I think this is absolutely right. Arguably World War II itself is a colossal example of second-mover advantage. Not only in terms of the moral high-ground (although the moral high ground, I would argue, is probably most important). The Axis invested heavily in weapons development in the later 30s, and so had the best equipment when the war started. The Allies in response invested heavily in the next generation of weapons, and so by 1942-3 were consistently coming out with great quantities of superior weapons. The Germans obviously produced some high-quality mid-1940s weapons, but couldn't overcome the Allied advantage in quantity, once Hitler's early actions had convinced them he had to be destroyed.
I mean most countries would vote against an invasion you would expect, what is interesting is that India and China abstained. That's a lot of population.
Short term, sure. Disruption always equals a price spike. But fertilizer mostly starts with the synthesis of ammonia from natural gas via the Haber process, and this is not restricted to any particular place. It's more a question of where the gas is cheaper. If the US (#2 fertilizer producer in the world, behind China) could probably relatively easily make up the loss -- it would just cost more.
This is the problem with social media: it turns everything into an echo chamber. I've been accused of "kissing ass to Russia" simply because I don't believe all the one-sided propaganda about "unexpected Ukrainian victory."
The worst part is that I think our own intelligence analysts are falling prey to that same echo chamber. The CIA could use a good housecleaning. The amount of incompetence it took to avoid forecasting this situation is mind-boggling. Every analyst in the CIA should be required to participate in internal prediction markets and have their track record objectively and measurably analyzed.
> The amount of incompetence it took to avoid forecasting this situation is mind-boggling.
Can you explain what you mean by this? My impression is that US intelligence agencies have predicted this much better than most other parties involved.
I’d suggest a slightly more varied set of sources than just Anatoly Karlin and CNN. I truly hope civilian targets are scrupulously avoided. But the most effective way of avoiding civilian deaths is to not invade.
That’s great. If you haven’t already some of pundits linked in Part 3 provide a nice variety of priors from Karlin.
I understand the heuristic “I trust Karlin the most on this topic so I’ll believe that info the most”. I don’t understand how that’s really combined with the heuristic “CNN are usually (always?) shit so I’ll just believe the opposite”?
You claim that the reason any civilians are dying is because “Russia has scrupulously avoided civilian targets. Recognizing this, Ukraine has taken to housing troops in residential areas, schools, etc...This makes it difficult to clear areas quickly without significant civilian casualties, which would give Ukraine and the West a massive propaganda victory”.
To be clear: you believe that Ukraine (and the West) are trying to increase civilian deaths for propaganda purposes? How confident are you that this is true? I think it's unlikely. I'd give it a pretty low probability compared to some other potential reasons civilians are dying.
Can you put a number on "fairly low" casualties? The current estimate is a few hundred vehicles destroyed and somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dead Russians depending on who you trust. Small compared to the total size of the army, but might still be unacceptably high if they were expecting an Iraq style walkover.
Also, not sure what "all flights knocked out on the first day" is supposed to mean militarily, since the Ukraine Air Force is still flying sorties last I looked.
"Russia's Air Force is complacent and inept" and "they have total control of the air space" may be both true.
State where neither Ukraine nor Russia is flying anything and Russia is capable of shooting down any Ukraine craft is possible.
Though note that Ukraine is still flying token forces (drones).
BTW, the Russian article also has
> “I want to emphasize once again that the armed forces of the Russian Federation strike only at military facilities. Nothing threatens the civilian population,” he said.
You can do a little better than "well, one side says one thing and one side says the opposite, guess we know *literally nothing.*" Some of the claims are unreasonable (like the multiple claims of IL-22 planes being shot down which never lead to any photos of a wrecked plane on the ground), but some are pretty reasonable (like the multiple claims that Ukrainian drones are scoring kills accompanied by video footage from the drones in question, matched to places in northern Ukraine). I'm not solely citing the Ukrainian MoD's claims here, which is why I said "a few hundred" rather than their extremely optimistic claim of 800 armored vehicles destroyed.
I didn't claim that Ukraine is winning (I think they're losing slowly and expensively), but I think there's enough eyes on the problem to say that 100s of destroyed Russian vehicles aren't just being made up from whole cloth, and that the numbers are probably at least the right order of magnitude.
Destroyed train is visible on satellite imagery as hot spots in infrared exactly matching train tracks! AKA we can see it burning. (search for "train" on that page)
Okay, but I suppose I did mention something important, which is that he made his prediction by pointing out that Russia's public demands looked more like a pretext for war than a starting point for negotiation. I think he definitely deserves credit for looking at what actual players were saying instead of going based on impressions of personalities/motivations from the last few decades.
I don't know what people thought the enormous military buildup on the Ukrainian border was for. They had been working on it for a year, first quietly, then brazenly. Putin isn't crazy but he really BELIEVES that Ukraine is ruled by a puppet government, so why WOULDN'T the military collapse, Afghanistan-style? Fairly rational behavior.
I agree most things so far have been fairly rational, not much evidence of the Putin has gone crazy theory. But the Russians and Ukrainians have close links, he would have had decent intelligence that the military would collapse if that was his plan.
The US had extremely tight links with Afghanistan's military and yet didn't have decent intelligence on how fast it would collapse. Willingness to fight isn't something intelligence can easily quantify like how many tanks and helicopters a country has. It's also something that can collapse or stiffen suddenly based on events on the ground.
Nonsense. The Pentagon knew very well how fast the Afghan military would collapse, if the endgame were played out in the idiotic way it was. But their advice was rejected by the President. The fact that the end was done so poorly has nothing to do with any lack of information about what would happen. It was decisions taken *in spite of* knowing what would happen, and just not caring.
For example, they were saying Kabul could fall "within 90 days", exactly 4 days before it fell. And yes, 4 days is "within 90 days", but that sure seems to be giving them a lot of credit. I don't really care to go through the whole list of their prognostications, but my memory is that they were playing this game throughout the entire collapse. I think it's fair to say at the time of the withdrawal, they probably expected the Taliban to win eventually, but they vastly overestimated the ease with which the cities would fall.
I don't see any way to escape from the conclusion that the US MIC's conduct was characterized by fraud and idiocy throughout the entire Afghan affair. They kept advising Presidents to stay and fight forever, but the situation never improved. I'm not sure what the precise breakdown is between fraud and idiocy, but I can only conclude that if you're correct and I overestimated the idiocy, I must have underestimated the fraud.
The "within 90 days" was mostly up to the Taliban; I don't think anybody expected the Afghan National Army to hold up through three months of brutal siege and block-to-block urban combat. But whether the Taliban would march directly on Kabul, or take a more methodical approach and/or secure the rest of the country first, was unknowable.
You don't know in detail what they said, because they said it to the President, and the only reports that were readily repeated were those that defended the President's decision. But there were enough details leaked out that it was very clear that the military gave him pretty accurate predictions -- he just chose to ignore them. That's *why* Bagram was abandoned early, which is almost as silly a decision (if you're trying to avoid a choatic withdrawal) as the decision to stop doing maintenance work on air assets early, which of course told the Afghans they had zero hope of maintaining their defense as soon as the Americans left. In Afghanistan without air power you're just screwed. The predictions of the military you hear were *all* predicated on following their recommendations for an orderly withdrawal, and one that coordinated faithfully and effectively with the Afghan government. Of course if you do something else entirely, it won't work out the way they suggested.
I think the argument was that Putin could intimidate Ukraine, make the West freak out, then embarrass them by not invading and add to the sense that the West is constantly freaking out about Russia even though they are peaceful.
I'm interested in hearing from military historians how many examples there are of cases where a leader did a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it.
But, to hear the Roman historians tell it, this was one of the incidents that led to Caligula's discrediting in the eyes of the Roman elite. In another comment below I mentioned the medieval English king who gathered an expedition against France and then sent it home--his barons were utterly disgusted by this stunt.
The confusing part to me about the potential of this strategy as a 'bluff' is that right up until paratroopers were dropped into the capital, Russian diplomats and representatives were swearing on their mother's graves that Russia would absolutely not invade. And as you mentioned, even mocking countries for suggesting Russia such a crazy idea.
So it only works as a bluff if the person being bluffed is absolutely convinced that every statement coming out of your mouth is a lie?
That suggests to me they really were committed from the start to an invasion, and simply genuinely preferred to have the element of surprise.
This is what I wanted to say - I've read an article claiming that the Russian govt. is kind of denouncing Putin for launching a war all by himself, without going through the proper channels, genuinely catching his own country by surprise.
If you read Lavrov's remarks at that infamous Feb. 21 Russian Security Council meeting, they sound quite reasonable and very technical, and not those of someone expecting full-on war to start in 3 days (he even mentions a meeting scheduled with Blinken in Geneva on Feb 24):
Lavrov is highly skilled and polished, but I don't know how much influence he has, or whether Putin sees Lavrov as order-taker solely responsible for "selling" whatever he decides, not an advisor. The Security Council was stage-managed and theatrical, but on the balance of probabilities it seems to me the decision completely blindsided Lavrov as well. Whatever mole the US has within the Russian presidency must be very close indeed.
I saw news reports[1] that the generals didn't know until a week beforehand, but I can't find them now.
For the grunts, they weren't even indoctrinated and why this mission was important, or why they might need to fire on people they consider their cousins.
EDIT I think it was on DAlperovitch's twitter feed, but having trouble with finding the primary source, which should be worrying
Able Archer 83 is probably the most obvious parallel insofar as the West swore up and down that it wasn't an invasion but the Soviets went to strategic high alert anyway... and then the West was telling the truth and it wasn't an invasion, so the Soviets calmed down.
> then embarrass them by not invading and add to the sense that the West is constantly freaking out about Russia
Partly that. Also, the military buildup forces Ukraine to put its troops on higher readiness. Doing that for a long time costs money, which Ukraine is short of.
Also, if there are lots of military buildups that don't lead to war, people will think the lastest buildup won't lead to war either, and be less prepared when it does.
Only found out about it yesterday from one of Galeev's magnificent threads, but I think the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480 counts; the leader of the Great Horde led a vast army to the Ugra River, there was a stand off with the Muscovites, and then the Horde just withdrew when they could have crossed the river unopposed, for reasons that remain unclear.
It ended the suzerainty of the Golden Horde over Russia, and is therefore one of the most important events in Russian history; and the decision to retreat led to the final, irrevocable severing from a declining empire of one of its most important provinces. It wouldn't be a surprise if the Ugra River confrontation was in Putin's thoughts when he decided not to follow the Horde's example.
The interesting thing about the Standoff was that people at the time didn't really recognize it as a turning point, just as the significance of Dimitry Donskoi's victory at Kulikovo Polje a hundred years before was really appreciated then.
I have a fair amount of historical knowledge (but I'd feel pompous saying "I'm a historian"), and I'm having difficulty thinking of a clear example of "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it." I can think of plenty of examples of saber-rattling where the rattler backed down (e. g., the two Morocco crises leading up to WWI, the rattler in both cases being Germany), and plenty of examples of intimidation leading to, in some sense, to bluff-calling leading to war (July 1914, I would argue, fits this to a significant extent). The Cuban Missile Crisis may be an example of a buildup where the builder intended a bluff and backed down, but I wouldn't say the buildup was massive, certainly not in the logistical sense.
In an hour or so of mulling, I simply can't think of a clear, unarguable example of the literal sense of what you're describing (again, "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it").
WW1 sort of illustrates how hard it was to do this thing in the era of vast conscript armies. Once Russia started mobilizing for war, it was a de facto declaration of war so it didn't matter if it was intended as a bluff or not.
That said, I *hate* to be the one to bring up Hitler since it's usually so trite, but the closest thing in the historical record I can think of is that a reasonable man in 1938 could have concluded that Hitler's threat towards the Sudetenland was a bluff that no one called. Though I think the historical consensus is it wasn't a bluff, Hitler really would have invaded and the results almost surely would have been much worse for him than in our world.
WW1 is a good example of what happens when the object of a threat refuses to back down. Russia mobilized, hoping to threaten Austria into not invading Serbia. Austria refused to back down and insisted Germany live up to its alliance with them. Germany mobilized, hoping Russia would back down. And so on. No government had actually decided upon war (except Austria against Serbia, in revenge for the assassination of the archduke), but since no one backed down, everyone had to follow through.
In the case of 1938, some historians (including Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw) argue that Hitler actually wanted war against Czechoslovakia in 1938, and was annoyed that the other powers in Europe were so accommodating that he felt he had to make a deal (especially because his one ally, Italy, seemed not to want war). Some historians argue that Chamberlain's appeasement actually did buy the British a year in which to prepare for war, and that war in 1938 would have actually been worse for the allies even than the one in 1939 was.
On the latter point, I'll recommend Tooze's new book on the Nazi war economy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He argues that German arms production was unsustainable beyond 1939, and the Geman economy being kept afloat by booty from its conquests. 1938 was probably the peak German moment in terms of its air power advantage, though not necessarily tanks, particularly as Czech production was a big help there. Tooze also argues for the French collapse being more or less a fluke, but a fluke that nonetheless required Germany to have the equipment to make it possible -- though none of that could have been predicted in 1938. The French weren't motivated by a fear of collapse so much as a fear of WW1 redux.
What could be seen in 1938, and what made war look even more suicidal for Germany than 1939, was that Hitler was more diplomatically isolated: he didn't have an understanding with the USSR, and the USSR had a defensive treaty with the Czechoslovaks. The Soviets didn't even have to contribute any forces in the event of invasion, they just had to restrict exports to produce a crushing economic crisis for Germany. Oil being the most obvious one, but grain being perhaps even more critical.
I've had Tooze's book in the back of my mind for a while, and you're really persuading me to put it at the front of the list! Tooze is first-rate. If you haven't read Deluge, I highly recommend it.
I don’t know about troop buildups in particular, but the general pattern of ‘periodically ratchet up military tensions and rattle sabers in exchange for economic concessions’ is a perennial North Korean favorite.
Technically I would say that this wasn't a bluff, but a threat. I normally dislike being a vocabulary pedant, and in general am in no position to cast stones. But "bluff" implies that they can't or won't, while "threat" implies that they can and might. And given that the theme of the post is accurate predicting, this seems like a worthwhile distinction to make (at least in our early-21st-century North American dialect of English).
The suggestion isn't that it *was* a bluff, but that people who incorrectly thought there wouldn't be an invasion were able to account for the build up of troops by saying it was a bluff.
[I'm not a historian, just another article reader who guessed this wrong.]
