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.
Not seeing Samo at anything less than a B+ here. Early assault on airport failed, but it seemed like bad luck; Putin was hoping for a reasonably bloodless victory—but those events are always subject to chance, in a similar way to how the US might have flubbed the Osama assasination.
Now it’s just going to be a horrific slow grind as Russia rolls in heavy, mass-casualty weaponry. Putin has up to a 10:1 advantage in numbers, which translates into a 100x advantage even against similar class of weaponry — which Ukraine doesn’t have. Kharkiv as a preview for what this heavy gauge lower tech looks like. (Or visit Syria.)
Samo analysis seems similar (and a few days ahead) of solid FT reporting. Eventually this reality will sink in to the NYT readership but the Times is too busy selling Marvel movie fantasy.
Forgive my disgust at the latter. It’s the Quaker in me.
I think Russia can still win, but I think the position that their army did the needed reforms, is logistically pretty competent, and could counter NATO airpower are all looking less true right now.
I think what may be the case is that the Russian armed forces made the necessary reforms in the early 2010s. This made the honest, competent defense minister deeply unpopular with powerful special interests who had been profiting by the corrupt practices he was clamping down on, and they were able to engineer his removal and replacement with a political toady who was happy to return things to the status quo ante.
This doesn't obviously explain their extremely limited use of fixed wing air power to date, though - that aspect is frankly just strange.
I suspect they're avoiding fixed wing air power because Ukrainian drones and AA missiles make it very vulnerable, while Ukraine's limited quantity of aircraft of its own mean their fixed wings have less to do.
Other option: Russia's broker than we think and can't afford to use them. Which I think is extremely possible.
The drones Ukraine has (and in general) are not focused on shooting down aircraft, they're focused on attacking ground targets. Ukrainian drones are active wrecking convoys as they are because Russia has not achieved air dominance from either the sky or the ground.
Sources that I've seen giving detailed information on the progress of the fighting are pretty unanimous that Russia is currently being relatively measured in its use of indirect fire, in order to avoid excessive casualties. (This is probably necessary in order to sustain Russian army morale and in light of Putin's notional motive to invade.) And the Russian army is apparently generally oriented around artillery indirect fire over airpower anyway.
I don't think anything about the relative lack of airpower is that odd.
A desire to win hearts and minds by avoiding indiscriminate destruction explains limited use of bombing in populated areas. It does nothing to explain the failure to rapidly eliminate Ukrainian aerial capability by some combination of ground based AA (in which Russia is supposed to be the world leader, and hasn't looked like any such thing), striking grounded aircraft and crucial basing facilities from the air and with long range missiles and artillery, and plain air-to-air combat. There is no way that slow, vulnerable TB2 drones should have been able to operate successfully against Russian ground forces on even day 2 of the conflict, and the small numbers of dated MiGs and Sukhois shouldn't have lasted much longer.
They also didn't know how many MANPADs the US sent to Ukraine, or are sending now. The Russians always think ground game, while the US loves the air. I speculate that as long as they think they can do it with armor and not risk extremely expensive air assets (including the pilots) to some militia recruit with a Stinger, they will.
MANPADS are great against drones and helicopters. They are very little threat to modern fixed wing fighters, and they also don't stop Russia's (far more extensive and sophisticated) ground based AA from shooting down Ukrainian aircraft). What is probably true is that the Russian air force sucks at SEAD, so they may have been worried about conventional Ukrainian SAMs I suppose.
Well...depends on the mission. If you're doing air superiority work, yes. If you're doing close air support, it's a different story. But yes it's a good point, I should have emphasized SAM systems in general, not just the most photogenic member of the family.
The point has been made elsewhere that Russia (and Putin) see Ukraine as being part of 'Greater Russia.' Perhaps this explains the dynamics of the armed conflict so far (Russian victory appearing to take much longer than many were predicting; Ukrainian resistance more dogged than many were predicting).
Given that the Russians see Ukrainians as fully or partly "fellow Russians" it's not unreasonable to think that Russia has been trying to achieve conquest with the minimum amount of force and with taking care to avoid civilian casualties where possible. In Putin's ideal world (I guess) Ukraine succumbs and is absorbed into Russia or is stabilised as a "Finlandised" state on Russia's border, but with the Ukrainian population not subsequently being entirely hostile to Russia.
If Russia had unleashed its full aerial, artillery and (non nuclear) missile capacity against the major Ukrainian cities it is likely that victory could have been achieved more quickly, albeit more brutally.
The Russian approach may prove to be a miscalculation: Russia invades with a relatively "softly softly" military approach; this approach allows Ukrainian resistance to solidify and stiffen; Russia is faced either with accepting a humiliating defeat or stepping up its military response (the latter being the far more likely option).
This is not just about the Ukrainian forces, but also the actions of the US and everyone else who's eager to take Putin down. The US wants to turn Ukraine into a new Afghanistan, pumping up the "local resistance" until the Moscow government collapses. Of course, this will be at great human cost to Ukrainians, but the US is plenty cynical enough to find that cost acceptable. We also weren't much concerned that bankrupting the Soviet Union didn't create much value for the Afghani people. What I see right now is a coordinated media effort to play up the ferocity of the Ukrainian "citizen resistance" - a part of which apparently needs to be collectively wished into existence. This resistance must be calibrated so that it's too weak to repel the invasion, yet strong enough to make the invaders increasingly desperate, brutal, and overstretched. Then we let the Dnieper run red with blood for a few months (hopefully not years) and the Putin regime is through. NATO only needs to feed this conflict with a precisely calibrated flow of "support" (weapons) to keep the killing at some strategically optimal level of intensity, all while highmindedly denouncing the violence.
The present stage of the plan is to overcome the instinct that both sides have against total war and maximum brutality. After all, regular Russians and Ukrainians do feel considerable kinship. I'm convinced that this is part of what's behind this week's media stories that actively dehumanize the Russians, presenting them as appendages of Putin rather than as human beings. It won't take much of this before real atrocities start happening, at which point the playground kids will no longer need to goad the fighters to hit harder.
When this ends Russia will be Putin-less, toothless, and utterly compliant. Ukraine will be a nation of bombed-out buildings and a people whose sacrifices served our geopolitical ends, not theirs. Russia will be such a mess that they will have to accept humanitarian aid on the condition that we name their new puppet government, and Nord Stream II can finally start pumping Russian gas into Germany with the self-congratulatory declaration that the money can now finally go to the Russian people and not Putin's oligarchs.
Of course, I write all this because I really really don't want my prediction to be right!
That's super cynical. But not necessarily wrong. However, I do think that we genuinely root for the underdog, and most American's are enthralled with the "Marvel-movie resistance". Not to say the support is not primarily to harm Russia, but to say we would be sad if too many Ukrainians got killed along the way.
You are describing the view of the American public. Spork is describing the view of the permanent foreign policy establishment (the deep State Department, if you like). I think you're both right.
> NATO only needs to feed this conflict with a precisely calibrated flow of "support" (weapons) to keep the killing at some strategically optimal level of intensity, all while highmindedly denouncing the violence.
That is assigning some malicious conspiracy to something that does not need it.
Note that complete destruction of invading Russian army would fulfill this goals even better!
They are not giving things needed to achieve that for multiple reasons, none of them requiring such malicious plans.
