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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26358 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Since @greyenlightenment suggested a list of topics that weren't getting enough attention in the previous CWR thread, I decided to write a bit about Russia-Ukraine situation.

The summer campaign has ended, and Ukraine has found itself in an unenviable situation. The much-hyped counteroffensive has achieved only marginal gains, but the EU has exhausted its disposable stocks of arms and armor and the US, which has enough disposable firepower to zone rouge a medium-sized country, is a) not a charity and b) kinda getting busy with other stuff.

All this means Ukraine knows it won't be able to conduct further offensive operations and its most important medium-term goal is to not lose. There are multiple ways it can lose:

  • it loses foreign financial support that is keeping its economy afloat, either because
    • it runs out of collateral for the IMF and similar sharks' loans, or because
    • paying Russia off directly becomes a much cheaper option, or because
    • its politicians, who, like Squire Trelawney, don't know when to keep their mouth shut, pick a fight with each other or the EU
  • it runs out of SAMs during the winter and Russia achieves air superiority. I am quite sure there are people in Russia right now trying to come up with the cheapest possible missiles or drones that can't be shot down with tube AA
  • Putin re-elects himself in spring and starts a mass mobilization to extend the frontline. There's a reason why Ukraine started talking about reinforcing their northern border

Having so many ways to lose means the time is ripe for a ceasefire or even peace negotiations, but when your adversary smells blood they won't be satisfied with just what they have. So Ukraine either:

  • tries to agree to a ceasefire and frantically prepares for a resumption of hostilities (and even the biggest patriots of Ukraine won't trust their country not to screw the process up fatally)
  • agrees to significant concessions in exchange for peace (Finlandization at the very least, outright puppeting as the worst-case scenario)
  • or continues to resist, hoping for a black swan that hurts Russia and not them, or at least for a glorious last stand (sure Prague is a prettier city than Warsaw, but Poles know the glory is theirs)

One of the things about the war I've been thinking about lately is how hard it has been to predict what's going to happen next. I'm not sure if there's anyone with a clear bill of being able to predict even the grand trends of the war for the entire duration. To have that you'd need to have:

  • been able to confidently even predict the war is going to start, after several false predictions on dates (a lot of folks, me included, would be right out this stage)
  • then go with the absolutely most bonkers pro-Ukrainian position until approximately autumn 2022 (insofar as I remember, it genuinely was only the most bonkers pro-Ukrainian types who were first able to predict that Russians would withdraw from Kiev and Ukraine wouldn't collapse right from the gate, then that Europe would do all the sanctions and support it has right now instead of chickening out immediately, then that the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives would actually be successful even after Kherson offensive had become a regular joke among pro-Russia types)
  • then move smoothly to a moderately pro-Russian narrative (ie not go with the predictions of renewed Russian offensives pushing to Odessa etc., but also be able to predict there would be no further major successes for Ukraine after Kharkiv and that Russia would still make gains in Donbass)
  • and, of course, all the while not predict that there would be further countries invaded, WMDs used, Western intervention etc., all of which were widely and often confidently speculated on at multiple intervals

All things considered, while my guess would be some sort of a ceasefire during this winter with frontlines wherever they are, I fully also acknowledge this has all the chances of being wrong with something else happening, though who knows what.

I haven't been accurate for the entire duration (the start of the war was indeed surprising) and I don't think picking a specific date is terribly important either, but I've actually been fairly consistent in my beliefs on the Ukraine conflict since before we got kicked off reddit and if anyone actually took the bets I was offering I'd have a 100 percent success rate so far. I think that you're right when you say that predicting the individual events that happen is insanely difficult, the general trend of the war is very easy to work out and extrapolate (the massive nuclear power is going to defeat the small economic backwater immediately adjacent to and financially dependent upon it). People just don't do that because the conclusions you come up with when you take a dispassionate look at the situation aren't very popular on twitter or facebook.

(the massive nuclear power is going to defeat the small economic backwater immediately adjacent to and financially dependent upon it)

You mean like how the USSR and the US won against Afghanistan?

It's easy to flip this too and say the combined economic output of NATO vs Russia means Russia is destined to lose. That would be a similarly sophomoric analysis.

After Russia started gearing up for a long war and China signaled it didn't want to give overt military support to Russia, it became an almost certainty that the war would be determined by how much military support the West was willing to give to Ukraine. That, and the outside possibility of a black swan event probably from the Russian side.

The US is not immediately adjacent to Afghanistan, and furthermore held it for decades.

My point wasn't that Afghanistan is identical to Ukraine, it was that an analysis that says "big country wins vs small country" is too limited.

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