I don't see the troop buildup as being as much a bluff as both a threat and preparation in one. I don't think that before the invasion that Putin had made up his mind one way or the other, he made demands and Lavrov seemed to be genuinely looking for some compromise he could bring back. The West were offering the stick but not the carrot as far as the media reported. As Robert Wright put it on his substack, they were boxing him in but not giving him a way out. It may be that they were expecting to have longer to negotiate before he acted but their correct predictions of the invasion seem to suggest otherwise. We still don't know when Putin decided to invade or how much chance he himself would have estimated earlier of him making (or being given) another politically viable option.
As for the history of troop buildups without war, yes it's common for the same reason: plans are always contingent. Napoleon and Hitler both massed troops at the channel for possible invasions of Britain that they decided against.
More recently, in cases there's less reason to think war was ever seriously considered, the powers and alliances have frequently taunted each other with massive military exercises of the sort that Russia and Belarus were supposedly doing. Around the South China Sea and Korean Peninsular; in the eastern Mediterranean; Pakistan, India, China. The exercises are both practice for, and threats of, possible attacks.
Western Intelligence released campaign plans for an invasion but I just assume that every country has plans to invade or defend against all of their neighbours hidden away in locked drawers.
I'm not sure any of the examples you cite actually conform to the description, "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it." Neither Napoleon or Hitler were bluffing; they both decided against carrying out the invasion because of circumstances (in Napoleon's case, the destruction of his fleet at Trafalgar and the Austro-Russian declaration of war against him; in Hitler's, the failure of the Luftwaffe to take control of the skies over Britain, and his greater interest in invading the Soviet Union).
The exercises you mention are certainly meant to remind targets of the power of the nation carrying out the exercises, but they don't threaten invasion, so they're not exactly a bluff. I suppose N. Korea's missile launches might qualify, since they seem at least partly designed to convince N. K.'s neighbors that they might do something crazy at any time. I think about 1970 Nixon also made a few moves to convince the Communist powers that "Nixon is crazy"; this is talked about in Nixonland--so that might qualify as an example of a pure bluff meant to intimidate.
That was looked pretty similar to Putin's own actions a year before. Since March 2021 military buildup of comparable scare was made, then redraw, then made again, then redraw, then made again.
So even if it was an intension for invasion since the very beginning... I see no reason it should be current (third as I count) iteration and not a year later.
The most convincing argument that I saw prior to the war actually breaking out was that the scale of the Russian deployment was too great in scale and too obviously prepared for battle to be a bluff. Making extremely obvious preparations to invade a country and then not invading that country just to own the libs would be a fairly pointless action, and it would have the side-effect of making Putin seem weak and undermining his ability to threaten other countries in the future.
Enormous military buildups are frequently, perhaps usually, meant to intimidate a neighbor into making concessions. So it's not a priori unreasonable to predict that the outcome of a large military buildup will be "demand concessions, get concessions, go home".
And maybe that was the original plan. But while Western pundits get a D for their understanding of Vladimir Putin, Putin himself gets an F for his understanding of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Really, I think almost everyone failed on that one.
They demanded them, but from NATO, not Ukraine. Medvedev said that there's no point talking to Ukraine, as they have no autonomy. And NATO dismissed the ultimatums, because there's no realistic non-suicidal threat that Russia can pose to it, and a big flare-up in Ukraine would be a great occasion to come down on Russia in full force to punish it for all the provocations over the years.
Or that the concessions demanded of NATO were fundamentally unworkable. If the concessions demanded of an organization amount to a negation of critical parts of their charter, they're not going to make those concessions.
Exactly. None of this makes sense. NATO could never make the concessions demanded. Russia never linked those demands to a threat to invade Ukraine. Invading Ukraine doesn't threaten NATO's interests, so it doesn't work as negotiating tactic. Conclusion: this is all a smokescreen to obscure Russia's real goals.
Also, demands to NATO were ridiculously absurd and included demand that Poland would disband army forces (the exact demand was to remove NATO armies from countries including Poland, as Poland is in NATO it would require removing Polish army from Poland).
Well, either Putin already decided by then to invade and made obviously unrealistic demands to obtain a casus belli, or he wanted NATO to haggle and give him at least something to prove that he is being taken seriously.
As I think you're implying in your second paragraph, a problem with the strategy of "buildup, intimidate, get concessions, go home" occurs if the target refuses to be intimidated. That puts the leader who has chosen the buildup, etc., strategy in a real bind. If Putin had just said, "well, that didn't work" and sent the troops home, his generals would have been utterly disgusted with him. In this sense, Zelensky's choice to simply refuse to admit the danger (rather than, say, admitting being intimidated and making concessions, or talking tough and essentially daring Putin to invade) put Putin, as I say, in a real bind.
I have this memory of a medieval English king, I think John or Henry III, who gathered a huge expedition to invade France and then sent everyone home, and this flub added to the English nobility's already-considerable disgust with this king and contributed to an outbreak of royal-noble civil war later--if anyone remembers the specific instance, I'd be most grateful to be reminded.
As I remember it, Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 would arguably be another story where an attempt to intimidate (Napoleon's) that provokes a fairly phlegmatic reaction (Alexander's) essentially leaves the would-be intimidator thinking they have no choice but to make the threat real.
Yes, perhaps it was a stroke of genuis by Zelensky to accept at face value reassurances which were intended by obviously fake. If Zelensky says he's unconcerned by Russia carrrying out peaceful exercises close to the border, Putin can't very well disabuse him of that.
On the other hand, I still don't understand what concession Ukraine might have made to prevent the invasion. If you wander round someone's shop with a baseball bat and suggest that you could ensure no harm came to it for a small fee, you might get paid, but it doesn't really work if you just look menacing and hope the shopkeeper guesses your demand.
Conceivably Zelensky could have promised not to join the EU or NATO and recognized the Russian claims in Crimea, and the breakaway republics in the east. These obviously would not have worked if Putin was determined on war from the get-go, but arguably would have allowed him to claim victory and send his troops back to their barracks without losing credit in the eyes of the Russian elite.
To be fair, even if Zelenskii wanted to make such promises (and he was elected in 2019 over vociferous American objections, on a platform of peace and reconciliation with Donbass) he probably couldn't.
> If you wander round someone's shop with a baseball bat and suggest that you could ensure no harm came to it for a small fee, you might get paid, but it doesn't really work if you just look menacing and hope the shopkeeper guesses your demand.
Or demand all money, house and help in extorting children of the shopkeeper.
I'm not sure what Putin thought the West could give him, without the whole thing looking like Munich 1938. "Oh, you're threatening to invade that country? In that case we'll definitely promise to never defend it and never consider it our ally, as you demand. And we'll throw a couple of our current treaty members under the bus as a bonus. Now, stay peaceful... pretty please?"
I was skeptical of this based on the argument that Russia didn't need to do an enormous buildup in order to invade Ukraine and make them collapse, so the extremely telegraphed buildup must have just been for show.
There had been several Russian and joint Belorussian-Russian wargames in the past years that moved comparable number of troops and equipment.
Zapad 2017 and 2021 exercises (for the Western Military District, mainly directed toward Poland and Baltic states) and Vostok 2014 and 2018 (Eastern Military District) involved 70 000 - 300 000 troops each (although it is difficult to give precise numbers here, I would take the upper range with a grain of salt, but for me it reasonable most of these involved 100 000 troops or more). Considering that it is a conflict zone and that large scale military exercises are not unusual in Russia, the amount of troops along the border is only weak evidence towards the invasion. Though, I myself did not believe there would be an attack up until the last weekend before the events.
> Russia might well invade Ukraine. though I suspect Putin's strategy is more to wear down Ukraine and the West by making people think it is likely, then not doing it, then doing it later.
While i didn't make any precise predictions, I thought Ukrainian resistance would be a lot weaker than it has turned out to be. Evidently Ukrainians feel more nationalist sentiment towards their country than I anticipated.
My current thinking is that whether Ukraine wins depends on 2 factors: (1) how quickly Russia attacks/advances and (2) how quickly the West decides to give Ukraine more military aid. European public opinion has gone from pacifism/appeasement to standing up to Putin a lot quicker than I expected, and if that continues, both in European and USA, it's likely Ukraine will get significant new aid, perhaps a no-fly zone or NATO troops directly fighting. (Probabilities of 40% and 20%, respectively, for these by the end of the month).
A no-fly zone would be NATO troops directly fighting.
And if you think it likely that nuclear-armed NATO and nuclear-armed Russia will be at war by the end of the month, what odds would you put on global thermonuclear war?
I'm not any kind of serious forecaster, but I called the war right (enough to comment to my wife that Taibbi was an idiot for that post he had to apologize for).
If we see mass civilian casualties, I'll bet 70% on NATO planes in direct action. Possibly without admitting it. "I don't know why your tanks and airplanes keep exploding. Perhaps their car warranty has expired?" I'm willing to give 10-15% odds that this has already happened.
If it happen in public, I would offer low probability (10%?) of going nuclear. Putin wants to live, the people in the chain of command to the actual nukes want to live.
Also the thing about betting against nuclear war is that if I'm wrong, I probably won't be around to eat crow. So it's a pretty "safe" bet.
>I'm willing to give 10-15% odds that this has already happened.
I bet you $10 (ie I pay you $10, you pay me $1) that by 01 Jan 2023 no information will have emerged from any credible source (arbitrated by Scott Alexander by means of pestering him until he makes a ruling) that NATO planes carried out direct action (defined as the use of bombs, missiles, rockets or cannons) against Russian ground forces in the Ukraine on or before 04 Mar 22.
Concessions I'll make: Russian equipment counts as forces even if uncrewed. Russian naval forces count if the engagement occurs within 16km of the Ukrainian coast. Russian UAVs, planes and helicopters count if they are within 50ft of the ground.
Oh sure, why not. Though, why the 50ft restriction? How about we make it $1.50/$10 (15% was my upper probability for "tanks and airplanes") and get rid of that limit? Or how about two separate bets, one for each?
And if you're actually part of the FBI's counter-prediction-market strike team, well, I'm not hard to find. See you in court.
I did the 50ft restriction because it's a lot harder to be unclear about where something is in relation to borders on the ground than it is in the air, which reduces the risk of failure by ambiguous resolution conditions. I'm happy to take your amendment though in a single bet form.
Email me at birch dot jj at google mail so we can keep touch until we declare the winner in an open thread early next year. I'll delete this post when I get your email.
A no-fly zone? Not the tiniest chance. No European nation (or rather coalition since none of them has fighters enough by itself) could attempt that without the US nuclear umbrella, and there is zero chance the American people will go to war directly with Russia over the Ukraine. I mean, we like Ukrainians, you bet, but not enough to risk SS-18s overhead on their behalf.
"My current thinking is that whether Ukraine wins depends on 2 factors: (1) how quickly Russia attacks/advances and (2) how quickly the West decides to give Ukraine more military aid. "
These are not measurable conditions or predictions, these are truisms that seem to conflate the conditions that define victory or defeat with the things that cause it. Of course the Ukraine will win if Russia has a rate of advance that is extremely slow or negative. Of course the Ukraine will be more likely to win if it has more materiel with which to fight.
This is the military equivalent of making a medical claim about treatment of malignant tumors that says "I think the odds of curing the tumor before it kills the patient depends on how quickly the tumors grow and spread, and how quickly and how much treatment is applied."
I think you need to do much, much better here. A prediction like "If the Russian FLOT is not at all crossing points over the Dneiper by 10 Mar 22 then no Russian forces will be on territory claimed by the Ukrainian government by 25 Dec 22." is an example of a measurable version of your claims around tempo etc, while something like "If Ukraine is not provided 100 fully crewed fourth generation multirole aircraft which are operated from Poland by 15 Mar 22 then Russia will control all Ukrainian territory by 01 Jul 22" is an example of a useful prediction around military aid.
Edit: Also I don't think the numbers on your website for NATO military involvement (no fly zone or direct fighting against Russians) are accurate. The real odds are quite a bit lower. NATO and member states have made their position extremely clear - they will not directly involve themselves in this conflict. The closest we will see to your prediction is the Ukraine receiving donations of materiel that comes crewed (for extreme eg, UKR pays $1 for 100 F16s from NATO that also happen to come with pilots who until a minute before the sale belonged to NATO airforces, but who have now retired. This distinction seems meaningless if you are not military, but the distinction is extremely meaningful from a LOAC perspective) and intelligence/EW/FID support (which is already active and has been since pre-invasion).
To compel negotiations that would resolve favorably. Making credible threats to get concessions is pretty standard behavior. The problem with executing on threats is that you are suddenly in a totally different game with different rules.
You can be rational and be working from bad facts. Putin probably did not anticipate the strength of Ukrainian resistance. Few people did. Getting out of a war is a lot harder than getting in. Probably he has to press on, rack up some wins, like capturing some major cities, no matter how costly, so he has some leverage to negotiate an exit. Awful, really. The whole situation is a disaster on many levels, and the scale of the risk of a nuclear armed country doing this is so bad that we cannot even really contemplate it.
With regards to Luttwak and his suggested insight to Putin's thinking, suggest listening to Andrew Sullivan's recent dishcast with him - Luttwak and Putin have had dinner together (many years ago).
I think that, in a way, the entire question here is wrong!
The thing is, using solely publicly available (and widely-disseminated) information, it was clear that Putin *could* imminently invade Ukraine. He had brought a truly remarkable amount of force to bear - even at the cost of military readiness elsewhere throughout Russia - and positioned it so that it could invade. It was a huge investment.
Putin had created a situation where he could, at a moment's notice, decide to invade or not. Now it turns out he was already resolved to do so and US intelligence knew about that. But Putin could, of course, have been genuinely unsure of whether he wanted to invade, in which case there would be no possible evidence of his intentions (they wouldn't exist yet). But good decision-making would nevertheless need to respond to the extremely real and serious *capability* he had then developed.
In light of this, I find all the prewar attempts to analyze US IC or to psychoanalyze Putin to be somewhat misguided.
No, I said that "predict what Putin should do" is the wrong question, in large part because it invites you to spend a lot of time working on a question that has weak data and (by historical example) invites a lot of motivated reasoning and wishful thinking by the asker.
Instead, much more emphasis should be put on *what Putin is capable of doing*, based on the observable, physical disposition of forces and other similar intelligence. Putin had created a situation in which he could, at a whim and moment's notice, launch an invasion of Ukraine. Your plans should be based on that.
I'll reitorate the aphorism - "play the chessboard, not the player" - in chess very little effort is put into trying to mindgame your particular opponent rather than simply learning to play well based on the objective arrangement of the pieces.
The story of Hitler is, infamously, people using that sort of reasoning to convince themselves he *wasn't* going to do what he said he was going to do. And with Putin, if he had all the same statements but *hadn't* massed 150k+ troops on the Ukrainian border, you would probably not think a Russian invasion was imminent.