NATO is not furnishing the complete destruction of the Russian invading army because quite simply they can't. (At least, not without active NATO military intervention that would pose an unacceptable escalation risk; and quite possibly not at all.)
The whole point of trying to turn Ukraine into an insurgency quagmire to bleed the Russians out is that it is nearly costless on the part of NATO.
To be fair, the Ukrainians and Afghans are both rational. If they think it's worth burning the place to the ground rather than letting the Russians have it, they really would be in a better position to make that decision than us.
I also think your plan is too cynical and too involved. Western powers do not successfully plan that far ahead.
One of the reasons that wars occur is that people are very bad at making this rational decision.
If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare that will destroy my city and certainly kill many of my family and friends and quite likely me too.
That's just a cold-hearted and rational utilitarian analysis, but I feel guilty for saying it even in the face of a totally hypothetical and implausible threat of invasion. Rationality is cowardice, in a situation like this. If this were an actual invasion threat, my "Well actually surrendering
to the hated enemy is probably a more rational solution if you think about it" judgment would not be looked on kindly by some of my less rational and more hot-headed compatriots, I'd be shouted down in the best case and hung as a fifth-columnist in the worst.
And besides, there's always a _chance_ we might win a resounding victory quickly, shouldn't we at least try to fight? Of course then you don't win the resounding victory quickly and you're stuck in Sunk Cost Fallacy Land, and you need to fight on to avenge your lost comrades.
If people were rational about wars then wars would pretty much never happen.
> If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare
I *think* that in worlds where this preference is more wide-spread, invasions by Russia or China are more common than in those where it is not. I believe that means that the cold-hearted rational behavior is actually to prefer the horrendous urban warfare, so as to live in a world where invasions are less likely.
(To be fair, I’m skipping over a lot of complicated calculus of probabilities and preferences here, and tricky estimates of how bad Russian and Chinese takeovers are, and substituting gut feeling.)
> If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare that will destroy my city and certainly kill many of my family and friends and quite likely me too.
Maybe too late for Ukraine - but if you're being totally cold hearted and rational then you plan ahead for knowing that your people are unwilling to fight 10 years of urban warfare. For instance you have a well trained highly effective military, and a reliable predictable reputation.
The Chechens has lost 10% of their population, and the regime that follow the war was horrible, maybe communist china horrible. This isn't such an easy computation.
An interesting analysis, but I see a problem in that you are assuming the people who make the decisions are also the people who will go fight. Not usually the case. It seems to me leaders could coldly and rationally order other men to go fight and die, and probably would, and have, because their interests and viewpoints differ from those of the schmo in the trenches.
It's a little reductive here to say "The Ukrainians and Afghans". It's like Vietnam. Or anywhere, really. A huge portion are willing to fight to the death, and a huge portion are basically actually on the side of the opponent. Look at the American Revolution, even. In the early stages, it's thought to have been something like one third pro-revolution, one third silent uninvolved, and one third self identifying British. Ukraine will have a lot of people willing to fight to the death in both directions because a large minority of the country have enjoyed 30 years of Western life and come to identify with it, and another large minority of the country see themselves as Russian or basically Russian.
The Ukrainians want to fight. The US/NATO isn't calibrating anything about "feeding the conflict"; we want Russians to die until they leave Ukraine. But realistically there's no level of material support that would likely allow the Ukrainians to actually defeat the Russians in force-on-force conflict because the Russians have too much of an advantage. A "victory" is Ukraine winning an asymmetric fight and Russia eventually withdrawing.
What the US/NATO wants is for Russia to avoid invading its neighbors. Imposing costs here might get them to leave Ukraine and avoid repeating this mistake anywhere else.
The part of my point about which I'm quite confident is that it's not in Ukraine's interest to be the place where the Russian bear went to die. That kind of thing makes for a humanitarian catastrophe. I agree that Ukrainians don't have good options. But make no mistake: if they want to go fight and die, the US attitude will be "Great! Go fight and die! Here are some weapons so you can fight harder, escalate the violence, and die faster!" ...rather than something else more humanitarian. Probably because of geography, Ukrainians have a pretty good track record of being martyrs for other states' geopolitical agendas. And here we go again, cheering them on to throw their bodies into the jaws of today's villain.
It's also not in Ukraine's interest, according to them, to be dominated by a hostile invading power.
Not sure if you know, but prior bouts of Russian domination also involved some major humanitarian disasters in Ukraine. Lots of people would rather go down fighting than die of say starvation.
Properly employed, the weapons we're giving them will make the Russians die faster, not the Ukrainians.
This doesn't really align with what actually happened here, though. The US strongly signaled its non-involvement from the start, and had no intention of really arming them for a conflict -- if our goal was to get them to resist, why didn't we arm them like this beforehand? And the notion that we're spurring them on to go fight conflicts with the fact that we tried to get Zelensky to flee, presumably to set up a government in exile for political pressure later.
When you look at what has unfolded over the last few days, it's clear that the rest of the world was ready to let Ukraine become a new Belarus, and it is only the fact that the Ukrainians chose to resist so aggressively that has spurred the West to actually support them. Ukrainians are making the choice that they would rather make sacrifices than be ruled by a puppet regime, and your proposition would require a different timeline than what has actually played out.
Incidentally, this is worth remembering if Ukraine is able to win this: despite what Western politicians are likely to claim about their successful support (particularly the US and Germany, but others too), they were happy to concede immediately and deserve absolutely no credit for boldness or bravery.
> When this ends Russia will be Putin-less, toothless, and utterly compliant [...] I really really don't want my prediction to be right!
I really *do* want the world to be Putin-less, as that would greatly lower the risk of nuclear war. And a Russia that is not always looking to invade its neighbours will be a better place for Russians and for everyone else (except perhaps arms salesmen).
Yeah, I hoped it would be clear from context that the part I don't like is the human cost that would be borne by the Ukrainians as they become the instrument by which Putin is defeated.
US IC also predicted Russia would be doing quite a bit better right now. Tactically and logistically, the Russians are grossly underperforming expectations (independent of how much fighting spirit the Ukrainians are having).
- Vehicles running out of fuel
- "Precision" missile strikes were not very effective
- Air dominance not obtained
- Ukrainian drones having success instead of being blown out of they sky from above or below
- Ukrainian command and control still in place (Russia was expected to use kinetic, electronic warfare, and cyber attacks to great effect in the opening phase)
- Russian troops apparently using unencrypted COTS radios that ham operators, let alone NSA et al, can listen in on/jam.
- Poor morale among Russian troops because they were uniformed about the operation beforehand (so the Russians tried OPSEC, but US IC still knew the plans in advance even if the bulk of the Russian military didn't)
- Russians not operating with effective "combined arms"; they don't have much air support going, and their armor keeps getting blasted because troops aren't dismounting to protect against javelins and such.
- Massed artillery fires allows Russia to level cities and entrenched positions, but it won't help them a damn bit vs. Ukrainians armed with an infinite supply of sniper rifles and MANPATS/MANPADS provided courtesy of EU/NATO.
TL;DR: There are 3 possible reasons why Russia isn't using its air force much. (1) they don't have many PGMs. (2) they are worried their own army will shoot down their aircraft. (3) Russian pilots aren't very well trained.
