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tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
I believe Putin’s awareness is underestimated. Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position. His real problem is controls.
You (Putin) can give any orders, but the longer the hierarchical chain of command they have to travel to reach the ground – the more they will disperse through attempts at every level to spread and avoid responsibility. There is no guarantee any order would be executed. You can iterate through all possible officials and commanders to find those, which work (and we’ve seen how many military officials have been changed since the start).
But you can’t iterate much through the pillars of your domestic power and administration – elites and technocrats. Technocrats/ managers do their job well, but there is only so much they can do with their tiny but precise levers. The real issue is that one of the primary mechanisms, through which Putin has been feeding his domestic elites for decades – is government contracts and corporate shares/management. But gradually it has rotten so much as to become a device solely for cash transfers. There has been many purges of petty fraudsters during the war – across all industries, like aerospace, military complex, high tech – but you can’t purge everything. And even after purge, it takes time to rebuild Potemkin industries, especially when many of them turned out to depend heavily on imported components.
In this situation your most reliable option is to order big impactful things, with sufficiently big impact-margin to account for all efficiency lost during implementation. This include diplomatic sabre-rattling, mobilization decisions, huge geoeconomical levers like shutting pipelines, etc.
As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable. At the same time he can query any of his subordinates, posing whatever uncomfortable questions he likes: they would serve you the bullshit, but the manner in which they do it certainly tells a lot. He can request a phone call to officials anywhere on the ground – and figure out why the governor of Kherson is unable to reply since a week. So at the bare minimum Putin can connect all those dots and infer the situation at least at strategic – “upper operational" level, but has little to change it.
Why are you so sure about that? Both the capability and the interest in doing anything of the sort.
First assumption is that he cares about his political survival and understands which domestic and foreign variables to track. Second, that he receives highlights from western media/ analysts anyway. If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him. Seems like a standard routine for an autocrat who is fed up with sycophants.
That's not unlike LW concerns about artificial intelligences: one needs to start with certain unspoken assumptions for these ones to lead to where you see them going. Sure he is motivated to survive: it's not clear he knows effective means to maximize his odds of survival, that's the whole problem (starting this war has done very little good for his long-term survivability, I think). I don't see reliable indications of Putin knowing how to use personal computing devices, or knowing that they're safe and worthwhile to use, or believing that people who use them are trustworthy. Klimenko asserts he doesn't use any gadgets or Internet. His professional career started and ended while they were of no consequence, and computers were basically specialized scientific/military tools (in his world at least); ever since then he's been bossing other people around, and mainly people from the same generation and way of life, people who are his direct threats, by means that have changed little since Assyria or, at most, Medieval Muscovy. Decades ago there were some staged videos of him using a PC I think; this, too, looks fake as hell (though maybe not as fake as these people believe).
As LWers like to say, we have trained doctors who can't handle elementary statistics crucial for interpreting test results. How the hell is Vladimir Putin supposed to know what an RCA is? Where will he get «independent analysts», through which causal chain – would he, like, growl at one of his 3-5 direct retainers and order to round up some eggheads in an unbiased manner? Why would he see reason to doubt his advisors in the first place? You assume an outside view, expected of a guy with an intellectual interest in governance and social structures, who has read books and articles and blog posts on history, politics, economy, epistemology... But you are not him. He's a political animal: that much we know. We can't really say more.
In your analysis, he's basically unable to affect precise terminal outputs; this seems fair. We don't really know if he receives meaningful inputs either. You probably remember that event. Kremlin may be the biggest Potemkin village of them all. Potemkin zoo, even.
I think that the entire situation involves a great number of mistakes, generally tragic ones, by all parties. The magnitude of the mistakes varies by quite a lot, from the trivial (Zelensky's glamor magazine photo shoot) to the profound (Putin's decision to attempt the conquest of Ukraine).
In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives. I believe that he wanted to elevate Russia back into the upper ranks of the Great Powers, and intended the enforcement of a Russian sphere of influence as a necessary step towards that goal. The actual effect has been to make Russia a pariah state, and hardened anti-Russian sentiment all along its borders.
Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses tomorrow, and Russian forces secure Kyiv within a week or so, the above failure remains. Putin's life's work is dead. Immediately calling a unilateral ceasefire and pulling every Russian back across the border won't revive it, either.
I feel pretty confident in my read of Putin's motives, but not confident at all in predicting his next move, since I don't see a next move that is productive from his perspective. Stall and hope for a miracle? But Russian attitudes stereotypically tend to the dour, not the optimistic.
In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade. I can see how, with Ukraine drifting toward the West, this might have been their best shot at returning them to the fold. Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed. But I don't see any real scenarios where, failing to accomplish regime change within about a week, continuing to press would do anything except start the meat grinder and drive irreconcilable wedges between Russian and Ukrainian identities. I'm not a gambling man, but I can see how that might make sense to one. Retreating after 72 hours claiming troops "got lost" or something still seemed possible, and probably would have held off the firehose of Western materiel that they're unable to counter.
Since then, I've realized that my understanding of Putin's goals and methods was flawed, although I'm not sure what they should be. The current situation seems fairly unwinnable to Russia (and I don't see mobilization changing that -- there's pretty good photographic evidence that they've been scraping near the bottom of the Soviet stockpile for a while), and I can't personally explain any action other than an orderly retreat with their tail between their legs (compare the US retreat out of Afghanistan or Vietnam)
Oh, I was completely wrong on this point as well. After Putin's adventures in Georgia and Crimea, I expected that we'd see a repeat, salami-slicing a good chunk of the Donbass, but stopping there. I was stuck in the mental mode of "the previous tactics worked, let's repeat," while it seems obvious in hindsight that Putin's thinking was more "the previous probing tactics revealed Western weakness, let's escalate" and we got the thunder run on Kyiv.
I think you're right that this alternate timeline gets closest to a win for Putin. The Western response in reality was a panicked economic cancellation of Russia. In the alternate "quick Russian military victory" timeline, what changes when the West is presented with the fait accompli? What's the likelihood that the West simply accepts the result, maybe with a militarized border in Poland?
There are countervailing pressures in the alternate timeline--maybe a quick Russian victory makes Putin more of a threat, accelerating the economic/diplomatic responses in the same direction, but with more urgency. Alternatively, maybe the real timeline where Russia got bogged down, showing weakness, allowed for a more vigorous economic/diplomatic response, and full economic cancellation would be seen as too risky in the "stronger Russia" timeline.
Setting aside the details of the military situation within Ukraine, I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics. The first is diplomatic, with Sweden and Finland set to join NATO. The Finnish border was never friendly, but going full NATO is a stark rejection of Putin's publicly declared preferences. The second is more cultural/economic, with the collapse of the European Green movement, and in particular German efforts to figure out an energy strategy that is reliable and diminishes Russian influence.
I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.
Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.
For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.
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