I find it interesting that Putin said he was genuinely surprised there were no concessions offered by western leaders
I believe this. He may have expected to invade but not getting any negotiation benefit out of the threat caught him off guard. Maybe he didn't expect to invade but wondered how little of a concession he would have to consider
Russia does not understand that westerners do not understand how Russians perceive NATO growth. Imo it's time to figure that out, especially since it could be the key to any kind of quick and acceptable end to the war
I don't think what Putin says offers any useful information about what he thinks. He's sufficiently well informed that he can't have been surprised by this.
This seems dead on. We made a huge, unforced error. Rather than respond to military realities and give at the margins, we decided to draw millions of people into an unwinnable war we don’t want.
This is where I see the merit in the anti-Dem position that Dems are obsessed by Russia, to the point of harmful irrationality.
It’s almost like they felt that concessions to Putin would have led to loss of face (“we gave in to the guy Trump says is a genius!”)
Whatever the outcome for Ukraine now, it is much worse than concessions would have produced. The number of people dead, the destruction of capital, economic disruption, tail risk of extreme events… can’t think of a worse outcome. And if promising Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO would have — at least — put it off?
The problem is that once you set the precedent that a dictator can get whatever he wants by threatening a war you're going to get a lot more threats of war until either you actually fight one, or the entire world is run by dictators.
The real world is different. It’s non-stationary. Concessions buy time.
In time, things might look very different. Perhaps Putin gets pancreatic cancer. Perhaps Germany restarts its nuclear power program. Perhaps Ukraine figures out a way to look spikier.
If we’re splitting the world between good guys and bad guys: in the 21st Century, the good guys benefit from delay. Functional civilizations are exceptionally powerful on the timescale of decades.
It’s the people with short time horizons that you need to worry about — who are trying to seize an advantage through action.
It makes sense. What good is a promise like that worth? As Ukraine gets closer to the EU economically, it will only become more distant from Putin's Russia. Finland isn't officially part of NATO but you can bet that if Putin starts piling up tanks on the border, NATO will start piling them up on the other side.
Russia invades Ukraine and takes some major cities. Ukraine loses sovereignty over a portion of its territory.
Russia extracts a promise from NATO that Ukraine won't be allowed to join. Ukraine loses sovereignty over a portion of its diplomatic relations.
Those two look remarkably similar except in one Russia is doing violence to Ukraine and in the other NATO allows itself to be weaponized by Russia to do violence to Ukraine. I also think the second is merely a convenient prelude to the first. Put off the invasion for how long exactly, and can you actually trust the Russian government on the matter?
That might only be partial. I thought there were six but it only lists four.
At any rate, only one of them was an absolute non-starter: withdrawing all NATO troops from NATO *member countries* that joined after 1997 -- basically all of eastern and central Europe. NATO was right to summarily reject that demand.
True, NATO also wouldn't commit to barring Ukraine from joining, but it's also true that the conditions in Crimea and Donbass expressly prohibited Ukraine from joining, at least for the foreseeable future, because NATO won't add members with contested borders (and rightly so).
On some of the other demands (e.g. regarding missile deployments) the Biden administration actually signaled a willingness to negotiate.
I don't think Russia's list of demands were offered in good faith. I don't even think they were an opening gambit for negotiations. I think they were intended as cover, so that Russia could make the case that it tried to avert war to its own people and sympathetic foreigners.
And while NATO expansion might have been part of the equation for Russia, I don't think it was the main driver behind the decision to invade. Or, if it was, then Russia badly, badly miscalculated. Because the invasion of Ukraine has been met with the very predictable response of NATO strengthening its eastern flank. Hell, NATO might even grow, and while the Kremlin might have thought there was a small chance it would actually happen, they should have at least considered it a realistic possibility given the public comments countries like Finland were making prior to the invasion. In other words, Russia's naked aggression has put it in a more precarious situation vis a vis NATO than it was even two weeks ago, and no one should be surprised by that.
If Russia has just signalled that it wants to swallow up any part of Eastern Europe that isn't in NATO, but is willing to stop at the borders of NATO, then I don't see how that should convince NATO not to expand, and certainly how it should convince Russia's neighbours not to join NATO.
I think it should convince NATO not to expand unless they are ready and willing to enforce a no-fly zone. As far as I'm concerned a no-fly zone should be made into a credible threat for Ukraine as fast as possible regardless of any concessions that might be made to Russia
From what I read, you can't enforce a no fly zone in Ukraine without attacking target in Russia and Belarus, and if you can do that, you can also attack Russia with nuclear weapon. So you can't enforce a no fly zone without directly going to war with Russia.
Because long-range surface to air missiles in Russia and Belarus can shoot down NATO warplanes trying to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Can and ultimately will, if NATO doesn't destroy the missile batteries first.
Any "no-fly zone" that isn't also a bomb-Russians zone (overlapping Actual Russia) will just mean NATO planes flying helplessly over Ukraine, watching Russian tanks and artillery slaughtering Ukranians while themselves being randomly shot down.
Any no-fly zone that *is* also a bomb-Russians-in-Russia zone, well, you know:
Huh, this basically is same as attempting to understand what an incel thinks. Extremely unlikely to happen, though nukes increase odd of this happening slightly.
You say "but incorrectly predicted that “Putin is not a fool”". Can we really say that yet? I'm still open to this being part of his plan and the Ukrainian resistance being hyped up. The Russian and Ukrainian soldiers trained together, Putin must have been advised on how they would fight. Either he has suddenly turned into a complete fool and not given thought to any of his actions or he planned for some of this.
My attitude is simpler: Putin is intelligent. Being intelligent is not the same as being omniscient or always making the right choice in every circumstance. Even a chess grandmaster may blunder, even if it's only once a decade.
The last time the Ukrainian army fought, they were a joke. They could deploy a few thousand soldiers and for the most part with non functional equipment. I think this is the first time since WW2 that an eastern European country resist so fiercely to aggression. I was expecting a Prague like situation, where as soon the Russian tank arrive, it's game over.
I am thus not surprised that the Ukrainian resistance was not expected, and that Russian were blindsided by arrogance and thought that the second army in the world could simply roll over the country after a token resistance.
Perhaps of interest, a thread of results from a casual and perhaps badly-written series of polls I ran starting in November.
I personally did not make any public predictions, discussed down thread. Somewhat regret this although I'm wondering lately if there's more personal value for me in mapping plausible scenarios and responses to each than there is making specific concrete predictions.
The Godofskys--I think Steven in particular--did a great job and were publicly confident that an invasion was imminent based on the distribution and quantity of troops.
I’m surprised that the current prediction markets are as favorable as they are to Russian victory. Maybe it’s because I’m getting all my news from Reddit, but it looks like Ukraine is pretty much holding its ground while Russians are running out of fuel and generally very confused (because they didn’t actually know why they were there). The leaked intelligence is saying that Putin planned for this to last 1-4 days, and Russia was not prepared at all for a prolonged conflict.
The Russian economy has also totally crashed. Like it’s just completely in the toilet, with the stock market currently being kept closed just so that they can pretend things aren’t as bad as they are. Russian government websites can’t even stay up because they’re being hacked so much.
I’ve only vaguely paid attention to prediction market posts before, but I’m interested in getting into them now because I think I can make a lot of money. Is it possible to do so in the U.S. without setting up a VPN?
And get Russian occupation? This time should be better than previous one (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor ) but I am dubious is anyone interested in ending like Belarus and rusification.
Given that Russians started from "there will be no invasion" and went on with bunch of false flag attacks and blatant lies about how Ukrainian government is evil, things are not optimistic to them.
The government in Ukraine was corrupt and somewhat incompetent in many areas before the invasion. The president's approval rating was in around ~30%-ish, wasn't it?
Obviously, getting invaded by someone even worse doesn't automatically turn every victim into an angel.
Seemed potentially interesting, so I checked other articles on their page
> Further, Western mainstream media since 2014 constantly parrot the fake meme of Russia’s “seizure” of Crimea.
> (...)
> Third, NATO may be regarded as a US-dominated Trojan Horse that lacks popular legitimacy, since the main reason for its existence disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
> (...)
> At the time of writing, Western media outlets continue to push hard on the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine” narrative, claiming that this has happened before and citing the alleged pressure that Moscow is now purportedly applying on Ukraine.
Surrender would have some obvious tangible negative consequences - no more Ukrainian self-government, occupation by a force hostile to them, isolation from the Western allies they've grown closer to and incorporation into the economic basket case Russosphere...
But I don't think that's the primary reason Ukraine won't surrender. They see themselves as a people on their native land, and will fight to defend it, even if offered relatively favorable terms. Deride it as an "alpha contest", reject it as "primitive nationalism", whatever terms you want to assign it. Throughout history, there have been people who haven't understood it, and their freedom has been defended time and time again by people who have.
I'm not a big fan of that article. It takes a lot of words to say that decisions made quickly under high emotions might be unwise, which is fair enough, but the author doesn't say what he would do and why.
Surrender would not mean an end to the violence - a surrender would mean a regime change to a Putin's puppet, regressing to an authoritarian oppressive regime similar to ones Ukrainians can see in DNR/LNR and Belarus; and the people surrendering would expect violent retaliation anyway, just with 'police' methods. I mean, it all started back when Ukrainians decided that they will rather risk their lives in revolution than live in such a regime.
I don't think there are any. Unless either you have a rather diminutive definition of 'lots of money'; or you just play the regular old financial markets, which you can mostly do from the US.
Reddit is about as trustworthy as russian state media at this point, they just feed people pro-Ukraine propaganda now. Lots of unverified and fake posts, lots of messages which just make you feel good about Ukraine or bad about Russia, with no substance.
Realistically, there is not trustworthy information about the conflict. We can infer some information from things that they don't say - for example, russians are not claming to have taken any major city, so they probably had not taken any just yet (if they did, that would be all over mainstream russian media). But anything more detailed than that is at best distorted and it worst completely untrue.
From what I can gather from my ukrainean friends, the cities are not getting bombed yet, nobody targets civilians on purpose, but there are accidents. Which would be reassuring on itself, but seeing that Ukraine has no plans to surrender, it is only a matter of time untill Russia starts actually bombing the cities (exactly like it happened in Grozniy in the past). And that's when things will get really ugly.
I'm terrified for my friends in Odessa in Kiev, any message I get from them could be last one.
Reddit definitely has a pro-Ukraine bias for sure (hence me mentioning the caveat). And I don’t believe in posts about e.g. the Ghost of Kyiv or whatever. But I think all the things I mentioned are broadly true. Plus, Switzerland has stopped being neutral, Kazakhstan refused to supply Russia troops, China isn’t giving them loans, etc.
Russia definitely has buttons to press to make Ukraine lose—I heard some news about them moving in thermobaric weapons, for instance. But I think the chances of Russia actually winning are quite low right now.
As a stylized fact, yes. But there are still differences. And reddit hasn't reached a steady state (and likely never will), so you can find subreddits that will be banned but haven't been yet.
If you follow mainstream news of the invasion (which have a pro-Ukrainian slant), the Russian army has clearly been making gradual progress, e.g. getting closer to Kyiv and Kharkiv. For Ukraine to be winning, it has to at least be fighting the Russians to a standstill, which it isn't quite doing. And now a column of Russian tanks and armor 40 miles long is descending upon Kyiv as we speak.
Russia is winning slowly, probably more slowly than it expected, and if the war is long and bloody enough, it may be a Pyrrhic victory, but in a strictly military sense of the word, Russia is definitely winning.
>Russia is winning slowly, probably more slowly than it expected, and if the war is long and bloody enough, it may be a Pyrrhic victory, but in a strictly military sense of the word, Russia is definitely winning.
Generally experts don't think Russia can lose in the sense of both militaries putting all their chips down. Rather it's a race between how long Ukraine's defense can hold out, and how much the Russian cost-benefit-analysis is tipped against continuing the invasion for every additional day Ukraine holds out.
Putin is committed now, he can't back down, doing so would mean losing power and likely his life.
Russia could certainly destroy the Ukrainian government (but not actually hold Ukraine) if it adopted the same brutal tactics it did in the Second Chechen War and turned Grozny into a field of rubble, but while the current invasion is certainly brutal, it hasn't reached the levels of horror of Chechnya. Ukrainians are still seen in Russia as a brother nation (or sub-nation).
To some extent Putin is hemmed in in what he can do by his own propaganda about liberating Ukrainians from a hated Nazi-dominated puppet government of the West. Would the Russian soldiers be willing to fire indiscriminately at their Ukrainian cousins? Ethnic proximity is no guarantee, after all the worst wars are civil wars, although in this case there isn't a religious divide as there was in Yugoslavia.
> Would the Russian soldiers be willing to fire indiscriminately at their Ukrainian cousins?
I would really like to see the USA and EU offer citizenship to any Russian soldier in Ukraine who surrenders. Many Russian soldiers would rather live a good life in the West than die in Ukraine, so if they see an opportunity to surrender they may well take it up.
Even if not many take it up, the Russian military would probably feel it necessary to keep their soldiers on a tighter leash where they are more closely monitored. This means keeping them together and reducing their initiative, both of which would reduce military efficiency.
Putin could back out now, he could accept a face-saving peace deal and go home claiming that he's won. Since his casus belli was largely BS to begin with, he could settle for "Ukraine totally promised to stop threatening us" and call that a victory.
> [...] but while the current invasion is certainly brutal [...]
I haven't actually seen much evidence of that. If Russia was deliberately targetting civilians or flagrantly violating the Geneva Conventions, the media (and Ukraine) would surely be all over that?
(Similar for Ukraine being brutal; only that I am less confident a casual observer in the west like me would hear about it. Since there are basically no Russian civilians in Ukraine, it's a lot easier for the Ukrainan fighters to be civilized.)
> Generally experts don't think Russia can lose in the sense of both militaries putting all their chips down.
I think Putin has already lost geopolitically, because he has united Europe against him. Finland (65%) and Sweden (55%) will make formal applications to join NATO by the end of the year.
> Rather it's a race between how long Ukraine's defense can hold out, and how much the Russian cost-benefit-analysis is tipped against continuing the invasion for every additional day Ukraine holds out.
The third factor in the race is how quickly (if ever) the West decides to help Ukraine more.
"Will there be a NATO no-fly zone in Ukraine during March 2022?" seems hilariously unlikely, that is basically declaring war against Russia.
It is not going lower than it is on Manifold because Manifold is kind of broken ( https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative - It is barely profitable that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area in 2022 is below 4%)
> And now a column of Russian tanks and armor 40 miles long is descending upon Kyiv as we speak.