All of these possibilities suggest the competence of the Russian air force should be downgraded.
I remember seeing (but who can trust these early reports) that one of the first aircraft downed in the war was a Ukrainian plane shot down by Ukrainian forces.
I think it's real, but less indicative of dysfunction than people are inclined to believe. IIRC it happened to the US in Iraq a couple times. Logistics is hard. Also, overrunning your supply lines can even be a result of unexpected success.
That was certainly what prompted the reforms, but Serdyukov - the defense minister widely regarded as being responsible for the reforms - was replaced in late 2012 with Shoygu - the current incumbent - under whom it appears there may have been considerable backsliding. Shoygu is the ultimate political cockroach: he's been a minister continuously since 1991. That suggests a certain flexibility on his part.
"Putin was hoping for a reasonably bloodless victory"
I think Putin's hope that the Zelenskyy government would just capitulate is part of the reason he's having so much trouble. He has troops deserting him because they feel tricked. They thought they were going to greeted as liberators but that's not happening and they're being confronted with the possibility have having to attack Russian speaking civilians, the people they were supposed to be liberating. I think Putin can still win but only by abandoning all of the pretenses he used to justify the invasion.
From what I've heard, many Russian troops genuinely thought they were just doing training exercises. Then all of a sudden they were instructed to invade Ukraine, which explains their low morale and poor supply lines.
One confident prediction that I can make for the coming week is that humanitarian situation in Ukraine will be deteriorating quickly. It's painful for me to write this since I have multiple Ukrainian friends with whom I chat daily in various Telegram groups.
In the second week of the war Russia is going to become much less selective in their actions. In the first days of the war they were trying to quickly take as much ground as possible without proper artillery support. This is about to change and it will mean much more civilian casualties than in the first week.
Multiple big Ukrainian cities are surrounded or semi-surrounded. It means that supplying food for civilians is becoming a problem. You can still go to a shop and buy food as in the peaceful time, but already yesterday my friend's relative living in Kiev spent 2 hours in line for groceries.
I think barring nuclear strikes the probability of Russia taking control of >50% of Ukrainian territory is low, say 20%. I expect the situation to become more or less a stalemate within one or two months from now. Russia simply doesn't have economic capabilities to lead a protracted war under the current (and future) sanctions.
Russia is going straight into an economic crisis. I see at least 50% probability of inflation in Russia exceeding 100% in 2022.
Despite that the probability of Putin being deposed is really low. In the past few years Russian opposition was mostly subdued by arresting their leaders. To have any effect the protests should count at least hundreds of thousands of people. From my understanding number of anti-war protestors in the last few days was in low tens of thousands. Around 5000 of protestors were arrested (these 5000 probably include a lot of people that were arrested, spent the night in jail, were released, went to the protests on the next day and were arrested again).
On the question of control, it seems far more cut and dried. Russia is shifting to lower tech, but highly effective, heavy weaponry. This is being spun in the Western media as a sign of "desperation", but that's a loaded term that means very little. It's an option that Putin might not have preferred, but it's one he can take.
I think people are strongly underestimating pure numerical advantage. The rough calculus is that this scales as N^2. If you have twice as many forces, you dish out twice as much damage — but receive half as much incoming fire. (One tank firing on ten has to split its fire in ten chunks, at the same time it receives ten times as much.)
What that means practically: say you had a special pill that made a unit, magically, twice as effective. That might be "fighting spirit" or "desire to defend the homeland", or "super smart sharp wits", or it might be "new upgraded tech coming in from Poland". That's offset completely by a 40% (or so, sqrt(2)) numerical advantage in your opponent.
Russia is roughly x5 in armored vehicles, x10 in planes, x20 in helicopters. It can send in less than a third of its army and completely dominate even if the Ukrainian military is hyped up on the x2 effectiveness pill. N^2 is not exp(N), but you can lose in polynomial time. There's just no way to offset that.
Ukraine will lose, very badly. Handing out machine guns to civilians, and telling them to make Molotov cocktails, as I see celebrated in the WaPo, or the NYT, will only lead to more needless death. I wish I could say Western governments "made a major miscalculation"; I think it's more accurate to say that they just did it for the clicks.
All of this is pretty well captured in the prediction markets, BTW.
The thing is that Russia doesn't have a numerical advantage at least in manpower. Ukraine can and did implement the universal mobilization, while Russia can't do it. The number of eligible Ukrainians is on the order of 10 million (all males between 18 and 60 years old). The total size of Russian military is around 1 million + 2 million reservists.
The question about the military equipment is more difficult and very much depends on how much Europe and other countries are willing to help Ukraine. Multiple countries have already started supplying ammunition, aircrafts and other equipment, but I don't have a good grasp whether it's enough or not.
Further, many historical examples like Vietnam war show that seemingly overwhelming military advantage is not enough to win a war on the enemy territory.
Looking at CNN data from a few days ago, it looks like Russia is x5 in active personel (900k vs 190k), and x2 in reserve personel (2M vs 900k). So even there it's a large advantage. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-military-comparison-intl/index.html Ukraine could, of course, "recruit" everybody (what fraction of the adult male population can you arm simultaneously?) but in that total war scenario, that all would hope we never reach, Russia comes out on top for similar reasons.
The N^2 scaling, and rough technological parity between Russian and the West means that the only way for the West to offset that balance is by a serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft? That seems insane, and something equivalent to all out, nuclear-exchange-provoking war between Russia and the West.
A big difference between Russia in Ukraine, and the US in Afghanistan or Vietnam is (to use the Talebism) skin in the game. Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory. In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, we were attempting to prop up client states with no geographic continuity. Russia has already been managing chunks of Ukraine for years without breaking a sweat.
As I wrote in the previous comment, universal mobilization in Russia is out of the question unless Ukraine starts counter-attacking on the Russian territory, which is currently unrealistic. Universal mobilization in Ukraine is ongoing. They've already drafted all the reservists and are planning to draft all the remaining eligible population.
> West to offset that balance is by a serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft?
I don't see why this is unrealistic. It is certainly within Europe's capabilities. At least equipping the infantry is cheap.
> Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory.
I don't think this is the case at all. Russia would probably swallow Donbas, but for the rest of Ukraine it would probably prefer to install a puppet government, making Ukraine into the second Belarus.
It remains to be seen whether universal mobilization is actually useful in the modern era. Can random dudes with a rifle plus no training or C&C actually do anything useful apart from taking the occasional potshot in the vague direction of an enemy soldier?
The thing is, many of the enemy soldiers are also just some random dudes going through their military training. Based on what we hear from the news, they are not very well prepared for the actual military action. (Though it is difficult to tell to what extent this is selection bias.)
Difficult to say, most of Russia already seems to have been burnt to the ground and rebuilt several times already. Rebuilding Kyiv with ugly 2020s apartment buildings instead of ugly 1960s apartment buildings probably won't bother them too much.
>A big difference between Russia in Ukraine, and the US in Afghanistan or Vietnam is (to use the Talebism) skin in the game. Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory.
It's possible this close relationship between Russia and Ukraine actually has the opposite effect.
As an analogy, consider how US troops might feel if they were ordered to shell Ottawa and kill or capture the Canadian government. Not super enthusiastic, I would imagine.
