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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?
A nation-state centered around Ukrainians, generally democratic and politically European, rather than a subject-state or administrative unit centered around Russians ruled by autocratic collaborators.
Yawn. You could read that interpretation since the very start of the conflict, given it's been one of the most prevalent propaganda narratives the whole time.
Your confirmation bias will continue to be well fed for the next year, as was predicted nearly half a year ago by the people who recognized the logistical limitations of the western artillery ammo shortage and production-mobilization lagging behind the Russians.
Only if you selectively choose the optimistic stories you remember, just as your numbers arguments only bear fruit if you selectively recall your numbers.
Because they like its perseverance more than they like Putin's.
There are multiple angles to this, ranging from the domestic political rewards of supporting Ukraine versus costs for wanting rapprochement with Russia, international angles of posturing withing various international organizations and forums, ideological views of various elites, security considerations for military establishments, economic incentives for politically-justifiable retoolings or expansions of military-industrial complexes, and so on.
There's also the point that Putin's kind of a dick, who tried to blackmail and then crash the European economy in the opening year of the war with energy cutoffs that have triggered long-term and painful economic shifts in the European industrial economy. Revenge and retaliation as a form of future-deterrence also play a role.
The war has been an abject disaster for the Russian state because the Ukrainian nation fought back, with western support, and did so despite obvious and predictable great cost. The deterrence model you appeal to only applies on behalf of the costs already imposed, and threatened to continue to be imposed, which your proposed compromise undercuts by indicating that resistance is neither indefinite or desired by yourself.
Moreover, Putin both started the war with war goals far beyond the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine (hence the attempt at a coup de main centered on Kyiv), and retains war goals far beyond the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine (which, notably, have never voted for association with Russia except when supervised by Russian military forces).
You are (allegedly) a utilitarian. Trading real costs for theoretical units of value (utils) is the core conceit of utilitarianism as a model.
'We' are not, unless you are speaking in association with the Russians invading Ukraine. The moral, ethical, and legal responsibility for the Ukraine War, the Ukraine War's continuation, and the Ukraine war's future costs are on Putin, who made the destruction of the Ukrainian national identity a core premise of his war from the start.
Because Putin continues to maintain maximalist war goals of in yet another continuation war against Ukraine, with stated and demonstrated objectives of waging a war of national destruction against the Ukrainian nation to subordinate them on revanchist grounds that apply to multiple other partners and allies of the broader Western coalition.
War is always cruel. War doesn't become pointless simply because you don't agree with the point.
That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
My initial bias was that Russia would score a quick victory. Then, influenced by my American media diet, I thought that the Russian economy would collapse and that the Ukraine counteroffensive, backed by advanced American weapons, would be effective.
When that didn't pan on I questioned my assumptions.
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still. I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
That's the problem isn't it? How do value these fuzzy future utils that rest on things like predictions of future actions of dictators? My prejudice is to take a "greedy algorithm" approach. Let's prefer the utils right in front of our face over hypothetical future utils (which might even be negative utils!). If you know finance, think of it like a present value calculation with a high discount rate.
People are FAR too confident about the future.
Also. Please don't be a jerk, especially to people who are making an effort to argue an unpopular opinion.
What makes you think Putin would accept a ceasefire proposal along the current line of control? All I have seen indicates to me that he is fully prepared to fight a years-long war of attrition until Ukraine runs out of either artillery shells or people, because he thinks at that point they will collapse like the Germans in 1918 and he can have the glorious march to Kiev he was denied at the start of the war. I don't see any incentive for him to stop halfway besides saving the lives of Russian soldiers dying in the trenches, and after all what's a few million dead compared to reuniting the motherland?
I can only speak for myself, but I still support sending aid to Ukraine and I never thought that reconquering Crimea or the breakaway Donbass republics was feasible, only status quo ante bellum at most. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight and there are no American boots on the ground (the odd volunteer excepted) though, I don't see any reason to deny their requests for assistance; we can stop the day Ukrainian public opinion turns against the war.
Isn't this just a general purpose argument for extending the war forever? Obviously the opponent would only compromise if he was weak. And if he's weak we can win!
Algorithm for perpetual war
Opponent is losing: Don't stop now, he's toast. March on to victory.
Opponent is winning: Don't negotiate from a state of weakness.
Honestly, I don't know. Maybe Putin wouldn't accept peace even at the current borders. Maybe he would. Maybe he'd give it all back in exchange for international recognition of Crimea. Why are we afraid to try offering an olive branch?
No. It's a specific-person argument relevant to the key decision maker based on past actions and demonstrated intentions.
Your algorithm lacks basic considerations such as not reflecting the considerations of what objectives are being pursued, the considerations of Putin that Resolute Raven was referring to, not factoring in the game theory of the nuclear weapons.
It also lacks the characteristic of having been made by the person you are responding to, rendering it a straw man that does not address their actual position.
I don't know- why are you afraid?
May other people aren't afraid, they just deem it an irrational and even harmful olive branch based on the multiple other olive branches Putin was offered that Putin discarded, ignored, or used as weapons in the course of his path to the present.
Which returns to your propensity to ignoring the history of involved actors and repeated iterations of conflicts and compromises as a factor in other people's considerations of how to deal with said actors.
To pick just one related to territorial claims, the history that Putin himself recognized Ukranian territorial integrity before he decided not to, before he said he had no further territorial claims on Ukraine, before he sponsored an uprising he claimed he had nothing to do with, before he launched an armed intervention to secure separatist republics he claimed he had no territorial ambitions on, before he annexed them but claimed he had no territorial goals on the rest of Ukraine, before he declared the annexation of not only territories held but territories never captured, to current highly costly efforts to continue conquering territory not held and never held previously.
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