Something the Russians would never get away with against a top-tier military today. (in fact, they wouldn't have got away with it 30 years ago -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death).
Which leads me to conclude that the Ukrainian military has been severely degraded and not been able to bring many long-range assets (such as multiple launch rocket systems, artillery, drones) to the defence of Kyiv.
My understanding is that the Russian army's progress is not a sign of success in itself--the Ukrainian strategy here was to let Russia extend as deep as they desire, because Ukraine's target is Russia's logistical capacity, and the deeper Russia goes the more strained that becomes.
No sources, I just listen to my friend who knows a lot of military stuff and told me this, for whatever that's worth to ya. And despite saying this, he does also expect Russia to be able to "win" once they start levelling cities if they don't pack it in first
I feel that this is essentially a race against time - whether Russia's military progress is faster or slower than their economic collapse. Ukraine may win the war without winning any battles by having holding the occupied territory be unsustainable (due to both resistance and economic sanctions) until the aggressor withdraws, just like USSR withdrew from Afghanistan.
Isn't it possible for Russia to both win the war *and* suffer economic collapse? Say they conquer and occupy Ukraine. Would the west suddenly say 'guess the war is over we can lift sanctions', or would they be imposed indefinitely?
Yes. Though do keep in mind that waging war is expensive.
So Russian leadership might have thought that they can win and then sit out the sanctions, but not keep fighting _and_ deal with sanctions.
I also suspect Russian leadership did not expect their foreign reserves to be essentially confiscated. After all, the West left those reserves alone in 2014.
Reddit is a hive of pro-Ukraine propaganda (and I say that as person wholly supporting Ukraine), with bunch of terminally online people forming bubbles.
There is a massive armed column getting close to Ukraine capital which may fall soon (hopefully not! and they will hold on until everyone in Ukraine up to bed-ridden grandmother has own anti-tank and AA rockets)
I read a bit of Russian though I'm not ethnically Russian. I've been casually reading a few Russian-language subreddits, and it seems Russians are quite livid with Putin. Is that really the case? Or did I find my way into a bubble?
I am pretty sure that "people on reddit" is extreme bubble, especially in Russia.
Biased toward, young, online, who use foreign site, discuss politics...
What worse, there are many Russian-speaking people who are not Russians: for example millions of Ukrainians.
Polish subreddits are not representative at all of broader society. Though right now people in Poland unusually agree, to the point that "I agree with you on that. Also, fuck you." type of comments on Twitter/FB/etc become memes.
A couple of reasons to think that Russia still has a good chance of winning, despite what we're seeing on Reddit:
1. 1-4 days would be *insanely* fast for a war. Like, the Six Day War was literally named for how fast it went, and that was probably the most one-sided a war has been in the modern era. So just because Russia's army hasn't delivered a record-setting performance doesn't necessarily mean that they're losing the war. Maybe political considerations will cause Putin to give up before the war gets too unpopular, but the Russian army can probably keep this up for a while longer.
2. You can see the tanks that got blown up, but you can't see the tanks that survived. Russia is on the offensive and has a much larger army, which means they have more chances to lose a tank in an embarrassing way on camera, but it doesn't necessarily tell you much about the success of the invasion as a whole. It also seems that Russia isn't countering this narrative by publishing their own footage of Ukrainians getting blown up, possibly because it would spoil the intended narrative of a short, clean war.
There's a common quip that a losing army is one that reports winning a string of glorious victories, each one closer and closer to their own capital city. In the same way, I expect that Ukrainian news will be a steady string of Russian blunders getting closer and closer to Kiev. Not that I think it's a guaranteed loss, but I wouldn't put real money on a win, either. A 30% chance they hang on to Kiev sounds about right for an underdog.
Russia just has so much materiel. They can "lose" a lot of engagements, still gain ground, and eventually win. For an idea of what that would look like, you can look at Grozny - it took months and use of heavy weapons, the Russian military didn't acquit themselves that well, but the city still fell. Once Kiev and Kharkiv are encircled and can't be supported or supplied, while artillery continue to fire - what then?
The only significant complicating factor may be an unwillingness on Russia's part to reduce a city they see as culturally important, occupied by people they see as Russians. But I don't think that hesitation will hold for long when those "Russians" are shooting back. I think the only hope for Ukraine is (a) securing peace by conceding swathes of the East, which is unlikely for either Ukraine to offer or Russia to accept; or (b) NATO riding in to Ukraine's rescue, also unlikely because it could turn this proxy war into a far, far greater conflict.
I just don’t see Putin’s endgame here—let’s assume he takes the country, what then? There’s no chance he won’t be facing constant insurgency movements and massive political backlash, and any sort of long-term hold would be a massive economic/political drain. What is his long-term goal here?
Yes, I don't see him gaining anything worth the effort either. I was very surprised when he invaded. Fortifying his enclaves, claiming them formally, made sense. Eight years of Ukraine-lovers going west and Russia-lovers going east, facts on the ground, these are real borders by now. Maybe Putin regrets not grabbing everything to the Dneiper in 2014 and he's just annoyed?
It seems like a precipitating factor was the threat of Ukraine joining NATO, which Putin has consistently maintained he would see as a threat to Russia. But if that's the motive, his actions have caused Finland to consider NATO membership, and caused European NATO members to commit to higher military spending. So on balance, his actions haven't served the long-term goal of "weaken NATO and get it off my borders".
Perhaps it was a miscalculation. Perhaps there's an internal political angle we're not seeing, where this will somehow allow him to consolidate power and eliminate rivals. Or perhaps there's no longer-term goal, and his invasion is driven merely by the short-sighted, single-minded goal of revanchism.
Suppose Alice threatens Bob with something that's hurts both of them a lot, perhaps it even hurts Alice more. Alice asks for only a small favour.
If Bob doesn't cave, then it is not in Alice's interest to carry out the threat.
Knowing this, Bob stands firm.
Now, if Alice could pre-commit herself to carrying out the threat if Bob's doesn't give in, even when it's no longer in her interest, her theat becomes credible. Suddenly, it's in Bob's interest to comply and perform the small favour. As a result, Alice gets what she wants and doesn't have to carry out her threat.
In contrast, if Bob can pre-commit to ignore threats, he can gain the upper hand.
In the real world, there are no firm precommitment devices for governments. Everything is murky guesswork.
Putin has a history of being a brutal mad man who gets what he wants.
In this case, neither Nato nor Ukraine gave in, and so he had a choice of either being seen bluffing or carry out a threat that's hurts him.
(The above is just one interpretation of available evidence; and explains how someone might rationally carry out an action, even if it is against their best interests.)
I think a lot of the above could be abbreviated as - "Putin would prefer to incur the costs of invasion than lose face by backing down". That could definitely factor in.
But it still leaves a lot unanswered; even if that helps to partially explain why he didn't back down once his troops were at the border, it doesn't explain why he put those troops there in the first place. I think there still must have been a major miscalculation on his part: either thinking that his bluff wouldn't get called, or that it wouldn't greatly harm his goals if the bluff were called.
The threat of joining NATO may have been the precipitating threat, but I'm pretty sure the ultimate motivation was nationalist irredentism and the desire to recreate 'Greater Russia.' So it's not that he's trying to weaken or intimidate NATO; rather, once Ukraine joins NATO, Russia's prospects for rebuilding its empire are essentially destroyed for good. So this was his last chance absorb Ukraine. That's my opinion at least.
Grozny was largely alone and wasn't backed by the UE and America, and it still survive the first war. The sanctions seem harsh enough that Russia can't take too much time to win before not being able to pay its army. Not saying this an easy win, but I think Ukraine has a chance.
Of what value is EU/US backing once Kyiv is encircled, every airfield occupied and destroyed, and there's no way to deliver antitank missiles to the people fighting the Russian tanks?
Bold speeches won't stop the Russian army. Support for partisans holding out in the mountainous west might inconvenience Russia, but won't stop Putin from claiming the same sort of victory Bush claimed over Afghanistan in 2002. Which, if the analogy holds, buys Putin twenty years - more than his remaining life expectancy.
I had the exact opposite response: I was surprised consensus is a 30% chance that Kyiv would hold out for another month. I'm rooting hard for Ukraine but what we're seeing in the US is *very* favorable to Ukraine, and some of it is almost certainly outright propaganda.
To be clear, Ukraine *should* be flooding the zone with propaganda -- they are in a fight for their very existence. Western journalists should also be trying to cut through that, because the citizens of Western democracies need an accurate picture of how things are going when they decide what policies to support.
And while it does really seem like Ukraine did better than expected in the opening phase of the war, it hasn't even been a week. Things could get really, really ugly in Kyiv in just the next few days, depending on how brutal Russia is willing to be.
This isn't really the best comparison. The Confederacy was isolated both physically and diplomatically through most of the war whereas Ukraine seems to be winning on that front. The west is shipping weapons into Ukraine in large quantities. I don't think Ukraine is going to go hungry the way the South did. The fight is far from over and I think Putin just needs to readjust his approach if he wants to win, but it's not for the same reasons as Manassas and Gettysburg.
What would eventually become the EU was shipping weapons to the Confederacy in large quantities. For commercial rather than ideological reasons, so the Confederates had to pay for the sort of support the Ukranians are getting for free - but they had cotton, where Ukraine has Zelenskyy's speeches, so that's pretty much a wash.
Mostly England, a fair bit from France and Austria, odds and ends from everywhere else. Confederate blockade runners were very effective, particularly in the early years of the war.
"Diplomacy of the American Civil War" will tell you nothing about this, because this had nothing to do with diplomacy. Just commerce. A Confederate representative shows up at the front office of European munitions firm with a steamer trunk full of cash and says "may I have ten thousand rifles please?", or sometimes "may I have a custom-built state-of-the-art oceangoing warship please?", and if the contents of the steamer trunk were adequate, the answer would be "why yes, yes you can. Please come again!" No diplomacy required.
*Eventually*, US diplomats were able to convince British diplomats to convince British bureaucrats to scupper the most obvious of those transactions, but that took a while and it never entirely stopped the trade.
Well, they tried but one of the reasons the Confederacy lost was because of the Union blockade which strangled their economy. The export of cotton slowed to a trickle, just what blockade runners could get out of the country and imports were stopped nearly entirely as well. I don't see that happening with Ukraine.
It's a fine comparison for my purposes, which was to emphasize that an early victory against modest forces doesn't mean squat when you have an enemy with much greater ultimate resources than you do. I get that you didn't see that point, but now that I have explained it perhaps you will, since you re-iterate it yourself in your last sentence.
I think prediction markets are still underestimating the probability of a Russian victory, precisely because they are filled with the sorts of people who get their news from reddit.
I think this is absolutely right. Arguably World War II itself is a colossal example of second-mover advantage. Not only in terms of the moral high-ground (although the moral high ground, I would argue, is probably most important). The Axis invested heavily in weapons development in the later 30s, and so had the best equipment when the war started. The Allies in response invested heavily in the next generation of weapons, and so by 1942-3 were consistently coming out with great quantities of superior weapons. The Germans obviously produced some high-quality mid-1940s weapons, but couldn't overcome the Allied advantage in quantity, once Hitler's early actions had convinced them he had to be destroyed.
> It has been weird seeing how this invasion has galvanized the rest of the world
Also, turns out that being widely disliked has consequences (due to stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkovskaya for start, to not mention things like praising USSR by Putin, denial of history, denying that they cooperated with Nazi Germany...)
I mean most countries would vote against an invasion you would expect, what is interesting is that India and China abstained. That's a lot of population.
That seems below 1% of global production if I look at the graph right? What is their consumption that also would be negated?
It may be bad, but just how bad it would be?
Short term, sure. Disruption always equals a price spike. But fertilizer mostly starts with the synthesis of ammonia from natural gas via the Haber process, and this is not restricted to any particular place. It's more a question of where the gas is cheaper. If the US (#2 fertilizer producer in the world, behind China) could probably relatively easily make up the loss -- it would just cost more.
This is the problem with social media: it turns everything into an echo chamber. I've been accused of "kissing ass to Russia" simply because I don't believe all the one-sided propaganda about "unexpected Ukrainian victory."
The worst part is that I think our own intelligence analysts are falling prey to that same echo chamber. The CIA could use a good housecleaning. The amount of incompetence it took to avoid forecasting this situation is mind-boggling. Every analyst in the CIA should be required to participate in internal prediction markets and have their track record objectively and measurably analyzed.
> The amount of incompetence it took to avoid forecasting this situation is mind-boggling.
Can you explain what you mean by this? My impression is that US intelligence agencies have predicted this much better than most other parties involved.
I didn't see anybody predict Putin would start a war, but try to keep it a Nice War with few casualties for the first four days.
I’d suggest a slightly more varied set of sources than just Anatoly Karlin and CNN. I truly hope civilian targets are scrupulously avoided. But the most effective way of avoiding civilian deaths is to not invade.
That’s great. If you haven’t already some of pundits linked in Part 3 provide a nice variety of priors from Karlin.
I understand the heuristic “I trust Karlin the most on this topic so I’ll believe that info the most”. I don’t understand how that’s really combined with the heuristic “CNN are usually (always?) shit so I’ll just believe the opposite”?
You claim that the reason any civilians are dying is because “Russia has scrupulously avoided civilian targets. Recognizing this, Ukraine has taken to housing troops in residential areas, schools, etc...This makes it difficult to clear areas quickly without significant civilian casualties, which would give Ukraine and the West a massive propaganda victory”.
To be clear: you believe that Ukraine (and the West) are trying to increase civilian deaths for propaganda purposes? How confident are you that this is true? I think it's unlikely. I'd give it a pretty low probability compared to some other potential reasons civilians are dying.
Can you put a number on "fairly low" casualties? The current estimate is a few hundred vehicles destroyed and somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dead Russians depending on who you trust. Small compared to the total size of the army, but might still be unacceptably high if they were expecting an Iraq style walkover.
Also, not sure what "all flights knocked out on the first day" is supposed to mean militarily, since the Ukraine Air Force is still flying sorties last I looked.
"Russia's Air Force is complacent and inept" and "they have total control of the air space" may be both true.
State where neither Ukraine nor Russia is flying anything and Russia is capable of shooting down any Ukraine craft is possible.
Though note that Ukraine is still flying token forces (drones).
BTW, the Russian article also has
> “I want to emphasize once again that the armed forces of the Russian Federation strike only at military facilities. Nothing threatens the civilian population,” he said.
