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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.
Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their
peasant dialectregional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.Note that the “destiny” of a people who declare sovereignty has never been important for Ukraine or her oligarchs, as they waged war against the ethnically and linguistically Russian inhabitants of eastern Ukrainian when they declared themselves sovereign (after a Western-influenced unconstitutional coup). This despite it having widespread support from the people, as shown by third party polling. Before and after Ukraine literally shelled a region with cluster munitions for declaring sovereignty, they waged cultural genocide against indigenous Russian speakers by making it illegal for shopkeepers to speak Russian or for newspapers to be published in Russian without publishing in Ukrainian first.
Some time ago I read a book about the early days of 2014 war by a Russian militant which made it quite clear, to me, that this narrative (or that Ukraine literally shelled a region with cluster munitions for declaring sovereignty") is bunkum.
What happened was that, in the post-Crimea high, a small group of Russian radical imperialist nationalists conducted a filibuster operation that, due to the general weakness of the post-Kuchma/Yanukovich Ukrainian state and army, managed to turn a heretofore-fairly-weak anti-Maidan operation that had aimed for federalization into a secessionist enterprise, this reaction then being furthered by the ongoing warfare. What is unclear is how much support from official Russia they had, but at least some sectors of the regime seem to have offered them backing.
While there probably was real support for secession in Crimea, I don't think that applies to Donetsk. Of course situation might have been different in the pre-2022 years in the then-Russian-controlled area due to people moving to/from the area for ideological reasons, but I'm not aware of any polls in the Donetsk/Luhansk areas giving any credence to widespread separatist support, apart from the obviously farcical status referendums of 2014 and 2022.
Considering how widely Russian is still spoken in Ukraine, and particularly before 2022, this is not a particularly efficient genocide. Ukraine does privilege Ukrainian to Russian, currently, but that's not genocide, cultural or otherwise.
(Also, below, you state "Ukrainian culture does not exist as separate from the history of Russians, though. That’s why it is nearly identical to Russian culture, religion, and language" - well, if that would be the case, why would Russians consider it such an onerous requirement to speak Ukrainian, identify with Ukrainian culture, join the OCU instead of UOC (MP) etc?)
Which do you think would be easier, incidentally - being an Ukrainian-only speaking in the areas of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia, or being a Russian-only speaker in Ukraine?
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology polled Donbas residents in 2014. The findings are tilted pro-Kyiv in two ways: it’s literally the results from an institution in Kyiv shortly after a coup, but more importantly Kyiv was mentioned whenever the polling was done — those who are wary of Kyiv or anti-Kyiv are obviously going to be less likely to answer an institute from Kyiv. If you look at page 35 Figure 1, 31% want either succession or joining with Russia, an additional 23% wanted to be made an autonomous republic within Ukraine, and 35% want to remain in Ukraine without autonomy. Of that last 35%, only 9% wanted the status quo, whereas 26% wanted expanded powers.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2454203
If the results are this pro-autonomy despite the bias in favor of Kyiv, it’s reasonable to assume that the actual figures are more pro-autonomy. Sadly, there’s no way to get that figure.
NYT say they have, as do HRW. You think it’s bunk because of an obscure book written by an obscure Russian, probably from an obscure passage you haven’t linked.
Yes, that poll shows a clear majority for staying within Ukraine (with autonomy or expanded powers, or without), which is completely different from separation and/or joining Russia.
To make it clear, I wasn't talking about cluster munitions, but about the idea that Ukraine just attacked innocent Donbass people for "wanting sovereignty", a term that means very little in itself. Ukraine defended itself by force of arms against armed filibusterers and (later) local separatists who wanted to violently enact separation and annexation to Russia (declared to be the aim by DPR/LPR from the start), ie. something that had just repeated in Crimea previously. Any other country would have done the same, according to capabilities.
If you want to read the book ("obscure", sure, but would one expect a pro-separatist Russian manifesto to be a NYT bestseller in any case?), it's here.
The poll is an extreme upper ceiling on support for remaining in Ukraine, which is sufficient to prove to even the most skeptical of skeptics that there is huge public support for independence / annexation among Donbas residents. Reminder by the way that Euromaidan was an armed, illegal ousting of a constitutionally-elected president.
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