As a Canadian, I have commented recently that if the US tried the same thing on us half the US troops would refuse because they're smart enough to look at Ukraine and imagine the same scenario pretty much exactly, and the other half would refuse because everyone knows we're a subarctic wasteland and they'd freeze to death even in the summer.
Whatever squeamishness the Americans might have initially had about fighting their own countrymen in the Civil War, it seems to have evaporated pretty quickly once the war got started.
> serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft? That seems insane, and something equivalent to all out, nuclear-exchange-provoking war between Russia and the West.
Military-industrial complex in USA presumably is excited about such scenario, and in this case their incentives are mostly aligning with mine.
It seems possible that Europe and USA can supply enough anti-tank and AA missiles that Russia would have problems (assuming that Ukraine will not collapse within hours).
> rough technological parity between Russia and the West
No. We don't have that. The Russian army uses inferior equipment to the West (e.g. it lacks PGMs, night vision goggles, even GPS in vehicles), and is much worse trained.
> Multiple countries have already started supplying ammunition, aircrafts and other equipment, but I don't have a good grasp whether it's enough or not.
One issue is that it takes time to train people to use new equipment, and the more sophisticated the equipment the longer it takes to train people. So it may well be that the West supplies Ukraine both with equipment and volunteer personnel to operate it.
If you're talking about the order of magnitude argument, there's nothing that says it has to be on a two dimensional grid. It works in arbitrary topologies, as long as there's line of fire between the parties.
And, unfortunately, it's pretty easy to get line of fire in a city: first, you level the city with missiles, as Russia just did in Syria. It's horrific, soul-destroying stuff to see.
The fear is, no, they can’t. Putin wants to win. They’ll level the cities. As they did in Syria.
The West will have to watch. They can prolong the process, by shifting in weapons. The Ukrainian government can have teenagers burn themselves to death throwing Molotov cocktails.
The only thing that would stop it is giving Putin an out — whatever concession he needs to feel good. Split the country, perhaps, like East and West Germany.
Or the army decides to disobey and there is “regime change” — a chaotic process that will take place in a nuclear power currently on high alert.
I don’t think people grasp how bad the reality is.
> The only thing that would stop it is giving Putin an out — whatever concession he needs to feel good
No. Whenever you incentivise behaviour you don't like, you'll get more of that beheviour. Therefore it is not in the West's interest to give Putin any concessions.
The West should announce that any Russian soldiers/officers who surrender or enact a coup against Putin will thereby be exempt from war crimes charges. (to incentivise defection and coups) and also that they've asked China to give Putin a safe retirement should he choose to flee there (to get people talking about Putin fleeing, which gives the idea more salience).
>If you're talking about the order of magnitude argument, there's nothing that says it has to be on a two dimensional grid. It works in arbitrary topologies, as long as there's line of fire between the parties.
The point is more that if you can't actually deploy all of your force numbers don't convey any kill-ratio advantage. If the front is only wide enough for 1,000 tanks, then your 50,000 tanks to your opponent's 10,000 won't let you give more fire while taking less; you have to go through relatively-even combat until 9,001 of their tanks are dead and holes start appearing in their line while you still have reserves.
I think we agree on the framework of analysis, but disagree on the relative power of topology (the contact point and line-of-fire network) and volume.
My feeling on these effects is that topology can only get you so far. We are struck by the exception cases (line of tanks in a city street, each tank can only see one partisan, etc). But in reality (1) they’re pretty easy to anticipate and avoid, and (2) air power and missiles make topology irrelevant — particularly if (like Putin) you don’t feel restrained morally.
Asymmetric warfare is the only sustainable strategy for Ukraine, yes.
Luckily for them, they're getting thousands of MANPADS and MANPATS to shoot from behind cover at Russian vehicles and aircraft. I wonder how long it will be before we see an IED employed.
“Luckily”, etc — these are really awful and disturbing outcomes. I worked on the Wikileaks data from Afghanistan years ago (first leak, of the on-the-ground reports). It gave me nightmares, literally, I would wake up in the middle of the night.
Imagine a really sick news story, something you wish you hadn’t read. Then imagine dozens a day, so many that there’s no time to grieve — like a horror movie where the slasher scene keeps going.
Luckily given situation. Alternative is occupation by regime that denies existence of your nation, apparently people claiming otherwise should be treated as nazis.
Nations are fictions. Convenient ones, at times. But (to paraphrase): nations were made for man; man was not made for nations. Democracies in particular. When things look bad, scatter. Don’t die, don’t kill. Trust in the long run.
The alternative is “the old lie”—Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Or the Randall Jarrell poem later:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
We don’t like to talk this way because countries that sold war as a reasonable response control the educational system. The smart countries were able to disappear and reappear in better conditions. Perhaps that’s a good chunk of 22nd Century wisdom dropped into the 21st.
Nations are the sort of fiction that becomes real when people believe in them. Cultural differences are real whether people believe in them. Many Ukraine do believe in Ukraine and this has been the case for generations. Ukraine is as much a separate nation from Russia as Latvia, (which Putin also wants to annex.)
War is terrible, yes. (I've in fact been to both Iraq and Afghanistan and had the pleasure of taking indirect fire.)
But if war is going to be terrible, I want the CARTOON-LEVEL BAD GUY to lose to the valiant and well-equipped underdogs. Sadly, the Russian troops themselves are not necessarily villains and I hope as many of them desert as possible.
We have very different psychologies. I find it hard to overlay phrases like “cartoon level bad guy” and “valiant underdogs” with the reality of how people die in a burning car.
For me it is quite clear, person who started without a good reason[1] an invasion that ends people dying in a burning car is “cartoon level bad guy”.
[1] There are people claiming that NATO invading nuclear capable Russia was at all plausible and that taking over Ukraine reduces this risk. Such people are either (1) uninformed consumers of Russian propaganda (2) idiots or (3) Russian trolls.
Leaving aside other things, noone is going to invade Russia with tank columns as long as Russia can launch nukes in response. That is a red herring.
> Handing out machine guns to civilians, and telling them to make Molotov cocktails will only lead to more needless death.
Yes it will lead to more death than surrender. But will it be needless? No, because (1) the longer Ukraine holds out the greater the chance of them receiving more significant military help from NATO, which would tip the balance. And (2) the longer the resistance, the more bitter Ukrainians will feel towards Putin and Russia, the less they will accept occupation or a puppet regime, and the sooner they will be free.
I'm not a tactician, and while I agree that RU is clearly the favorite, I assume the specific geography and tactics around a given objective can complicate the pure firepower equation you've laid out.
Regarding Lindyman's comment: if you remove the "without any resistance" part, and just ask whether the Russian army could conquer Europe up to the borders of France, I am *extremely interested* as to whether that is the case.
Consider: the Russian military is, apparently, making poor progress on several fronts of its invasion into Ukraine. But its losses thus far, in both personnel and equipment, are only a small fraction of its assets; and it has assets, particularly its fixed-wing air force, that have barely been employed thus far. It currently has the luxury of making mistakes, and learning from them, against an opponent which doesn't have the capability to seriously exploit them. Meanwhile, the multinational NATO force deployed to Eastern Europe has limited experience training as a combined unit, and could have any number of weaknesses ready to be revealed when it first undertakes real combat operations.