> that Ukraine is winning
none serious person really claims that, at most they claim that they are losing slower than expected (hint: side defending own capital is not winning)
You can do a little better than "well, one side says one thing and one side says the opposite, guess we know *literally nothing.*" Some of the claims are unreasonable (like the multiple claims of IL-22 planes being shot down which never lead to any photos of a wrecked plane on the ground), but some are pretty reasonable (like the multiple claims that Ukrainian drones are scoring kills accompanied by video footage from the drones in question, matched to places in northern Ukraine). I'm not solely citing the Ukrainian MoD's claims here, which is why I said "a few hundred" rather than their extremely optimistic claim of 800 armored vehicles destroyed.
This guy has been accumulating a list of all the destroyed or abandoned Russian vehicles that he could find photographic evidence of (which he notes will be an underestimate, because not every vehicle will be destroyed on camera): https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
I didn't claim that Ukraine is winning (I think they're losing slowly and expensively), but I think there's enough eyes on the problem to say that 100s of destroyed Russian vehicles aren't just being made up from whole cloth, and that the numbers are probably at least the right order of magnitude.
> like the multiple claims that Ukrainian drones are scoring kills accompanied by video footage from the drones in question, matched to places in northern Ukraine (...) https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
Not only that!
Destroyed train is visible on satellite imagery as hot spots in infrared exactly matching train tracks! AKA we can see it burning. (search for "train" on that page)
https://postimg.cc/gLJ15mDf
He's one of the people/groups explicitly graded in the post!
Somehow I skipped that reading on my phone. Deleting to save my honour.
Okay, but I suppose I did mention something important, which is that he made his prediction by pointing out that Russia's public demands looked more like a pretext for war than a starting point for negotiation. I think he definitely deserves credit for looking at what actual players were saying instead of going based on impressions of personalities/motivations from the last few decades.
I don't know what people thought the enormous military buildup on the Ukrainian border was for. They had been working on it for a year, first quietly, then brazenly. Putin isn't crazy but he really BELIEVES that Ukraine is ruled by a puppet government, so why WOULDN'T the military collapse, Afghanistan-style? Fairly rational behavior.
I agree most things so far have been fairly rational, not much evidence of the Putin has gone crazy theory. But the Russians and Ukrainians have close links, he would have had decent intelligence that the military would collapse if that was his plan.
The US had extremely tight links with Afghanistan's military and yet didn't have decent intelligence on how fast it would collapse. Willingness to fight isn't something intelligence can easily quantify like how many tanks and helicopters a country has. It's also something that can collapse or stiffen suddenly based on events on the ground.
Nonsense. The Pentagon knew very well how fast the Afghan military would collapse, if the endgame were played out in the idiotic way it was. But their advice was rejected by the President. The fact that the end was done so poorly has nothing to do with any lack of information about what would happen. It was decisions taken *in spite of* knowing what would happen, and just not caring.
For example, they were saying Kabul could fall "within 90 days", exactly 4 days before it fell. And yes, 4 days is "within 90 days", but that sure seems to be giving them a lot of credit. I don't really care to go through the whole list of their prognostications, but my memory is that they were playing this game throughout the entire collapse. I think it's fair to say at the time of the withdrawal, they probably expected the Taliban to win eventually, but they vastly overestimated the ease with which the cities would fall.
I don't see any way to escape from the conclusion that the US MIC's conduct was characterized by fraud and idiocy throughout the entire Afghan affair. They kept advising Presidents to stay and fight forever, but the situation never improved. I'm not sure what the precise breakdown is between fraud and idiocy, but I can only conclude that if you're correct and I overestimated the idiocy, I must have underestimated the fraud.
The "within 90 days" was mostly up to the Taliban; I don't think anybody expected the Afghan National Army to hold up through three months of brutal siege and block-to-block urban combat. But whether the Taliban would march directly on Kabul, or take a more methodical approach and/or secure the rest of the country first, was unknowable.
The ANA deciding "they're going to win anyway, let's give up right now to avoid reprisals" seems like a bigger factor in the accelerated timeline,
You don't know in detail what they said, because they said it to the President, and the only reports that were readily repeated were those that defended the President's decision. But there were enough details leaked out that it was very clear that the military gave him pretty accurate predictions -- he just chose to ignore them. That's *why* Bagram was abandoned early, which is almost as silly a decision (if you're trying to avoid a choatic withdrawal) as the decision to stop doing maintenance work on air assets early, which of course told the Afghans they had zero hope of maintaining their defense as soon as the Americans left. In Afghanistan without air power you're just screwed. The predictions of the military you hear were *all* predicated on following their recommendations for an orderly withdrawal, and one that coordinated faithfully and effectively with the Afghan government. Of course if you do something else entirely, it won't work out the way they suggested.
I think the argument was that Putin could intimidate Ukraine, make the West freak out, then embarrass them by not invading and add to the sense that the West is constantly freaking out about Russia even though they are peaceful.
I'm interested in hearing from military historians how many examples there are of cases where a leader did a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it.
But, to hear the Roman historians tell it, this was one of the incidents that led to Caligula's discrediting in the eyes of the Roman elite. In another comment below I mentioned the medieval English king who gathered an expedition against France and then sent it home--his barons were utterly disgusted by this stunt.
This is a question I’ve been interested in as well
>invade as a bluff
The confusing part to me about the potential of this strategy as a 'bluff' is that right up until paratroopers were dropped into the capital, Russian diplomats and representatives were swearing on their mother's graves that Russia would absolutely not invade. And as you mentioned, even mocking countries for suggesting Russia such a crazy idea.
So it only works as a bluff if the person being bluffed is absolutely convinced that every statement coming out of your mouth is a lie?
That suggests to me they really were committed from the start to an invasion, and simply genuinely preferred to have the element of surprise.
I wonder if they even told the diplomats?
This is what I wanted to say - I've read an article claiming that the Russian govt. is kind of denouncing Putin for launching a war all by himself, without going through the proper channels, genuinely catching his own country by surprise.
If you read Lavrov's remarks at that infamous Feb. 21 Russian Security Council meeting, they sound quite reasonable and very technical, and not those of someone expecting full-on war to start in 3 days (he even mentions a meeting scheduled with Blinken in Geneva on Feb 24):
https://www.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/7082
Lavrov is highly skilled and polished, but I don't know how much influence he has, or whether Putin sees Lavrov as order-taker solely responsible for "selling" whatever he decides, not an advisor. The Security Council was stage-managed and theatrical, but on the balance of probabilities it seems to me the decision completely blindsided Lavrov as well. Whatever mole the US has within the Russian presidency must be very close indeed.
Apparently a lot of the military didn't even know.
Obviously you don't want to tell the grunts: what every private knows might as well be public.
So the question is how high up do you have to go before you find a military person who knew? Did the highest ranking generals know?
I saw news reports[1] that the generals didn't know until a week beforehand, but I can't find them now.
For the grunts, they weren't even indoctrinated and why this mission was important, or why they might need to fire on people they consider their cousins.
EDIT I think it was on DAlperovitch's twitter feed, but having trouble with finding the primary source, which should be worrying
[1] and that might well be propaganda
> So it only works as a bluff if the person being bluffed is absolutely convinced that every statement coming out of your mouth is a lie?
Which, to be fair, is probably a fairly accurate description of Russia's credibility with many people in the west.
Do countries normally admit their invasion plans before actually starting the invasion? I wouldn't have guessed so.
If denying invasion plans is SOP before an actual invasion, then a bluff should also include such denials.
> Do countries normally admit their invasion plans before actually starting the invasion?
Sometimes yes. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Creating_a_coalition
Able Archer 83 is probably the most obvious parallel insofar as the West swore up and down that it wasn't an invasion but the Soviets went to strategic high alert anyway... and then the West was telling the truth and it wasn't an invasion, so the Soviets calmed down.
I don't doubt that Putin enjoys embarrassing the Western establishment, but not enough to incur the cost of deploying 190,000 troops.
Reagan did so with ReForGer, which I assume left a memory in Russian military circles.
> then embarrass them by not invading and add to the sense that the West is constantly freaking out about Russia
Partly that. Also, the military buildup forces Ukraine to put its troops on higher readiness. Doing that for a long time costs money, which Ukraine is short of.
Also, if there are lots of military buildups that don't lead to war, people will think the lastest buildup won't lead to war either, and be less prepared when it does.
Not a historian, but "building up troops, putting them close to borders, then demanding concessions" is literally a game mechanic in Civilization
Only found out about it yesterday from one of Galeev's magnificent threads, but I think the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480 counts; the leader of the Great Horde led a vast army to the Ugra River, there was a stand off with the Muscovites, and then the Horde just withdrew when they could have crossed the river unopposed, for reasons that remain unclear.
It ended the suzerainty of the Golden Horde over Russia, and is therefore one of the most important events in Russian history; and the decision to retreat led to the final, irrevocable severing from a declining empire of one of its most important provinces. It wouldn't be a surprise if the Ugra River confrontation was in Putin's thoughts when he decided not to follow the Horde's example.
Very, very interesting.
The interesting thing about the Standoff was that people at the time didn't really recognize it as a turning point, just as the significance of Dimitry Donskoi's victory at Kulikovo Polje a hundred years before was really appreciated then.
I have a fair amount of historical knowledge (but I'd feel pompous saying "I'm a historian"), and I'm having difficulty thinking of a clear example of "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it." I can think of plenty of examples of saber-rattling where the rattler backed down (e. g., the two Morocco crises leading up to WWI, the rattler in both cases being Germany), and plenty of examples of intimidation leading to, in some sense, to bluff-calling leading to war (July 1914, I would argue, fits this to a significant extent). The Cuban Missile Crisis may be an example of a buildup where the builder intended a bluff and backed down, but I wouldn't say the buildup was massive, certainly not in the logistical sense.
In an hour or so of mulling, I simply can't think of a clear, unarguable example of the literal sense of what you're describing (again, "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it").
It's not pompous unless you say "an historian"
Meh, I like alliteration.
How is either version alliterative...?
'an historian' repeats the 'n' sound and I like it. Pompous? Maybe harmlessly.
WW1 sort of illustrates how hard it was to do this thing in the era of vast conscript armies. Once Russia started mobilizing for war, it was a de facto declaration of war so it didn't matter if it was intended as a bluff or not.
That said, I *hate* to be the one to bring up Hitler since it's usually so trite, but the closest thing in the historical record I can think of is that a reasonable man in 1938 could have concluded that Hitler's threat towards the Sudetenland was a bluff that no one called. Though I think the historical consensus is it wasn't a bluff, Hitler really would have invaded and the results almost surely would have been much worse for him than in our world.
WW1 is a good example of what happens when the object of a threat refuses to back down. Russia mobilized, hoping to threaten Austria into not invading Serbia. Austria refused to back down and insisted Germany live up to its alliance with them. Germany mobilized, hoping Russia would back down. And so on. No government had actually decided upon war (except Austria against Serbia, in revenge for the assassination of the archduke), but since no one backed down, everyone had to follow through.
In the case of 1938, some historians (including Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw) argue that Hitler actually wanted war against Czechoslovakia in 1938, and was annoyed that the other powers in Europe were so accommodating that he felt he had to make a deal (especially because his one ally, Italy, seemed not to want war). Some historians argue that Chamberlain's appeasement actually did buy the British a year in which to prepare for war, and that war in 1938 would have actually been worse for the allies even than the one in 1939 was.
On the latter point, I'll recommend Tooze's new book on the Nazi war economy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He argues that German arms production was unsustainable beyond 1939, and the Geman economy being kept afloat by booty from its conquests. 1938 was probably the peak German moment in terms of its air power advantage, though not necessarily tanks, particularly as Czech production was a big help there. Tooze also argues for the French collapse being more or less a fluke, but a fluke that nonetheless required Germany to have the equipment to make it possible -- though none of that could have been predicted in 1938. The French weren't motivated by a fear of collapse so much as a fear of WW1 redux.
What could be seen in 1938, and what made war look even more suicidal for Germany than 1939, was that Hitler was more diplomatically isolated: he didn't have an understanding with the USSR, and the USSR had a defensive treaty with the Czechoslovaks. The Soviets didn't even have to contribute any forces in the event of invasion, they just had to restrict exports to produce a crushing economic crisis for Germany. Oil being the most obvious one, but grain being perhaps even more critical.
I've had Tooze's book in the back of my mind for a while, and you're really persuading me to put it at the front of the list! Tooze is first-rate. If you haven't read Deluge, I highly recommend it.
I don’t know about troop buildups in particular, but the general pattern of ‘periodically ratchet up military tensions and rattle sabers in exchange for economic concessions’ is a perennial North Korean favorite.
Honestly that kind of sounds like conspiracy talk
Technically I would say that this wasn't a bluff, but a threat. I normally dislike being a vocabulary pedant, and in general am in no position to cast stones. But "bluff" implies that they can't or won't, while "threat" implies that they can and might. And given that the theme of the post is accurate predicting, this seems like a worthwhile distinction to make (at least in our early-21st-century North American dialect of English).
The suggestion isn't that it *was* a bluff, but that people who incorrectly thought there wouldn't be an invasion were able to account for the build up of troops by saying it was a bluff.
[I'm not a historian, just another article reader who guessed this wrong.]
I don't see the troop buildup as being as much a bluff as both a threat and preparation in one. I don't think that before the invasion that Putin had made up his mind one way or the other, he made demands and Lavrov seemed to be genuinely looking for some compromise he could bring back. The West were offering the stick but not the carrot as far as the media reported. As Robert Wright put it on his substack, they were boxing him in but not giving him a way out. It may be that they were expecting to have longer to negotiate before he acted but their correct predictions of the invasion seem to suggest otherwise. We still don't know when Putin decided to invade or how much chance he himself would have estimated earlier of him making (or being given) another politically viable option.
As for the history of troop buildups without war, yes it's common for the same reason: plans are always contingent. Napoleon and Hitler both massed troops at the channel for possible invasions of Britain that they decided against.
More recently, in cases there's less reason to think war was ever seriously considered, the powers and alliances have frequently taunted each other with massive military exercises of the sort that Russia and Belarus were supposedly doing. Around the South China Sea and Korean Peninsular; in the eastern Mediterranean; Pakistan, India, China. The exercises are both practice for, and threats of, possible attacks.
Western Intelligence released campaign plans for an invasion but I just assume that every country has plans to invade or defend against all of their neighbours hidden away in locked drawers.
I'm not sure any of the examples you cite actually conform to the description, "a massive troop buildup that looked like they would invade as a bluff, then didn't go through with it." Neither Napoleon or Hitler were bluffing; they both decided against carrying out the invasion because of circumstances (in Napoleon's case, the destruction of his fleet at Trafalgar and the Austro-Russian declaration of war against him; in Hitler's, the failure of the Luftwaffe to take control of the skies over Britain, and his greater interest in invading the Soviet Union).
