it already controls), with an eventual Korea-style cease-fire.
30% chance that Ukraine eventually cuts the land bridge, possibly leading to a "Russia gets to keep Crimea in exchange for leaving" style peace.
20% chance that Ukraine wins big and retakes everything up to its 1991 borders.
Your bet seems like even-money to me, mostly because you list the breakaway republics in there as well. Crimea seems to hold a significant place in Russian thinking, so I wouldn't bet against you there. But Donetsk and Luhansk were never really essential to Russia other than as a way to leverage influence in Ukraine. I could see them being traded away for peace if Russia thought its hold on Crimea was seriously threatened and the land bridge had already been cut. Of course, Putin doesn't want to give away anything at the moment, so resolution is likely still more than a year away.
I don't claim to know exactly how the war will end - there's all sorts of potential black swan events that could change how things play out. If I see a barn on fire, I don't know exactly how it will end either - maybe it'll collapse, maybe it will simply burn to ash, maybe some rain will put it out. But I don't have to know exactly how it will end to rule out any options that leave it standing perfectly unharmed. Ukraine does not have the blood, treasure or military force to achieve their stated goals. Casualties are too high and the West is already making noises about cutting off the flow of treasure - don't forget that Trump is waiting in the wings too(ignoring fantasies or delusions about him being a Russian stooge, he has actually said that he wants to stop arming Ukraine). Even then, the sheer number of Ukrainian casualties and war dead is too high a number for even more US weaponry to overcome, given that Russia views this conflict as existential in nature(and have said so repeatedly wrt a NATO aligned Ukraine) to the point that they really can't back down.
I disagree with your proposals but at the same time I don't think there's any real way to settle the debate in the present moment. The fog of war is too thick and accurate information about what's happening on the battlefield is hard to come by. But I simply do not believe that Russia is willing to accept any kind of NATO-aligned regime on their doorstep, and they have no motivation whatsoever to pull back or retreat. At the same time Ukraine does not have the human or military capital required to achieve their stated goals. Of course, the bet is still on the table if you want to pick it up...
What? Nobody has said that Ukraine will leave this conflict "unharmed", i.e. without a lot of pain and suffering, which is obvious because that's already happened and will continue happening.
On the other hand, if you're trying to make a point about the certainty of your conclusions then this analogy doesn't make sense to me.
If the West opened the floodgates of weapons to Ukraine, Russia would almost certainly be toast in the medium term. Their only realistic options would be defeat or nuclear escalation. Modern conventional weapons are just spectacularly lethal, and the West's combined economic might completely dwarf that of Russia's.
Running out of manpower won't be a concern for either side for a long time yet. There might be concerns about manpower quality as they conscript more and more, but Ukraine and Russia are both far, far away from running out of people in a general sense.
They have every incentive to say this, since it's basically just akin to "we're really committed to the war". The conflict might be existential for Putin, but Ukraine doesn't have mass territorial ambitions on Russian land, so it's hard to see how this would be existential in any meaningful capacity. The most plausible way for it to become existential would be if a civil war happens as a result of defeat, but if that's the primary fear then Russia would be better served by withdrawing and focus on averting that instead.
There are already several of these, and indeed Finland got added to that camp because of this war.
From my perspective and understanding of the situation the idea that Ukraine will take back Crimea is on the same level as a burning barn deciding to put itself out. There's no path from the current situation to them achieving their goals - any kind of nuclear exchange just immediately ends the world, and Ukraine does not have the manpower or resources to take back the contested territories without mushroom clouds.
The lack of quality in terms of troops is exactly what you would expect to happen when they start running out of actually fit recruits. Though I don't think this argument can actually be settled because the precise numbers are closely guarded military secrets. My interpretation of the information around recruiting efforts and the relative "success" of the counter-offensive is that Ukraine is having manpower problems and is unable to provide quality soldiers in enough numbers to make a difference despite incredibly heavy-handed and corrupt conscription efforts. But again there's no real way to settle this without access to that red hot information.
I don't understand how the conflict could be existential for Putin given that he's reportedly a strongman dictator who doesn't have to care about his public reputation, but Ukraine absolutely does have important territorial ambitions for Russian land. Crimea is a vitally important base for Russia, and if they don't have control over that area someone could just go and bomb the gas transit pipelines they spent so long setting up. I think it is fair to say that the US certainly viewed the Cuban missile crisis as an existential threat, and I think there's a very direct equivalence to the idea of Ukraine becoming a NATO outpost. To the best of my knowledge, the reason they view it as an existential threat is that they think NATO missile interdiction systems would give US authorities the false belief that they'd be able to win a nuclear exchange.
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I would not take Russian public insinuations at what is or isn't existential to them at face value.
This isn't an insinuation but a direct positive statement about what a NATO-aligned Ukraine sitting on their border would mean, and I don't see any convincing argument against the idea that allowing the US military to set up a large base and fortified position directly adjacent to their border and with the ability to cut off access to important infrastructure isn't actually an existential threat to Russia. Do you think that the US would just sit there and do nothing if a coup took place in Mexico and the new government went on to join the BRICS and start hosting large numbers of Russian and Chinese military equipment/forces?
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