That said, I don't believe this is likely: the NATO advantage in technology, and particularly in air power, should be decisive. But I can't help thinking of the historical parallel to 1939, when nobody (?) believed the Allied forces in France would collapse in the face of a German invasion. If the probability that the Russian military could overwhelm the NATO forces currently in Eastern Europe is 5%, say - or, maybe more importantly, if Putin *thinks* it's over 50% - I think further NATO reinforcements are strongly motivated.
If Russian troops were pushing back NATO troops within the borders of Germany or Italy, NATO nukes would definitely fly, so in the possible worlds where the answer to "would they use nukes" is "no", then it can be confidently asserted that "the Russian Army could conquer Europe up to the borders of France" is false. The possible worlds where the answer is "yes" are those where Russia retains sufficient capability after nuclear bombardment to pull it off.
(I'm not saying NATO wouldn't defend Poland - we would. I'm saying that it's somewhat more questionable whether being pushed back in Poland would trigger an immediate *nuclear* reprisal from NATO. Equally, I'm not saying that Putin wouldn't use nukes to support a conventional invasion - I'm not confident on that one way or the other - only that NATO *would* if needed to support a conventional *defence* of Western Europe.)
As a measure of which countries, if invaded, would trigger a nuclear response from NATO, would it be reasonable to look at the list of countries with collaborative control over US nukes under the nuclear sharing programme? So: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey? (Plus the NATO nuclear powers themselves, of course.)
To be honest, I'm surprised to see Turkey still on that list, given their current relations with the West.
I don't think NATO would escalate to nuclear in response to a Russian invasion of anywhere, because NATO would be confident in its ability to win that war by conventional means.
The big concern would be preventing Russia from escalating to nuclear once it becomes clear that they're going to lose. For that there's two options:
1. Attempt to take out Russian nuclear sites and subs with conventional weapons, or
2. The exact opposite: make it clear that we will _only_ engage Russian troops outside Russian borders and will not attack Russia proper at all, hoping that we can prevent the war from escalating to homeland-attack mode.
I don't pretend to know which of these would be better, nor which would be chosen. Maybe it depends on what happens with the submarines.
I expect that if Russia were to invade a NATO country, we would see a full declaration of war and all enemy naval ships (especially submarines) would be immediately targeted.
There is a big difference between targetting attack submarines and targetting ballistic missile submarines. The latter operate in the most isolated convenient patch of ocean, and don't pose a threat in any scenario short of a nuclear exchange. Targetting them is an admission that you expect that scenario to occur, and would probably provoke it.
The usual proposed way of degrading a silo-based deterrent is using groundburst nukes from intermediate range (this is the reason Cuban Missiles were a Crisis, and later the reason for the INF treaty). Conventional bombing/missiles won't work very well due to their hardened design, and taking them with troops is far too slow to stop them launching (ICBM launches also give too much response time, hence intermediate range).
The consensus seems to be that a surprise, all-out Russian attack on NATO would overrun the Baltic states and push a bit into Poland. Then it would be stopped due to lack of supplies and gathering resistance, and then over a week or two, NATO would secure air control and grind them down. After that, it’s a roll-up.
A drive to the Rhine is simply inconceivable, utterly fanciful. There’s hardly any way the attack would even get into Germany. Russia isn’t the Soviet Union, and recent days have proven that they were weaker than anyone expected.
On the evidence of Russian buffoonery in Ukraine so far, I suspect they would lose badly to Polish army + NATO air power without any necessity for the involvement of other NATO ground forces. If their air defenses are letting Ukrainian drones hit meaningful targets several days into the invasion, the USAF and chums would wreak unfathomable havoc. The Russian air defense network specifically looks very much like a paper tiger at this point.
I wonder how to reconcile the discussion of track-gauge incompatibility with the posited threat of Soviet invasion during the Cold War. Wouldn't they have found it slow going, converting standard-gauge European railways to fit broad-gauge Soviet rolling stock? But the Soviet satellites - Poland, Romania etc. - used standard gauge, so perhaps their trains would have been the ones supplying the Red Army.
I know next to nothing about military strategy, but I find it hard to imagine Russia gracefully running supply lines all the way across hostile Central Europe. Even assuming Russia can miraculously establish air superiority, their current display in Ukraine doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their logistical operation. I wouldn’t want to be a Russian conscript running diesel back and forth through angry angry Poland.
On its face, the claim that the Russian Federation could overwhelm all of Europe doesn’t sound too serious. Unless of course you throw in some whacky assumptions about a decadent West constitutionally incapable of fighting Strong Orthodox Slav Gigachads (But at that point no appeal to military hardware or doctrine will matter anyway).
The Allied forces in France DIDN'T collapse in the face of German invasion. They generally fought very hard. French command-level incompetence did a lot of heavy lifting (they kept launching counterattacks 12-24 hours after they'd been ordered). But despite the popular description of the Fall of France as a rout, it wasn't. The British fought hard, as did the French. The Germans outmaneuvered them.
Also, once the Russians are out of range of their rail network, they're walking, because supplying them is extremely difficult due to the fuel needs. And I don't care how incompetent you think Western militaries are, once the Russians are walking across Europe it is defensible.
> the NATO advantage in technology, and particularly in air power, should be decisive
I agree. In every high intensity war where western-style forces/equipment/doctrines have fought Soviet or Russian style forces, the Western forces have won.
I would humbly propose the following hypothesis: the rationalist community (diverse as it is) tends to be receptive to anti-woke and anti-institution models and explanations. In some cases, this creates a blind spot when the culture war is an inappropriate explanatory framework (particularly when American institutions are involved)
I think a canary in the coal mine is the systematic discounting of the American intelligence community, inconsistent with its portrayal as an intrusively mighty all-seeing eye. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, this dissonance was waved away by the (hilariously uncharitable) notion that Joe Biden was manipulating intelligence reports in order to put us on the path to nuclear annihilation. It was a ridiculous explanation, but nevertheless gained purchase.
I suspect other Western institutions are likewise unfairly downweighted within the rationalist community. I hope this tussle causes a re-examination of the community’s dominant culture-war model.
>I think a canary in the coal mine is the systematic discounting of the American intelligence community, inconsistent with its portrayal as a intrusively mighty all-seeing eye.
These aren't wholly inconsistent. There are a couple of obvious ways of reconciling those:
1) They know everything but are lying i.e. the CIA director can trust the CIA but us plebs can't.
2) They're powerful and oppressive but incompetent (causing damage with power is easy; extracting things with power is not).
Not saying your larger point is *wrong*, just that the logic isn't particularly tight here.
You're right that it isn't much of a deductive argument, although I wasn't quite going for that level of rigor. A more modest rephrasing would be that: Joe Biden confidently making falsifiable predictions during special press conferences should have led more of us to update against either scenarios you propose, and towards the direction of 'the USA has probably collected convincing evidence that Russia will invade soon'. To the extent we didn't, I suspect this reflects strong systematic biases that have taken root within the community (or what I identify as such) over the course of fighting the culture wars.
As for the other point: a substantial minority apparently found credible the idea that ruling elites actively sought to wage war against a nuclear power. I don't think that's a serious idea, and I am left scratching my head as to the priors required to arrive at that conclusion.