The exercises you mention are certainly meant to remind targets of the power of the nation carrying out the exercises, but they don't threaten invasion, so they're not exactly a bluff. I suppose N. Korea's missile launches might qualify, since they seem at least partly designed to convince N. K.'s neighbors that they might do something crazy at any time. I think about 1970 Nixon also made a few moves to convince the Communist powers that "Nixon is crazy"; this is talked about in Nixonland--so that might qualify as an example of a pure bluff meant to intimidate.
That was looked pretty similar to Putin's own actions a year before. Since March 2021 military buildup of comparable scare was made, then redraw, then made again, then redraw, then made again.
So even if it was an intension for invasion since the very beginning... I see no reason it should be current (third as I count) iteration and not a year later.
The most convincing argument that I saw prior to the war actually breaking out was that the scale of the Russian deployment was too great in scale and too obviously prepared for battle to be a bluff. Making extremely obvious preparations to invade a country and then not invading that country just to own the libs would be a fairly pointless action, and it would have the side-effect of making Putin seem weak and undermining his ability to threaten other countries in the future.
Enormous military buildups are frequently, perhaps usually, meant to intimidate a neighbor into making concessions. So it's not a priori unreasonable to predict that the outcome of a large military buildup will be "demand concessions, get concessions, go home".
And maybe that was the original plan. But while Western pundits get a D for their understanding of Vladimir Putin, Putin himself gets an F for his understanding of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Really, I think almost everyone failed on that one.
The problem with this is that the Russians didn't demand concessions, but on the contrary insisted their intentions were peaceful.
They demanded them, but from NATO, not Ukraine. Medvedev said that there's no point talking to Ukraine, as they have no autonomy. And NATO dismissed the ultimatums, because there's no realistic non-suicidal threat that Russia can pose to it, and a big flare-up in Ukraine would be a great occasion to come down on Russia in full force to punish it for all the provocations over the years.
Or that the concessions demanded of NATO were fundamentally unworkable. If the concessions demanded of an organization amount to a negation of critical parts of their charter, they're not going to make those concessions.
Exactly. None of this makes sense. NATO could never make the concessions demanded. Russia never linked those demands to a threat to invade Ukraine. Invading Ukraine doesn't threaten NATO's interests, so it doesn't work as negotiating tactic. Conclusion: this is all a smokescreen to obscure Russia's real goals.
Also, demands to NATO were ridiculously absurd and included demand that Poland would disband army forces (the exact demand was to remove NATO armies from countries including Poland, as Poland is in NATO it would require removing Polish army from Poland).
Seriously, what was that?
Well, either Putin already decided by then to invade and made obviously unrealistic demands to obtain a casus belli, or he wanted NATO to haggle and give him at least something to prove that he is being taken seriously.
Haggling and negotiation may make sense but if you offer to pay 10$ for luxurious home in center of London then you are getting counteroffer.
Starting from high/low offer is viable but it needs to be sort of serious.
As I think you're implying in your second paragraph, a problem with the strategy of "buildup, intimidate, get concessions, go home" occurs if the target refuses to be intimidated. That puts the leader who has chosen the buildup, etc., strategy in a real bind. If Putin had just said, "well, that didn't work" and sent the troops home, his generals would have been utterly disgusted with him. In this sense, Zelensky's choice to simply refuse to admit the danger (rather than, say, admitting being intimidated and making concessions, or talking tough and essentially daring Putin to invade) put Putin, as I say, in a real bind.
I have this memory of a medieval English king, I think John or Henry III, who gathered a huge expedition to invade France and then sent everyone home, and this flub added to the English nobility's already-considerable disgust with this king and contributed to an outbreak of royal-noble civil war later--if anyone remembers the specific instance, I'd be most grateful to be reminded.
As I remember it, Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 would arguably be another story where an attempt to intimidate (Napoleon's) that provokes a fairly phlegmatic reaction (Alexander's) essentially leaves the would-be intimidator thinking they have no choice but to make the threat real.
Yes, perhaps it was a stroke of genuis by Zelensky to accept at face value reassurances which were intended by obviously fake. If Zelensky says he's unconcerned by Russia carrrying out peaceful exercises close to the border, Putin can't very well disabuse him of that.
On the other hand, I still don't understand what concession Ukraine might have made to prevent the invasion. If you wander round someone's shop with a baseball bat and suggest that you could ensure no harm came to it for a small fee, you might get paid, but it doesn't really work if you just look menacing and hope the shopkeeper guesses your demand.
Conceivably Zelensky could have promised not to join the EU or NATO and recognized the Russian claims in Crimea, and the breakaway republics in the east. These obviously would not have worked if Putin was determined on war from the get-go, but arguably would have allowed him to claim victory and send his troops back to their barracks without losing credit in the eyes of the Russian elite.
To be fair, even if Zelenskii wanted to make such promises (and he was elected in 2019 over vociferous American objections, on a platform of peace and reconciliation with Donbass) he probably couldn't.
> he was elected in 2019 over vociferous American objections
I've been hearing from pro-Pution people that Zelenskyy is a puppet-government of the West. Did America really complain about his election?
> If you wander round someone's shop with a baseball bat and suggest that you could ensure no harm came to it for a small fee, you might get paid, but it doesn't really work if you just look menacing and hope the shopkeeper guesses your demand.
Or demand all money, house and help in extorting children of the shopkeeper.
I'm not sure what Putin thought the West could give him, without the whole thing looking like Munich 1938. "Oh, you're threatening to invade that country? In that case we'll definitely promise to never defend it and never consider it our ally, as you demand. And we'll throw a couple of our current treaty members under the bus as a bonus. Now, stay peaceful... pretty please?"
He probably thought recognition of Russian control of Crimea / Donbas was on the table.
I was skeptical of this based on the argument that Russia didn't need to do an enormous buildup in order to invade Ukraine and make them collapse, so the extremely telegraphed buildup must have just been for show.
There had been several Russian and joint Belorussian-Russian wargames in the past years that moved comparable number of troops and equipment.
Zapad 2017 and 2021 exercises (for the Western Military District, mainly directed toward Poland and Baltic states) and Vostok 2014 and 2018 (Eastern Military District) involved 70 000 - 300 000 troops each (although it is difficult to give precise numbers here, I would take the upper range with a grain of salt, but for me it reasonable most of these involved 100 000 troops or more). Considering that it is a conflict zone and that large scale military exercises are not unusual in Russia, the amount of troops along the border is only weak evidence towards the invasion. Though, I myself did not believe there would be an attack up until the last weekend before the events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapad_Exercises
https://www.army-technology.com/news/newsrussian-military-completes-vostok-2014-exercise-4386404/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_2018
Edit: fixed typoos
"typoos"...if that's not a word, it should be...
Well said
> I don't know what people thought the enormous military buildup on the Ukrainian border was for.
A threat to demoralise the West and get concessions.
At the start of the year i predicted a 30% chance of war (https://pontifex.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022). I said at the time:
> Russia might well invade Ukraine. though I suspect Putin's strategy is more to wear down Ukraine and the West by making people think it is likely, then not doing it, then doing it later.
While i didn't make any precise predictions, I thought Ukrainian resistance would be a lot weaker than it has turned out to be. Evidently Ukrainians feel more nationalist sentiment towards their country than I anticipated.
My current thinking is that whether Ukraine wins depends on 2 factors: (1) how quickly Russia attacks/advances and (2) how quickly the West decides to give Ukraine more military aid. European public opinion has gone from pacifism/appeasement to standing up to Putin a lot quicker than I expected, and if that continues, both in European and USA, it's likely Ukraine will get significant new aid, perhaps a no-fly zone or NATO troops directly fighting. (Probabilities of 40% and 20%, respectively, for these by the end of the month).
EDIT: I have collated my predictions here https://pontifex.substack.com/p/more-predictions-on-the-ukraine-russia with links to Manifold Markets so you can bet on them.
A no-fly zone would be NATO troops directly fighting.
And if you think it likely that nuclear-armed NATO and nuclear-armed Russia will be at war by the end of the month, what odds would you put on global thermonuclear war?
I'm not any kind of serious forecaster, but I called the war right (enough to comment to my wife that Taibbi was an idiot for that post he had to apologize for).
If we see mass civilian casualties, I'll bet 70% on NATO planes in direct action. Possibly without admitting it. "I don't know why your tanks and airplanes keep exploding. Perhaps their car warranty has expired?" I'm willing to give 10-15% odds that this has already happened.
If it happen in public, I would offer low probability (10%?) of going nuclear. Putin wants to live, the people in the chain of command to the actual nukes want to live.
Also the thing about betting against nuclear war is that if I'm wrong, I probably won't be around to eat crow. So it's a pretty "safe" bet.
There's a distinction between hardware and troops that is important.
>I'm willing to give 10-15% odds that this has already happened.
I bet you $10 (ie I pay you $10, you pay me $1) that by 01 Jan 2023 no information will have emerged from any credible source (arbitrated by Scott Alexander by means of pestering him until he makes a ruling) that NATO planes carried out direct action (defined as the use of bombs, missiles, rockets or cannons) against Russian ground forces in the Ukraine on or before 04 Mar 22.
Concessions I'll make: Russian equipment counts as forces even if uncrewed. Russian naval forces count if the engagement occurs within 16km of the Ukrainian coast. Russian UAVs, planes and helicopters count if they are within 50ft of the ground.
Deal?
Oh sure, why not. Though, why the 50ft restriction? How about we make it $1.50/$10 (15% was my upper probability for "tanks and airplanes") and get rid of that limit? Or how about two separate bets, one for each?
And if you're actually part of the FBI's counter-prediction-market strike team, well, I'm not hard to find. See you in court.
I did the 50ft restriction because it's a lot harder to be unclear about where something is in relation to borders on the ground than it is in the air, which reduces the risk of failure by ambiguous resolution conditions. I'm happy to take your amendment though in a single bet form.
Email me at birch dot jj at google mail so we can keep touch until we declare the winner in an open thread early next year. I'll delete this post when I get your email.
A no-fly zone? Not the tiniest chance. No European nation (or rather coalition since none of them has fighters enough by itself) could attempt that without the US nuclear umbrella, and there is zero chance the American people will go to war directly with Russia over the Ukraine. I mean, we like Ukrainians, you bet, but not enough to risk SS-18s overhead on their behalf.
"My current thinking is that whether Ukraine wins depends on 2 factors: (1) how quickly Russia attacks/advances and (2) how quickly the West decides to give Ukraine more military aid. "
These are not measurable conditions or predictions, these are truisms that seem to conflate the conditions that define victory or defeat with the things that cause it. Of course the Ukraine will win if Russia has a rate of advance that is extremely slow or negative. Of course the Ukraine will be more likely to win if it has more materiel with which to fight.
This is the military equivalent of making a medical claim about treatment of malignant tumors that says "I think the odds of curing the tumor before it kills the patient depends on how quickly the tumors grow and spread, and how quickly and how much treatment is applied."
I think you need to do much, much better here. A prediction like "If the Russian FLOT is not at all crossing points over the Dneiper by 10 Mar 22 then no Russian forces will be on territory claimed by the Ukrainian government by 25 Dec 22." is an example of a measurable version of your claims around tempo etc, while something like "If Ukraine is not provided 100 fully crewed fourth generation multirole aircraft which are operated from Poland by 15 Mar 22 then Russia will control all Ukrainian territory by 01 Jul 22" is an example of a useful prediction around military aid.
Edit: Also I don't think the numbers on your website for NATO military involvement (no fly zone or direct fighting against Russians) are accurate. The real odds are quite a bit lower. NATO and member states have made their position extremely clear - they will not directly involve themselves in this conflict. The closest we will see to your prediction is the Ukraine receiving donations of materiel that comes crewed (for extreme eg, UKR pays $1 for 100 F16s from NATO that also happen to come with pilots who until a minute before the sale belonged to NATO airforces, but who have now retired. This distinction seems meaningless if you are not military, but the distinction is extremely meaningful from a LOAC perspective) and intelligence/EW/FID support (which is already active and has been since pre-invasion).
To compel negotiations that would resolve favorably. Making credible threats to get concessions is pretty standard behavior. The problem with executing on threats is that you are suddenly in a totally different game with different rules.
Assuming Putin is rational, what does he do now?
Good question. If he is rational surely he would predicted most of what has happened so far.
Seems like some Internet censoring is happening meaning it is harder to find out.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/is-the-internet-being-censored/comments?utm_source=url
You can be rational and be working from bad facts. Putin probably did not anticipate the strength of Ukrainian resistance. Few people did. Getting out of a war is a lot harder than getting in. Probably he has to press on, rack up some wins, like capturing some major cities, no matter how costly, so he has some leverage to negotiate an exit. Awful, really. The whole situation is a disaster on many levels, and the scale of the risk of a nuclear armed country doing this is so bad that we cannot even really contemplate it.
In most bars in Europe there is a simple rule . If someone bumps you hit them or get ready to be hit
Except in this bar one of the patrons has ballistic missiles.
With regards to Luttwak and his suggested insight to Putin's thinking, suggest listening to Andrew Sullivan's recent dishcast with him - Luttwak and Putin have had dinner together (many years ago).
I think that, in a way, the entire question here is wrong!
The thing is, using solely publicly available (and widely-disseminated) information, it was clear that Putin *could* imminently invade Ukraine. He had brought a truly remarkable amount of force to bear - even at the cost of military readiness elsewhere throughout Russia - and positioned it so that it could invade. It was a huge investment.
Putin had created a situation where he could, at a moment's notice, decide to invade or not. Now it turns out he was already resolved to do so and US intelligence knew about that. But Putin could, of course, have been genuinely unsure of whether he wanted to invade, in which case there would be no possible evidence of his intentions (they wouldn't exist yet). But good decision-making would nevertheless need to respond to the extremely real and serious *capability* he had then developed.
In light of this, I find all the prewar attempts to analyze US IC or to psychoanalyze Putin to be somewhat misguided.
tldr: "Play the chessboard, not the player."
You are right. Though do keep in mind that markets can sometimes forecast behaviour better than the actors themselves.
Compare eg market forecasts of interest rates, and what the Fed says about the future.
> In light of this, I find all the prewar attempts to analyze US IC or to psychoanalyze Putin to be somewhat misguided.
Predicting such action is possible based on public data. Many evil leaders openly declared their plans or can be predicted based on past actions. See Mein Kampf or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians was for me very strong indicator that Putin actually plans and wants destruction of Ukraine.
Oh, definitely. Having more info helps. But "guess we cannot predict whether Putin is an aggressive asshole or pacifist" is not a solution.
