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A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
I've said it before, I'll say it again: bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
"But [list of reasons why long term Ukraine is screwed, won't be able to get back lost territory, etc, etc]." Yeah, sure. Also Russia is exhausting itself at a very small cost to the American taxpayer.
If Russia spends years grinding away to a standstill in Ukraine, then they won't have the ability to attack any further anytime soon.
And very optimistically, it serves as a warning to other countries wanting to invade their neighbors. If they badly desire a drawn out conflict that drains their resources for no obvious gain, we'll give it to them.
I think this is the rationale.
It doesn't seem to be working. The sanctions have failed. Utterly. It turns out that China, not the West, is the key trade partner of any commodity producer. Russian oil and commodities freely trade on the world market, and the West is actually afraid to sanction Russia more strongly because it hurts them more than Russia. Sanction Russian metals? Great, welcome to higher prices and China will scoop up all Russian production for cheap.
The bigger issue is that the Russian army is 15% larger than before the war and apparently Russia is outproducing the West in key armaments by large margins.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
I think this rationale is mostly in defending military aid to Ukraine. In two years, the US spent a total of $75 billion on Ukraine aid. This is like 5% of its military budget over the same time frame. I think it is hard to overstate how much of a bargain that is. If they could keep China occupied for another 10% of their military spending a Machiavellian strategist would of course do this.
And the Ukrainian cause is quite photogenic. They are somewhat democratic and western and fighting against annexation by a much larger warmonger. Much better than previous allies the US supported against the USSR, like the Mujaheddin.
If the US was smuggling a nuke into St Petersburg and detonated it there to weaken Russia, that would be incredibly evil, yes. But this is not what is happening.
Forget about the small scale conflict of 2014. Putin has no moral claim to occupy Kiev. He is the aggressor in this conflict. NATO is not mind-controlling the Ukrainians. They want to continue to fight, foolishly dreaming of reclaiming every square meter of their country from 2014 back. I think that they might be better served by pursuing a negotiated peace where they cede the occupied parts and then join NATO so Putin can not come back for another slice.
You might be a radical pacifist who thinks that violence is always wrong, and the decent people of the world should just roll over and give the bullies what they want.
I think that fighting wars which can be won or at least fought to a stalemate is sometimes worth it. I am not even firmly opposed to fighting losing wars. Sometimes extracting the maximum cost from an enemy can be a sound strategy. It does not help you in your timeline, apart from satisfying petty feelings of revenge, but it might help you in all the other timelines. If every military operation where the attacker was twice as strong as the defender resulted in the defender surrendering without conditions and the aggressor reaping the full productivity of their new possession, a lot more aggression would happen. Instead, the mere threat of a long war followed by decades of asymmetric conflict eating up the productivity of the region is a lot of the reason why wars of conquest are rare.
I do not expect the Ukrainians to be especially grateful for NATO for the military support. They know that we treat them as pawns, with them doing all the dying. I am strictly against sending NATO troops into Ukraine, Russia and NATO shooting directly at each other is how nuclear wars start. If Ukraine was in NATO, then it would be worth risking World War III in its defense because the alternative would be to defect from the obligations of Article 5 and destroy any deterrence NATO offers, which would enable Russia to pick off European countries one by one.
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It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
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