Lots of people out there doing "reversed stupidity is intelligence" on Iraq WMDs (where the intel community did eff up) and "Russiagate" (where the intel community did not eff up, but the media et al did make a lot of unsubstantiated claims).
Bounded trust is hard to calibrate here because of the classified nature of the information.
I feel like to a certain extent this was an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in the sense that while US intelligence agencies are relatively credible when not excessively politicized, "Vladimir Putin is not a complete idiot" also seemed like a pretty reasonable and counterbalancing yardstick. If your point of view was something like "The US intelligence agencies are credible and there is a buildup of troops, but Vladimir Putin could be trying to pretend to signal an invasion to intimidate Ukraine with this buildup or or he must be up to something because he's not a complete idiot and only a complete idiot would invade Ukraine", the consensus view of 40% chance of Ukranian invasion did not seem completely crazy at the time.
This argument requires that you assume that the US intelligence agencies don't have the same presumption about Putin.
I think if you believe they are relatively credible, you should also believe they also don't operate from the assumption Putin is an idiot. That would mean they had strong enough evidence to trump that.
A given report would have to explain its epistemics for that to be knowable. Otherwise, determining the extent to which the US intel incorporated your other prior is really a big problem, and that's one way to get pushed into "I have no fucking clue" territory.
Here's a word problem. Let's say you know that US reports have a 70% hit rate, a report says Vlad will do a boneheaded thing, and you think there's a prior 90% chance that Vladimir Putin isn't going to be boneheaded. What's the probability that Vladimir Putin is going to do the boneheaded thing?
The answer is that there's no answer and you're screwed. You have (A) and (B) but you don't know how much (A) was already influenced by (B), so this is actually quite a difficult problem. If you treat (A) and (B) as independent you could reasonably have very low chance of Ukraine invasion because of the strong Putin prior -- if you treat B as completely incorporated into A, you could have a 75% chance of invasion by fully trusting the intelligence, but the real answer is that you're screwed because you don't actually know how much to adjust for this kind of a cascade, and this easily pushes into that perilous 40-60% "who the heck knows" territory.
Given current electoral prospects, "Ukrainian war" was probably to the advantage of Biden and the Democrats/establishment. As such, maybe it should have been presumed that they would instigate, if needed, for domestic gains.
I'm not sure 'presumed' is the right word here. Consider two competing explanations for "Joe Biden announces Russia will invade within a week":
A) The Biden government is fabricating evidence that Russia will invade, in order to escalate tensions and possibly cause war between Russia and Ukraine to break out. This plan will likely inflict unbearable suffering upon Ukraine and Russia, destabilize the region, and open the door to nuclear escalation, not to mention the risk of worldwide condemnation, criminal charges and eternal shame if the plan ever gets leaked or found out. The speculative electoral gains from the operation may rationally justify the immense political, military, economic and diplomatic risks to the US as well as the psychopathic torment of millions of Ukrainians and Russians.
B) The intelligence community has determined that the huge Russian army strategically assembled at the border with Ukraine is poised to launch an attack.
How in the world could anyone pick A as the likelier explanation, let alone 'presume' it must be true?
That's not absurd, but I think you still need unacceptable priors to weight this more than the much simpler option 'B'.
Your strategy has:
* High expected costs (undermines US diplomacy, damages credibility of US intelligence, strengthens Russian narrative of Western paranoia and meddling)
* Uncertain, and likely modest payoffs (assumes this complex narrative is compelling to the public; may be rebuffed by opposition counter-messaging; very unlikely to remain a top issue by November)
* Immensely high risks (military escalation with nuclear power, humanitarian cost of war, US seen as an instigator of the crisis, immense political and diplomatic risks from leaks or investigations, undermines US response to further Russian action closer to November, Russia convincingly presents evidence that invasion was never planned)
Again, I don't see how you can conclude that the Biden administration would make this gamble, without putting your finger on the scale with very strong assumptions. I think this brings the argument's rationality into question.
I would sort of agree except that I'm not sure where "rationalist community" figures into this. The only person I mentioned here who's a "rationalist" is *maybe* Samo, who didn't make this particular mistake.
My comment was actually in reference to the estimates of prediction markets (hence 'systematic' bias), and wasn't targeted at particular individuals like Samo. The term 'rationalists' was a messy shorthand connecting 'prediction market users' to a prevalent tribe within the greater LW orbit*, of grizzled Bayes enthusiasts returning from a fifth tour of duty in the culture wars.
If I'm not at all being clear, that'd be helpful to know
* Aella twitter threads, the subreddits, this lovely webzone, DSL, Scott Aaronson's blog's comments, Cade Metz summoning circles, etc.
I would counter with: The intelligence community was actually wrong several times on the timing of the invasion. Which is actually a huge and important aspect of predicting an invasion. So they still failed horribly, but also, sadly, in a way where they get to claim they were correct.
I personally think that revealing an aggressor's intents despite their flat-out denials is a reasonably impressive feat of intelligence. I am not aware of other agencies firmly predicting a more precise date of invasion, nor do I recall the exact timing being a sufficiently important item to attract much debate at all.
There were firm predictions of the 18th and 21st. The fact that they were erroneous means that Putin obtained knowledge that our IC didn't have the goods on him, possibly emboldening him to actually invade.
As a Russian living abroad I can say this has been a complete shock for me. I was nearly certain the war wouldn't happen. I thought I roughly understood what is happening in Russia and Putin's head. It turned out I was completely wrong.
My theory of Putin always was that he wasn't really interested much in anything else than his own power. He was authoritarian but not THAT bad (e. g. remember that Navalny was freely publishing his stuff and calling up protests for about 10 years, during which he was only harassed, and only then there was the weird poisoning attempt and ultimately prison), and he did try to be a good ruler for Russia, as he understood it, and insofar as it didn't contradict with his own goals. Previous military adventures kind of fit into this narrative: Georgia, Syria and especially Crimea were easy, quick and boosted his popularity; and every ruler has to worry about their popularity, even an authoritarian one. DPR/LPR were only supported half-heartedly, and for many years were a frozen conflict when Putin realized that no one actually cared much about DPR/LPR. Stuff like speeches about the unity of Russian people, the made-up identity of Ukrainians and the weird support for the Orthodox church I considered just pandering to his main audience, older Russians who miss the USSR.
But, well, turns out this theory is wrong, because the war in Ukraine cannot fit into it at all. It is very clearly completely pointless and suicidal; in a matter of days, Russia became a pariah state like Iran. Whatever his goals in the war are, even he accomplishes them all, he is now losing so much more. I thought it a valid argument that Ukraine aligned with NATO is genuinely bad for Russia, and assumed the events of last few months were posturing to make Ukraine and/or NATO guarantee their neutrality. Honestly I think if they agreed, there is a chance this mess could have been avoided... But they took a hard line, and instead of saving face (recognition of DPR/LPR, Russian troops officially there for good, some more minor sanctions in response; last Wednesday I was sure that's how it ends) he went all in. And even if he guarantees now Ukraine's loyalty somehow, he will have Finland and Sweden in NATO, he will have NATO stronger and more united than ever. Sweden taking sides, Germany re-militarizing and apparently even considers not shutting down their nuclear as they always wanted. This is insanity.