To better predict what will happen. This comments are responding to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting/comment/5316903?s=r that claim that predicting what will Putin do should ignore Putin behavior/character/psychology.
No, I said that "predict what Putin should do" is the wrong question, in large part because it invites you to spend a lot of time working on a question that has weak data and (by historical example) invites a lot of motivated reasoning and wishful thinking by the asker.
Instead, much more emphasis should be put on *what Putin is capable of doing*, based on the observable, physical disposition of forces and other similar intelligence. Putin had created a situation in which he could, at a whim and moment's notice, launch an invasion of Ukraine. Your plans should be based on that.
I'll reitorate the aphorism - "play the chessboard, not the player" - in chess very little effort is put into trying to mindgame your particular opponent rather than simply learning to play well based on the objective arrangement of the pieces.
The story of Hitler is, infamously, people using that sort of reasoning to convince themselves he *wasn't* going to do what he said he was going to do. And with Putin, if he had all the same statements but *hadn't* massed 150k+ troops on the Ukrainian border, you would probably not think a Russian invasion was imminent.
I find it interesting that Putin said he was genuinely surprised there were no concessions offered by western leaders
I believe this. He may have expected to invade but not getting any negotiation benefit out of the threat caught him off guard. Maybe he didn't expect to invade but wondered how little of a concession he would have to consider
Russia does not understand that westerners do not understand how Russians perceive NATO growth. Imo it's time to figure that out, especially since it could be the key to any kind of quick and acceptable end to the war
I don't think what Putin says offers any useful information about what he thinks. He's sufficiently well informed that he can't have been surprised by this.
This seems dead on. We made a huge, unforced error. Rather than respond to military realities and give at the margins, we decided to draw millions of people into an unwinnable war we don’t want.
This is where I see the merit in the anti-Dem position that Dems are obsessed by Russia, to the point of harmful irrationality.
It’s almost like they felt that concessions to Putin would have led to loss of face (“we gave in to the guy Trump says is a genius!”)
Whatever the outcome for Ukraine now, it is much worse than concessions would have produced. The number of people dead, the destruction of capital, economic disruption, tail risk of extreme events… can’t think of a worse outcome. And if promising Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO would have — at least — put it off?
The problem is that once you set the precedent that a dictator can get whatever he wants by threatening a war you're going to get a lot more threats of war until either you actually fight one, or the entire world is run by dictators.
That’s true in theory.
The real world is different. It’s non-stationary. Concessions buy time.
In time, things might look very different. Perhaps Putin gets pancreatic cancer. Perhaps Germany restarts its nuclear power program. Perhaps Ukraine figures out a way to look spikier.
If we’re splitting the world between good guys and bad guys: in the 21st Century, the good guys benefit from delay. Functional civilizations are exceptionally powerful on the timescale of decades.
It’s the people with short time horizons that you need to worry about — who are trying to seize an advantage through action.
This guy makes a compelling case that "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" wouldn't change anything:
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-war-in-ukraine/
It makes sense. What good is a promise like that worth? As Ukraine gets closer to the EU economically, it will only become more distant from Putin's Russia. Finland isn't officially part of NATO but you can bet that if Putin starts piling up tanks on the border, NATO will start piling them up on the other side.
Russia invades Ukraine and takes some major cities. Ukraine loses sovereignty over a portion of its territory.
Russia extracts a promise from NATO that Ukraine won't be allowed to join. Ukraine loses sovereignty over a portion of its diplomatic relations.
Those two look remarkably similar except in one Russia is doing violence to Ukraine and in the other NATO allows itself to be weaponized by Russia to do violence to Ukraine. I also think the second is merely a convenient prelude to the first. Put off the invasion for how long exactly, and can you actually trust the Russian government on the matter?
> he was genuinely surprised there were no concessions offered by western leaders
Are you aware of his demands? And that he demanded meeting them without negotiations?
The demands were absurdly massive and not serious at all.
Here is a summary of Russia's demands:
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072413634/russia-nato-ukraine
That might only be partial. I thought there were six but it only lists four.
At any rate, only one of them was an absolute non-starter: withdrawing all NATO troops from NATO *member countries* that joined after 1997 -- basically all of eastern and central Europe. NATO was right to summarily reject that demand.
True, NATO also wouldn't commit to barring Ukraine from joining, but it's also true that the conditions in Crimea and Donbass expressly prohibited Ukraine from joining, at least for the foreseeable future, because NATO won't add members with contested borders (and rightly so).
On some of the other demands (e.g. regarding missile deployments) the Biden administration actually signaled a willingness to negotiate.
I don't think Russia's list of demands were offered in good faith. I don't even think they were an opening gambit for negotiations. I think they were intended as cover, so that Russia could make the case that it tried to avert war to its own people and sympathetic foreigners.
And while NATO expansion might have been part of the equation for Russia, I don't think it was the main driver behind the decision to invade. Or, if it was, then Russia badly, badly miscalculated. Because the invasion of Ukraine has been met with the very predictable response of NATO strengthening its eastern flank. Hell, NATO might even grow, and while the Kremlin might have thought there was a small chance it would actually happen, they should have at least considered it a realistic possibility given the public comments countries like Finland were making prior to the invasion. In other words, Russia's naked aggression has put it in a more precarious situation vis a vis NATO than it was even two weeks ago, and no one should be surprised by that.
If Russia has just signalled that it wants to swallow up any part of Eastern Europe that isn't in NATO, but is willing to stop at the borders of NATO, then I don't see how that should convince NATO not to expand, and certainly how it should convince Russia's neighbours not to join NATO.
I think it should convince NATO not to expand unless they are ready and willing to enforce a no-fly zone. As far as I'm concerned a no-fly zone should be made into a credible threat for Ukraine as fast as possible regardless of any concessions that might be made to Russia
From what I read, you can't enforce a no fly zone in Ukraine without attacking target in Russia and Belarus, and if you can do that, you can also attack Russia with nuclear weapon. So you can't enforce a no fly zone without directly going to war with Russia.
Why would you need to attack targets in Russia or Belarus?
Because long-range surface to air missiles in Russia and Belarus can shoot down NATO warplanes trying to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Can and ultimately will, if NATO doesn't destroy the missile batteries first.
Any "no-fly zone" that isn't also a bomb-Russians zone (overlapping Actual Russia) will just mean NATO planes flying helplessly over Ukraine, watching Russian tanks and artillery slaughtering Ukranians while themselves being randomly shot down.
Any no-fly zone that *is* also a bomb-Russians-in-Russia zone, well, you know:
https://youtu.be/6wBp2VusRhE
Huh, this basically is same as attempting to understand what an incel thinks. Extremely unlikely to happen, though nukes increase odd of this happening slightly.
You say "but incorrectly predicted that “Putin is not a fool”". Can we really say that yet? I'm still open to this being part of his plan and the Ukrainian resistance being hyped up. The Russian and Ukrainian soldiers trained together, Putin must have been advised on how they would fight. Either he has suddenly turned into a complete fool and not given thought to any of his actions or he planned for some of this.
Sorry, I should have phrased that as "incorrectly predicted that Putin would not invade, using the argument that he is not a fool". I'll edit it.
Ah ok, no worries!
I think Putin is just a gambler who's normally good at analyzing risks and such but has very much misjudged the situation this time around.
My attitude is simpler: Putin is intelligent. Being intelligent is not the same as being omniscient or always making the right choice in every circumstance. Even a chess grandmaster may blunder, even if it's only once a decade.
The last time the Ukrainian army fought, they were a joke. They could deploy a few thousand soldiers and for the most part with non functional equipment. I think this is the first time since WW2 that an eastern European country resist so fiercely to aggression. I was expecting a Prague like situation, where as soon the Russian tank arrive, it's game over.
I am thus not surprised that the Ukrainian resistance was not expected, and that Russian were blindsided by arrogance and thought that the second army in the world could simply roll over the country after a token resistance.
Perhaps of interest, a thread of results from a casual and perhaps badly-written series of polls I ran starting in November.
I personally did not make any public predictions, discussed down thread. Somewhat regret this although I'm wondering lately if there's more personal value for me in mapping plausible scenarios and responses to each than there is making specific concrete predictions.
The Godofskys--I think Steven in particular--did a great job and were publicly confident that an invasion was imminent based on the distribution and quantity of troops.
https://mobile.twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1496748148504494083
I’m surprised that the current prediction markets are as favorable as they are to Russian victory. Maybe it’s because I’m getting all my news from Reddit, but it looks like Ukraine is pretty much holding its ground while Russians are running out of fuel and generally very confused (because they didn’t actually know why they were there). The leaked intelligence is saying that Putin planned for this to last 1-4 days, and Russia was not prepared at all for a prolonged conflict.
The Russian economy has also totally crashed. Like it’s just completely in the toilet, with the stock market currently being kept closed just so that they can pretend things aren’t as bad as they are. Russian government websites can’t even stay up because they’re being hacked so much.
I’ve only vaguely paid attention to prediction market posts before, but I’m interested in getting into them now because I think I can make a lot of money. Is it possible to do so in the U.S. without setting up a VPN?
And get Russian occupation? This time should be better than previous one (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor ) but I am dubious is anyone interested in ending like Belarus and rusification.
Given that Russians started from "there will be no invasion" and went on with bunch of false flag attacks and blatant lies about how Ukrainian government is evil, things are not optimistic to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians is not giving optimism
The government in Ukraine was corrupt and somewhat incompetent in many areas before the invasion. The president's approval rating was in around ~30%-ish, wasn't it?
Obviously, getting invaded by someone even worse doesn't automatically turn every victim into an angel.
Seemed potentially interesting, so I checked other articles on their page
> Further, Western mainstream media since 2014 constantly parrot the fake meme of Russia’s “seizure” of Crimea.
> (...)
> Third, NATO may be regarded as a US-dominated Trojan Horse that lacks popular legitimacy, since the main reason for its existence disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
> (...)
> At the time of writing, Western media outlets continue to push hard on the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine” narrative, claiming that this has happened before and citing the alleged pressure that Moscow is now purportedly applying on Ukraine.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/nato-russia-and-ukraine-false-pretexts-for-war
Looks like putintroll site to me, sorry.
Surrender would have some obvious tangible negative consequences - no more Ukrainian self-government, occupation by a force hostile to them, isolation from the Western allies they've grown closer to and incorporation into the economic basket case Russosphere...
But I don't think that's the primary reason Ukraine won't surrender. They see themselves as a people on their native land, and will fight to defend it, even if offered relatively favorable terms. Deride it as an "alpha contest", reject it as "primitive nationalism", whatever terms you want to assign it. Throughout history, there have been people who haven't understood it, and their freedom has been defended time and time again by people who have.
I'm not a big fan of that article. It takes a lot of words to say that decisions made quickly under high emotions might be unwise, which is fair enough, but the author doesn't say what he would do and why.
Surrender would not mean an end to the violence - a surrender would mean a regime change to a Putin's puppet, regressing to an authoritarian oppressive regime similar to ones Ukrainians can see in DNR/LNR and Belarus; and the people surrendering would expect violent retaliation anyway, just with 'police' methods. I mean, it all started back when Ukrainians decided that they will rather risk their lives in revolution than live in such a regime.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/05/prediction-goes-to-war/
From the US, you either
- have to stick to reputation or play money markets
- Use PredictIt, which is loosely regulated but only does politics
- Use Kalshi, which is regulated but limited (eg no Ukraine questions)
- or get a VPN
Do you have any VPN recommendations? And are there any potential legal consequences for subverting U.S. regulations by using one?
That's a question for a lawyer. Especially if you plan to 'make a lot of money'.
Where are the prediction markets to 'make a lot of money'?
(I'm not in the US.)
I don't think there are any. Unless either you have a rather diminutive definition of 'lots of money'; or you just play the regular old financial markets, which you can mostly do from the US.
Someone on Metaculus linked to this site saying you can predict for real money. Insightpredictions. Ever heard of it?
https://insightprediction.com/markets/175
What about people in other countries? Where are the predictions markets with real money that you can use from other countries?
Reddit is about as trustworthy as russian state media at this point, they just feed people pro-Ukraine propaganda now. Lots of unverified and fake posts, lots of messages which just make you feel good about Ukraine or bad about Russia, with no substance.
Realistically, there is not trustworthy information about the conflict. We can infer some information from things that they don't say - for example, russians are not claming to have taken any major city, so they probably had not taken any just yet (if they did, that would be all over mainstream russian media). But anything more detailed than that is at best distorted and it worst completely untrue.
From what I can gather from my ukrainean friends, the cities are not getting bombed yet, nobody targets civilians on purpose, but there are accidents. Which would be reassuring on itself, but seeing that Ukraine has no plans to surrender, it is only a matter of time untill Russia starts actually bombing the cities (exactly like it happened in Grozniy in the past). And that's when things will get really ugly.
I'm terrified for my friends in Odessa in Kiev, any message I get from them could be last one.
Reddit definitely has a pro-Ukraine bias for sure (hence me mentioning the caveat). And I don’t believe in posts about e.g. the Ghost of Kyiv or whatever. But I think all the things I mentioned are broadly true. Plus, Switzerland has stopped being neutral, Kazakhstan refused to supply Russia troops, China isn’t giving them loans, etc.
Russia definitely has buttons to press to make Ukraine lose—I heard some news about them moving in thermobaric weapons, for instance. But I think the chances of Russia actually winning are quite low right now.
The thing with Reddit is the up/downvote system ends up meaning you just get one side of a story and the rest is buried - real mind poison.
Yes. Though at least they have different subreddits. (Alas, most of reddit has the same political leanings.)
Subreddits with different views get quarantined and then banned.
As a stylized fact, yes. But there are still differences. And reddit hasn't reached a steady state (and likely never will), so you can find subreddits that will be banned but haven't been yet.
If you follow mainstream news of the invasion (which have a pro-Ukrainian slant), the Russian army has clearly been making gradual progress, e.g. getting closer to Kyiv and Kharkiv. For Ukraine to be winning, it has to at least be fighting the Russians to a standstill, which it isn't quite doing. And now a column of Russian tanks and armor 40 miles long is descending upon Kyiv as we speak.
Russia is winning slowly, probably more slowly than it expected, and if the war is long and bloody enough, it may be a Pyrrhic victory, but in a strictly military sense of the word, Russia is definitely winning.
>Russia is winning slowly, probably more slowly than it expected, and if the war is long and bloody enough, it may be a Pyrrhic victory, but in a strictly military sense of the word, Russia is definitely winning.
Generally experts don't think Russia can lose in the sense of both militaries putting all their chips down. Rather it's a race between how long Ukraine's defense can hold out, and how much the Russian cost-benefit-analysis is tipped against continuing the invasion for every additional day Ukraine holds out.
