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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 think any analysis that focuses on the internal mental states and thoughts of other people is doomed. It's a mistake I made myself just prior to this conflict, in which I could not envision what could possibly motivate Putin to invade Ukraine. Suitably chastened, I'll restrict my analysis to the best facts we have, which at current point are:
1: Ukraine has held. You can blame western weapons and aid if you want, but the point is the Ukrainian people have used that aid to hold off the Russians. All the military aid in the world didn't do shit for the Iraqis or Afghans, because they had no nationalistic impulse to bind them together. Ukraine is finding and founding their national myths for the future, if they survive.
2: With the recent offensive, the Ukrainian military has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they can run a competent conventional military offensive operation, which isn't nearly as simple as civilians might think. What's more, it has worked at least to some significant degree. Once again, you can blame western weapons or badly trained Russian troops, but both those things are realities.
Early on, I was fairly pessimistic about Ukrainian chances in a stand-up war with Russia, and I think the fundamentals do still favor Russia. But we are seeing the cracks in this consensus idea. Yes, Russia could mobilize fully, but will their economic and political system withstand the strain? Yes, they could nuke, but that doesn't solve their problem. They're trying to annex this territory, after all. What is becoming clear is that without committing significantly more resources to the fight, Russia is not on track to defeat Ukraine outright. We don't know if Ukraine can continue their offensive, or repeat their success, but the idea that Russia can ignore their military capability is now dead. Beyond that, speculation can take a man anywhere he wants to go.
I think the idea is to use the troops to secure the "1000 km of frontline" to prevent any more Kharkivs and then just continue the slow methodical grind in Donbass (and other parts of the four oblasts they don't yet hold?). It's not going to be a tactic for conquering entire Ukraine, but I don't think that's in the cards, unless there's some complete collapse or something else changing the picture considerably. (Though Belarus joining in or a sudden surprise attack in the Northern front areas Ukraine has retaken might change the picture considerably.)
On the topic of securing lines: any comment on Finns and Balts blocking escape for Russians who flee mobilization, Latvians allegedly even planning deportation for residence permit holders? I mean, is this just reflecting the popular desire to inflict punishment on Ruskies cost be damned, or that old chestnut that «if we force them to stay, they'll effect a regime change»?
Because I guarantee you that there will be no bottom-up regime change. They'll just get caught, drafted, trained and sent to fight in Ukraine.
Sigh. What needs to be understood about this issue that the border thing is not a new issue for Finland; it goes back to the summer, expect back then it was not about draft dodgers or regime opponents, simply about why the Finnish border was open for hordes of tourists, at least stereotypically your stolid "non-political" middle class, seeing it as their sovereign right to continue cross-border shopping or use Helsinki to go on an Italian flight despite all this war business and of course getting into very non-political fights with Ukrainian refugees in Finland while doing so.
The Finnish government indicated that it sees this as a problem and wants to end this tourism, but it can't do so, since there's a law issue, and Finnish governance is all about being sticklers about formal procedure and following laws and regulations to the letter. This thread by Finnish nationalist politician explains this tendency and its roots quite well, though I disagree with him on whether the border closure would have actually done anything to destabilize Russia ("When the Russian middle-class cannot go on holiday they'll overthrow Putin etc.").
This issue continued to build up, in large part because it has provided a good populist attack vector for Finland's right-wing opposition bent on accusing the Finnish center-left gov't of being weak on Russia and also in part because it has led to our little brother nation Estonians and other Baltics calling Finland an unreliable ally. This rose to a fever pitch just before Putin's mobilization announcement, making it all but impossible for border closure proponents even consider backing down and making it even harder for the Finnish government to maintain "b-but... the law..." position. Any arguments that now the border-crossers are going to be mobilization dodgers are just going to be met with newly-minted claims that since Putin and Shoigu implied that it's West that Russia is at war with, young Russian males crossing the border might just be destabilization agents and a danger to Finland.
Anyway, one more proper argument that I'd say might have weight is that if the intent is mobilizing 300 000 soldiers and the task has been delegated down to regions with quotas, any potential mobilization avoiders fleeing abroad might just mean that the positions they might have filled in the quota would just be filled by some poor schlubs who don't have the money to utilize this option.
There's a further issue, which I didn't see mentioned here, of being a long-term casus belli by Putin or similar russian nationalists.
Putin has repeatedly used ethnic russians as pretexts to intervene, or threaten intervention, around the region. Much of the pre-February rhetoric from Moscow on multiple fronts could be leveraged against Russia's more northern neighbors, which was one of the reasons Europe reacted as strongly as it did when Putin followed through with his threats with actual invasion. Just from this angle, significantly increasing the Russian national population in the border states- who are almost certainly going to locate themselves to the ethnic russian enclaves- strengthens an ethnic-based framing of a future pre-conflict narrative.
Further, there's also a point about what sort of Russians would be coming to reside in Finland/border states. Before this week, you could at least make an argument that these people were the minority of Russians who actively opposed the war, and were signalling their sincerity by leaving at cost to themselves. But these were the exceptions for a reason- among which being that most Russians, apolitical nationalist as they were, maintained high approval polling of Russian nationalist incursions in the region without issue, ie the potential threat against Finland or others... up unto the moment it potentially involved them.
If you work from the general assessment that Putin's approval numbers are genuinely high and representative of Russian people, and that these new would-be migrants are representative, they're drawing from the same overlapping ven diagram. These are not anti-imperialists who were committing to not associating with imperialism at personal cost, these are drawing from passively supportive imperialists who are only not associating with imperialism because it risks a personal cost... and who, if safe from that cost, have no history/credibility that they won't just go right back to vaguely supporting russian imperialism, only from inside the border territories where they could serve as a casus belli.
Is it a generalization? Sure. But it nests on real security threats (Putin using Russian ethnic ties as a basis for unprovoked war), and with a presumed- and at least not disproven- demographic overlap of the very target audience who have been passively supporting such revaunchism through political support so long as the nationalist element didn't harm them.
Now, one could make an argument that this compliant and low-pain tolerance is why they should be accepted- that they wouldn't be willing to tolerate social pressure opposing their nationalism- but this is where we go back to where they would likely go (existing or new Russian enclaves), what they could do wittingly or unwittingly (be sanctuary/support for Russian destabilization efforts), and whether they'd default back to Russian nationalism if social pressure from non-Russian social pressure targetted them.
This sounds like an example the more-general problem of determining whether people fleeing a place wrecked by bad policies are more likely to oppose them (because their last home was wrecked by them) or support them (because those policies had support in their old home and they may not have made the connection.) I admit the example that comes to mind is "Californians fleeing to redder states" but whether one approves of that example or not, I think it at least suggests that often it's not so easy to distinguish which is which as it may be in this mobilization case.
Pretty much, only instead of needing a majority dynamic (the issue of California idea exports wouldn't matter much if most Californians fleeing didn't share them), the nature of security threats is that they're disproportionate in impact to their population number. Even just a 5% over Russian sympathizer rate would be a major pool for Russian influence operations to be run from, and through.
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