Right now I think -- although right now no one can be sure of anything -- he actually genuinely believes his shit. How Ukraine doesn't really exist and all. Apparently he really wants to resurreсt Russian Empire, the way he sees it at least. Possibly he wouldn't need the Baltics or Central Asia, but Ukraine is crucial, as "they are Russians too". And Belarus he basically already has anyway.
I don't know if that's always been his plan or just him being more and more detached from reality in the later years. Apparently he was really scared by COVID and spent the last two years in severe isolation, you can still see in pictures and videos the ridiculously long table which he uses now. Probably didn't do any good to his mind.
And apparently he really believed that Ukrainian people would welcome Russians as saviors. That's the only explanation I can see for the surprising weakness of the Russian army; like most, I expected Ukraine to collapse in days. Not only the troops appear incompetent, but the army that he gathered (was it 150,000?) is utterly inadequate for occupation of a country of 40 million, which was a major reason why I thought the war would be impossible to begin with. And Ukraine, as a heroically resisting victim of unprovoked aggression of Russia (which no one really liked to begin with), has now all the sympathy in the world, although it's of course good to remember that whatever we learn about the war now is mostly Ukrainian (and Western intelligence) own propaganda.
Unfortunately I don't know what happens now and I don't think WWIII scenario is completely excluded. Putin cannot go back, and the Western response has been utterly devastating and gets worse every day, they really should stop already... Russian economy is collapsing, it's in walking ghost phase right now. I fear this really backs him into corner. In his old memoires, year 2000, he says how the thing that made the greatest impression to him as a kid was how a cornered rat can turn to fight a man. Some consolation that I have is that he probably, in his mind, really wants to build a great Russia for all Russian peoples, and killing all Russian peoples in nuclear holocaust doesn't quite fit into these plans. And he appears afraid of death (of COVID or otherwise).
And of course the best thing we can hope for is him being deposed/assassinated very quickly now. I think that is possible, but I have no idea how likely. Clearly you don't stay an authoritarian leader for 22 years without preparing for the possibility. But also clearly apart from a few of his trusted siloviki NO ONE expected him doing THAT, and NO ONE expected that the West would react like THAT. Lives of everyday Russians will be devastated as well by collapse of entire industries, ruble freefalling, new Iron Curtain starting to fall, and I think it is actually likely that we could see really huge protests. The thing about Putin's Russia is that it mostly hasn't been all that bad for people at all. That's why he was tolerated and any protests always were relatively small; people actually had a lot to lose. Now they won't. The world is also much more interconnected than it was in the times Iran or North Korea became pariah states; just imagine losing microchips import in 2022.
But of course everything changes now in a matter of hours, so who knows? At least it's a good thing I emigrated 4 years ago, even though back then politics was the last thing on my mind. I'm afraid of anti-Russian sentiment abroad now (and hopefully the West won't start deporting all Russians), but well, for now let's at least hope there's no WWIII.
>you can still see in pictures and videos the ridiculously long table which he uses now.
It is not an important issue, but I have to ask what do Russians think about the long tables?
I assumed I was seeing photoshopped images, I was shocked these were official Russian released photographs and the tables are comically long. Even in photos with top military staff who Putin must have trust in. Is there any official explanation or is it ever talked about officially?
At least when he was talking with Macron there actually was an official explanation of Macron having refused to take a COVID test in Russia. But currently he is talking to his own ministers also using a ridiculously long table (actually a different one)... I can't help thinking it might also be for making it more difficult to aim, if one of his people suddenly decides to shoot him with their handgun. Or maybe he's thinking of the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, which was done with a bomb under a conference table.
The thing I don't understand is that if it is about avoiding assassination risks, why not just do video meeting in those government meeting rooms with the giant screens, and have a few real people in the room you actually trust so it doesn't look too weird. That would look fairly normal, especially post-Covid. I wouldn't think twice about it.
The crazy tables just make think, holy cow, our government doesn't even trust its own high level officials?
I've heard the conspiracy theory that Putin is not actually vaccinated against COVID – officially he's had 3 shots but he didn't do it live on TV as other heads of state did; there is no video of it. So, given his age, he's now absolutely terrified of getting COVID.
They do look a little silly, but of all the things he's been doing lately the long tables make sense. Especially if they already have them in inventory.
The most absurd part of it is that before the war, he could probably get Crimea peacefully (which is strategically important for Russia, and not really attached to Ukraine by anything other than a historical accident). Now he'll be lucky if he can get the sanctions lifted without paying reparations.
De facto he did, sure. Getting it internationally acknowledged, getting a properly negotiated land corridor etc could stabilize the situations for multiple decades, and I don't think that was diplomatically out of the question (especially if phrased as giving Crimea some kind of autonomy, instead of outright annexation). NATO would of course throw a shitfit but an independent Ukrainian government (lol) could agree to it.
Right now he has a good chance of losing Crimea permanently, drastically weakening Russia around the Black Sea.
I'm Russian still living in Russia. Congratulation on getting out of here, btw.
I think your original model is still pretty valid. I think the missing part is that Putin was originally counting on his army on the Ukranian border being an impressive threat that will make the West concede some of the pressure and stop applying new sanctions which could be pretty troublesome for his close friends. Basically he wanted the same thing that worked for Lukashenko with migration crisis: make the West fold due to the fear of an irrational dictator.
But Putin's move failed. Removing the sanctions was not a point that the West wanted to concede. And then he had only two options. Either fold himself, or double down. I can imagine the rationalization according to which double downing makes more sense. If he returned his troops it would mean that his threats are not credible, that harsh response to his provocation is the right thing to do. And he couldn't afford such a thing, it would ruin his main political strategy. But mainly, I think the final decision to attack was made due to much mundane reasons. At some moment he just asked his generals whether they can do it. And his generals did what they used to do: said what Putin wanted to hear.
> If he returned his troops it would mean that his threats are not credible, that harsh response to his provocation is the right thing to do.
The part I can't get my head around is that Russian diplomats and representatives were swearing on their mother's graves Russia would absolutely never invade. Almost literally right up to the point where troops were dropped into the capital of Ukraine.
Well I count it as an evidence in favour of "originally planning not to invade, but then invading out of spite" hypothesis. The diplomats got debriefed what to say and they kept doing it till the bitter end, even after the true intentions changed.
As I understand that, the threat was supposed to work like that: "We are definetely not invading, you paranoid, doublestandarded russiaphobes! Have you heard about all these time USA invaded other countries, btw? Still we have an army on the border. And do you know that our army is very powerful? No of course we are not invading. But if we invaded we would definetely win. So you shouldn't provoke us, if you catch our meaning". Such double talk is very representative of Putins regime.
Ah, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" tactic? Saying "We can either be good people who don't deserve sanctions and whom you negotiate with and who would never invade, or we can be bad people who deserve sanctions and whom you won't negotiate with and who will invade. Your choice."
> Basically he wanted the same thing that worked for Lukashenko with migration crisis: make the West fold due to the fear of an irrational dictator.
As far as I know migration crisis ended with some reputation loss to Poland and some dead migrants, but "make the West fold" has not happened.
Ironically, Poland solved it by increased oppression that was legally and ethically dubious - but it actually worked. (still not sure what was the proper action here...)
And right now we are building fence across Belarusian border.
