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What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?
It's hard to get good numbers as both Russia and Ukraine lie about everything. But it feels that Ukraine is exhausted and will soon lose this war. My heuristic for this is reading between the lines of the news. Every optimistic story about Ukraine's war effort in the last year has failed to bear fruit. And nuggets of facts go unchallenged, such as the average age of Ukraine's soldiers now being 42.
The U.S. estimate as of August (according to Wikipedia) is that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed with another 120,000 wounded. I would treat this as a floor, personally. The Ukrainian forces at the start of the war were 200,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 paramilitary. I think it's safe to say these troops have been utterly gutted. The size of the Ukrainian army is reportedly 800,000 today but at this point it must be nearly entirely conscripts. Conscripts with an average age of 42. To channel George Carlin, think of the average 42 year old. How would they fare in a trench? Now realize half of Ukrainian soldiers are older than that.
Millions of people have fled Ukraine. The population (as of 2022) had already declined from 51 million to 36 million within the 1991 borders. It is likely much lower today. We will soon see the first instance in more than 150 years of a country losing half its population. (Either the Potato Famine or the Paraguayan War seem like the last potential candidates for this happening).
What people don't realize is how incredibly RARE this is. The population of other war-torn regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq has skyrocketed. You can't even see the conflicts on a population chart. Syria had a brief decline but has rebounded and is now higher than ever before. The population of Russia dipped during WWII by about 10% but by 1955 had rebounded again to an all-time high.
The combination of low fertility, huge emigration, and war deaths will depopulate Ukraine to a degree that hasn't been seen in modern times.
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine? Yes, it's very convenient that Ukraine is willing to destroy itself to hurt Russia. But, as a utilitarian, I am very skeptical of the benefits of "grand strategy" type decisions like this. The world is complicated. If we let Putin have the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine will he then demand the Polish-speaking parts of Poland? No. It's not like this war has been a resounding success. Furthermore, he could die tomorrow.
But the deaths suffered by Ukrainian conscripts (and yes Russian conscripts too) are very real. We are trading the deaths of real people for theoretical future benefits. And we are destroying an entire country in the process. Why not go to the bargaining table and end this cruel and pointless war?
Because Putin has shown 0 interest in meaingfully negotiating, his minimum position is "I win, you lose" and this is obviously unacceptable to Ukraine/'the west'. Putin has shown again and again and again that any compromise will be taken as a sign of weakness that emboldens him to push further. If you wish to minimise human suffering, focus on winning the war and defeating Russia to the point where it stops launching such stupid and wasteful wars in the first place.
Because 'the west' broadly empathises with the desire of Ukrainians to not be Russians, I certainly know that I'd be fighting and dying if I was in their shoes and would appreciate all the help that I could be given. While there are certainly those who are seeking to control this war for more cynical ends (looking at you, idiots in the US state department) they are by far and away in the minority, popular support for Ukraine in the west is driven much more by sympathy for the plight of their fellow Europeans, resisting aggression and a desire to reassert the taboo against major wars in Europe. Russia and its foreign cheerleaders have taken great pains to try and depict this war as one between NATO and Russia, with the Ukrainians cast as pawns in the greater struggle, but this is a complete misreading of the situation designed to flatter the egos of the Russian people and portray the west as villains. The reality is that if the Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they wouldn't fight and certainly they would not fight with the tenacity and resourcefulness that they've shown.
"My source? It was revealed to me in a dream."
The narratives around this war have been as changeable as a wind sock, turning to match each gust of changing fortune. I wouldn't bother trying to guess how this will all end, nobody can tell from where we are now.
When Putin defeated Chechnya, what happened to the Chechens? Were they ethnically displaced? No. Well, were they culturally Russified? Not really. But surely they lost the ability to adjudicate their own matters in their own republic? Nope, they enforce an Islamic dress code and still kill gays…
It’s western propaganda that Russia wouldn’t negotiate with Ukraine, or that Ukrainian culture would be damaged by Russia. There’s no evidence for it. There’s plenty evidence of the exact opposite.
"Just bow before the golden statue, you don't have to mean it."
On the first level, it's always rational to give in to threats of force when you are uncertain that you can resist, and never more so than when all you have to do is give up some wispy theoretical thing like "sovereignty". Just calculate the probability weighted present value of future benefits and select the decision branch that maximizes it, right?
But game theory is baked into human nature: tit for tat is optimal in some games, but we go even further to ensure deterrence. Break into my house and I'll shoot you; invade some Roman lands and they'll destroy Carthage; blow up a battleship in harbor and America will bend every resource to your complete submission or annihilation.
In repeated games, vengeance is rational, and resistance in the face of impossible odds is logical.
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