Putin is committed now, he can't back down, doing so would mean losing power and likely his life.
Russia could certainly destroy the Ukrainian government (but not actually hold Ukraine) if it adopted the same brutal tactics it did in the Second Chechen War and turned Grozny into a field of rubble, but while the current invasion is certainly brutal, it hasn't reached the levels of horror of Chechnya. Ukrainians are still seen in Russia as a brother nation (or sub-nation).
To some extent Putin is hemmed in in what he can do by his own propaganda about liberating Ukrainians from a hated Nazi-dominated puppet government of the West. Would the Russian soldiers be willing to fire indiscriminately at their Ukrainian cousins? Ethnic proximity is no guarantee, after all the worst wars are civil wars, although in this case there isn't a religious divide as there was in Yugoslavia.
> Would the Russian soldiers be willing to fire indiscriminately at their Ukrainian cousins?
I would really like to see the USA and EU offer citizenship to any Russian soldier in Ukraine who surrenders. Many Russian soldiers would rather live a good life in the West than die in Ukraine, so if they see an opportunity to surrender they may well take it up.
Even if not many take it up, the Russian military would probably feel it necessary to keep their soldiers on a tighter leash where they are more closely monitored. This means keeping them together and reducing their initiative, both of which would reduce military efficiency.
Putin could back out now, he could accept a face-saving peace deal and go home claiming that he's won. Since his casus belli was largely BS to begin with, he could settle for "Ukraine totally promised to stop threatening us" and call that a victory.
> [...] but while the current invasion is certainly brutal [...]
I haven't actually seen much evidence of that. If Russia was deliberately targetting civilians or flagrantly violating the Geneva Conventions, the media (and Ukraine) would surely be all over that?
(Similar for Ukraine being brutal; only that I am less confident a casual observer in the west like me would hear about it. Since there are basically no Russian civilians in Ukraine, it's a lot easier for the Ukrainan fighters to be civilized.)
> Generally experts don't think Russia can lose in the sense of both militaries putting all their chips down.
I think Putin has already lost geopolitically, because he has united Europe against him. Finland (65%) and Sweden (55%) will make formal applications to join NATO by the end of the year.
> Rather it's a race between how long Ukraine's defense can hold out, and how much the Russian cost-benefit-analysis is tipped against continuing the invasion for every additional day Ukraine holds out.
The third factor in the race is how quickly (if ever) the West decides to help Ukraine more.
EDIT: Manifold markets has similar predictions to my Finland/Sweden ones, see https://pontifex.substack.com/p/more-predictions-on-the-ukraine-russia
"Will there be a NATO no-fly zone in Ukraine during March 2022?" seems hilariously unlikely, that is basically declaring war against Russia.
It is not going lower than it is on Manifold because Manifold is kind of broken ( https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative - It is barely profitable that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area in 2022 is below 4%)
> And now a column of Russian tanks and armor 40 miles long is descending upon Kyiv as we speak.
Something the Russians would never get away with against a top-tier military today. (in fact, they wouldn't have got away with it 30 years ago -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death).
Which leads me to conclude that the Ukrainian military has been severely degraded and not been able to bring many long-range assets (such as multiple launch rocket systems, artillery, drones) to the defence of Kyiv.
The Ukrainians don't have air superiority even over their own country, let alone Russia.
I'm sorry but this comparison is retarded. Iraq alone was fighting against four big countries.
My understanding is that the Russian army's progress is not a sign of success in itself--the Ukrainian strategy here was to let Russia extend as deep as they desire, because Ukraine's target is Russia's logistical capacity, and the deeper Russia goes the more strained that becomes.
No sources, I just listen to my friend who knows a lot of military stuff and told me this, for whatever that's worth to ya. And despite saying this, he does also expect Russia to be able to "win" once they start levelling cities if they don't pack it in first
This isn't 1812 though. Kyiv is less than 250km from Russia, that doesn't seem like an enormous distance for a supply chain to stretch.
In absolute terms, maybe. In relative terms, 250km is still more vulnerable than 50km.
Well empirically it does seem to be working quite well. They're getting BTFO'd logistically. Their giant armor column is currently completely frozen by logistics issues https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-isolation-intensifies-ukraine-fighting-rages-2022-03-01/
I feel that this is essentially a race against time - whether Russia's military progress is faster or slower than their economic collapse. Ukraine may win the war without winning any battles by having holding the occupied territory be unsustainable (due to both resistance and economic sanctions) until the aggressor withdraws, just like USSR withdrew from Afghanistan.
Isn't it possible for Russia to both win the war *and* suffer economic collapse? Say they conquer and occupy Ukraine. Would the west suddenly say 'guess the war is over we can lift sanctions', or would they be imposed indefinitely?
Yes. Though do keep in mind that waging war is expensive.
So Russian leadership might have thought that they can win and then sit out the sanctions, but not keep fighting _and_ deal with sanctions.
I also suspect Russian leadership did not expect their foreign reserves to be essentially confiscated. After all, the West left those reserves alone in 2014.
Reddit is a hive of pro-Ukraine propaganda (and I say that as person wholly supporting Ukraine), with bunch of terminally online people forming bubbles.
There is a massive armed column getting close to Ukraine capital which may fall soon (hopefully not! and they will hold on until everyone in Ukraine up to bed-ridden grandmother has own anti-tank and AA rockets)
I read a bit of Russian though I'm not ethnically Russian. I've been casually reading a few Russian-language subreddits, and it seems Russians are quite livid with Putin. Is that really the case? Or did I find my way into a bubble?
I am pretty sure that "people on reddit" is extreme bubble, especially in Russia.
Biased toward, young, online, who use foreign site, discuss politics...
What worse, there are many Russian-speaking people who are not Russians: for example millions of Ukrainians.
Polish subreddits are not representative at all of broader society. Though right now people in Poland unusually agree, to the point that "I agree with you on that. Also, fuck you." type of comments on Twitter/FB/etc become memes.
A couple of reasons to think that Russia still has a good chance of winning, despite what we're seeing on Reddit:
1. 1-4 days would be *insanely* fast for a war. Like, the Six Day War was literally named for how fast it went, and that was probably the most one-sided a war has been in the modern era. So just because Russia's army hasn't delivered a record-setting performance doesn't necessarily mean that they're losing the war. Maybe political considerations will cause Putin to give up before the war gets too unpopular, but the Russian army can probably keep this up for a while longer.
2. You can see the tanks that got blown up, but you can't see the tanks that survived. Russia is on the offensive and has a much larger army, which means they have more chances to lose a tank in an embarrassing way on camera, but it doesn't necessarily tell you much about the success of the invasion as a whole. It also seems that Russia isn't countering this narrative by publishing their own footage of Ukrainians getting blown up, possibly because it would spoil the intended narrative of a short, clean war.
There's a common quip that a losing army is one that reports winning a string of glorious victories, each one closer and closer to their own capital city. In the same way, I expect that Ukrainian news will be a steady string of Russian blunders getting closer and closer to Kiev. Not that I think it's a guaranteed loss, but I wouldn't put real money on a win, either. A 30% chance they hang on to Kiev sounds about right for an underdog.
Russia just has so much materiel. They can "lose" a lot of engagements, still gain ground, and eventually win. For an idea of what that would look like, you can look at Grozny - it took months and use of heavy weapons, the Russian military didn't acquit themselves that well, but the city still fell. Once Kiev and Kharkiv are encircled and can't be supported or supplied, while artillery continue to fire - what then?
The only significant complicating factor may be an unwillingness on Russia's part to reduce a city they see as culturally important, occupied by people they see as Russians. But I don't think that hesitation will hold for long when those "Russians" are shooting back. I think the only hope for Ukraine is (a) securing peace by conceding swathes of the East, which is unlikely for either Ukraine to offer or Russia to accept; or (b) NATO riding in to Ukraine's rescue, also unlikely because it could turn this proxy war into a far, far greater conflict.
I just don’t see Putin’s endgame here—let’s assume he takes the country, what then? There’s no chance he won’t be facing constant insurgency movements and massive political backlash, and any sort of long-term hold would be a massive economic/political drain. What is his long-term goal here?
Yes, I don't see him gaining anything worth the effort either. I was very surprised when he invaded. Fortifying his enclaves, claiming them formally, made sense. Eight years of Ukraine-lovers going west and Russia-lovers going east, facts on the ground, these are real borders by now. Maybe Putin regrets not grabbing everything to the Dneiper in 2014 and he's just annoyed?
I suspect he tried to posture to gain concessions.
The other side didn't cave. So Putin either had to be seen as an empty bluffer, or go through with the threat.
Putin can burn Russian blood and treasure holding the Ukraine at more cost than its worth, while proclaiming it to be a great victory.
It seems like a precipitating factor was the threat of Ukraine joining NATO, which Putin has consistently maintained he would see as a threat to Russia. But if that's the motive, his actions have caused Finland to consider NATO membership, and caused European NATO members to commit to higher military spending. So on balance, his actions haven't served the long-term goal of "weaken NATO and get it off my borders".
Perhaps it was a miscalculation. Perhaps there's an internal political angle we're not seeing, where this will somehow allow him to consolidate power and eliminate rivals. Or perhaps there's no longer-term goal, and his invasion is driven merely by the short-sighted, single-minded goal of revanchism.
There's another explanation from game theory:
Suppose Alice threatens Bob with something that's hurts both of them a lot, perhaps it even hurts Alice more. Alice asks for only a small favour.
If Bob doesn't cave, then it is not in Alice's interest to carry out the threat.
Knowing this, Bob stands firm.
Now, if Alice could pre-commit herself to carrying out the threat if Bob's doesn't give in, even when it's no longer in her interest, her theat becomes credible. Suddenly, it's in Bob's interest to comply and perform the small favour. As a result, Alice gets what she wants and doesn't have to carry out her threat.
In contrast, if Bob can pre-commit to ignore threats, he can gain the upper hand.
In the real world, there are no firm precommitment devices for governments. Everything is murky guesswork.
Putin has a history of being a brutal mad man who gets what he wants.
In this case, neither Nato nor Ukraine gave in, and so he had a choice of either being seen bluffing or carry out a threat that's hurts him.
(The above is just one interpretation of available evidence; and explains how someone might rationally carry out an action, even if it is against their best interests.)
I think a lot of the above could be abbreviated as - "Putin would prefer to incur the costs of invasion than lose face by backing down". That could definitely factor in.
But it still leaves a lot unanswered; even if that helps to partially explain why he didn't back down once his troops were at the border, it doesn't explain why he put those troops there in the first place. I think there still must have been a major miscalculation on his part: either thinking that his bluff wouldn't get called, or that it wouldn't greatly harm his goals if the bluff were called.
The threat of joining NATO may have been the precipitating threat, but I'm pretty sure the ultimate motivation was nationalist irredentism and the desire to recreate 'Greater Russia.' So it's not that he's trying to weaken or intimidate NATO; rather, once Ukraine joins NATO, Russia's prospects for rebuilding its empire are essentially destroyed for good. So this was his last chance absorb Ukraine. That's my opinion at least.
Grozny was largely alone and wasn't backed by the UE and America, and it still survive the first war. The sanctions seem harsh enough that Russia can't take too much time to win before not being able to pay its army. Not saying this an easy win, but I think Ukraine has a chance.
Of what value is EU/US backing once Kyiv is encircled, every airfield occupied and destroyed, and there's no way to deliver antitank missiles to the people fighting the Russian tanks?
Bold speeches won't stop the Russian army. Support for partisans holding out in the mountainous west might inconvenience Russia, but won't stop Putin from claiming the same sort of victory Bush claimed over Afghanistan in 2002. Which, if the analogy holds, buys Putin twenty years - more than his remaining life expectancy.
Occupation against insurgents is expensive and Russia is broke.
I had the exact opposite response: I was surprised consensus is a 30% chance that Kyiv would hold out for another month. I'm rooting hard for Ukraine but what we're seeing in the US is *very* favorable to Ukraine, and some of it is almost certainly outright propaganda.
To be clear, Ukraine *should* be flooding the zone with propaganda -- they are in a fight for their very existence. Western journalists should also be trying to cut through that, because the citizens of Western democracies need an accurate picture of how things are going when they decide what policies to support.
And while it does really seem like Ukraine did better than expected in the opening phase of the war, it hasn't even been a week. Things could get really, really ugly in Kyiv in just the next few days, depending on how brutal Russia is willing to be.
Because they aren't confusing First Manassas with Gettysburg, is my guess.
This isn't really the best comparison. The Confederacy was isolated both physically and diplomatically through most of the war whereas Ukraine seems to be winning on that front. The west is shipping weapons into Ukraine in large quantities. I don't think Ukraine is going to go hungry the way the South did. The fight is far from over and I think Putin just needs to readjust his approach if he wants to win, but it's not for the same reasons as Manassas and Gettysburg.
What would eventually become the EU was shipping weapons to the Confederacy in large quantities. For commercial rather than ideological reasons, so the Confederates had to pay for the sort of support the Ukranians are getting for free - but they had cotton, where Ukraine has Zelenskyy's speeches, so that's pretty much a wash.
Which countries in particular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_of_the_American_Civil_War suggests otherwise. I am not sure how much cotton they actually managed to sell, given the blockade?
Mostly England, a fair bit from France and Austria, odds and ends from everywhere else. Confederate blockade runners were very effective, particularly in the early years of the war.
"Diplomacy of the American Civil War" will tell you nothing about this, because this had nothing to do with diplomacy. Just commerce. A Confederate representative shows up at the front office of European munitions firm with a steamer trunk full of cash and says "may I have ten thousand rifles please?", or sometimes "may I have a custom-built state-of-the-art oceangoing warship please?", and if the contents of the steamer trunk were adequate, the answer would be "why yes, yes you can. Please come again!" No diplomacy required.
*Eventually*, US diplomats were able to convince British diplomats to convince British bureaucrats to scupper the most obvious of those transactions, but that took a while and it never entirely stopped the trade.
Well, they tried but one of the reasons the Confederacy lost was because of the Union blockade which strangled their economy. The export of cotton slowed to a trickle, just what blockade runners could get out of the country and imports were stopped nearly entirely as well. I don't see that happening with Ukraine.
It's a fine comparison for my purposes, which was to emphasize that an early victory against modest forces doesn't mean squat when you have an enemy with much greater ultimate resources than you do. I get that you didn't see that point, but now that I have explained it perhaps you will, since you re-iterate it yourself in your last sentence.
I think prediction markets are still underestimating the probability of a Russian victory, precisely because they are filled with the sorts of people who get their news from reddit.