I suspect that adding ant-tank ditch to it may be a worthwhile upgrade.
I think Putin might have read too much into the quick collapse of the Afghan government. He saw a government that had support from the US collapse in a matter of 2 days. And maybe he actually believes that the Ukrainian government are a corrupt drug gang. This made him think it would be a very quick win and then the West would just eventually shrug and accept the new situation.
I think this wasn't a completely crazy prediction, but, well, turns out Ukraine is not Afghanistan. Now he's stuck with this war he can't win without enormous cost (both politically and monetary).
I personally thought in mid-February that Putin would do _something_ – he wouldn't just gather troops for nothing – but I thought he would just occupy DPR/LPR. I really did not expect him to go for the whole of Ukraine.
Yeah, I predicted the "peacekeepers" but said I'd be mildly surprised if Putin actually went for Ukraine entire, simply because taking the Donbass already got/would get him his respect.
"and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia."
Such as? I've found it really odd hearing leftist commentators like Michael Tracey and Kyle Kulinski bash Democrats for "Russiagate", as if all the speculations regarding Russia (and its connections to the Trump campaign) have since been conclusively disproven. They haven't - far from it. I'd have thought the events of the past week would put an end to such smug dismissiveness.
Yes – particularly how the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is evidence for or against 'Russiagate', except, possibly, in some kind of convoluted 'everything is correlated' argument. But I still can't imagine any even somewhat concrete 'correlated' argument.
I'm not claiming that I haven't heard or read whatever argument(s) you might have in mind – I just don't know which one(s) that/they might be.
To be fair, from my remove (and because of my indifference), I'm skeptical of all kinds of claims that might seem like strong evidence to others. (I don't trust any of the people involved to make honest statements about this or anything like it.)
Is this relationship supposed to be self-evident? If Russia installed Trump as president, why'd they wait till over a year after he was out of office to invade Ukraine? I don't think Russia's timeline revolves around America's domestic politics.
That there is a relationship at all should be self-evident. The specific nature of the relationship is up for debate.
Saying "Russia installed Trump as president" is a strong statement, and not one that I made or would make. Putin definitely wanted Trump to win, and for obvious reasons, and he definitely put his finger on the scale. Whether it actually altered the election outcome is also up for debate.
I have no definitive answer as to why Putin invaded when he did. I've heard his military wasn't adequately prepared from some, including John Bolton. I don't know, but he was probably considering many different factors. I agree that American domestic politics were likely not a dominant factor, so I don't understand why you're asking the question. I think you're jumping to incorrect conclusions about what my views are.
With that said, the notion that Joe Biden being president rather than Donald Trump makes it easier for Putin to invade is laughable. I'm not a big Biden fan by any means, but under him the coordinated response with European countries has been tremendous. I don't know to what degree that can actually be credited to Biden, but I know that other European countries did not respect or trust Trump, and his antics very well could have impeded similar coordination from occurring had he been president instead. That, or maybe he would've outright opposed the sanctions - he had a tendency of objecting to Russian sanctions while he was in office.
I think there can be reasons that Russia would prefer Trump to Clinton that have nothing to do with whether they thought they could manipulate him or not. I think a pretty rational decision for Putin preferring Trump over Clinton may simply be how badly Clinton seemed to want to escalate tensions with Russia.
We can certainly see that now, with her giving interviews advocating for the US providing a no-fly zone over Ukraine (which is insane imo), but she was also loudly in favor of no-fly zones over Syria if I recall correctly. Further, Trump was loudly (and uniquely) against foreign wars and for domestic investment in American workers. Even Biden has had to cede ground on these issues, given how popular they proved. And again, this is in direct opposition to Clinton, who at the time was still preaching about the benefits of NATO and international trade.
From my perspective, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that "most" of the Russia allegations connected to Trump seemed to be exaggerated or fabricated. What remained seemed about as serious as, say, the Clinton email scandal. Which is not to say "totally un-concerning," but certainly eye-roll-worthy from most sources. So when I hear someone talk about Russiagate, I tend to agree with the general feeling that it was largely a thing that needed "debunking" for most Democrats.
Mostly, I find the debate about Trump vs. Biden's level of culpability to be uninteresting and missing a fundamental point; the American public wasn't paying attention to the NATO crisis in Ukraine because we were obsessed with our own domestic dramas, and so we allowed leaders of both parties to make increasingly stupid blunders on the world stage. If Americans were paying attention to actual policy instead of useless cultural bickering, then maybe both Trump and Biden would've been forced into having and communicating a more coherent international strategy.
But we Americans have recently been very bad at self-examination and self-correction, so instead we're already using our time trying to blame the other team for the situation we all helped create. I really hope we don't make similar mistakes going forward.
And yet the FBI, CIA, every friendly foreign intelligence agency, plus the bipartisan Republican-led Senate intelligence committee report from 2020, continue to assert with certainty that Russia was behind the DNC (and RNC) hacks. It's unbelievable that people still cling on to these petty politically-motivated indictments on technicalities as if they actually bring into serious doubt the broad consensus conclusion on this matter. You're in wild conspiracy territory.
My impression is there's a core of definitely true stuff (eg Russia was sponsoring a lot of pro-Trump Facebook ads), a periphery of stuff that seemed plausible but didn't pan out (the "Trump's servers connecting to Russian servers" thing, the piss tape, etc) and a giant lunatic fringe of people who spent several years calling everyone who disagreed with them paid Russian agents.
I agree with that impression. The odd thing to me is bundling that all together and calling it "Russiagate". It's throwing many perfectly good babies out with the bathwater. It remains genuinely concerning that Trump had Paul Manafort working for him and that he withheld arms to drag Ukraine into a fabricated US electoral scandal. Did anybody watch the impeachment testimonies? He was privately undermining the consensus US foreign policy agenda, trying to weaken NATO (he was NOT trying to strengthen NATO, do not even get me started), offering consistent praise for Putin's bad behavior, and actively destabilizing our own country.
The Mueller report did not disconfirm any of this. I have never understood why it was so widely dismissed. It had a limited scope, and simply failed to find conclusive evidence of coordination or election fraud by Trump's campaign. It was mired by false testimony and missing information, and it said as much in the report. When Mueller issued it, he made it pretty clear that what they did find was alarming. Everything we know continues to seem consistent with Trump acting to further Russian foreign policy goals. In light of that, I don't think it makes sense to make the focus be the fringe conspiracies.
> It remains genuinely concerning that Trump ... withheld arms to drag Ukraine into a fabricated US electoral scandal
Without necessarily disagreeing with the rest of it, do you think it's fair to call it a "fabricated" scandal?
I think it's pretty fair to ask questions about influence peddling when the US Vice-President's son starts landing board seats on Ukranian oil companies despite zero knowledge of Ukraine or the oil industry. In a country with a functioning news media, those questions would have been asked.
Yes, 100%. Be real. It was absolutely not just innocently asking questions; it was demanding the *announcement* of a formal investigation based on nothing beyond speculation. It was clearly just mudslinging to help Trump's re-election chances. It is painfully clear that he cared about PR impact more than any legitimate investigation (because he himself knew there wasn't any there there!). Actually look into the evidence and background of Ukraine, Shokin, and our long-standing foreign policy strategy there, and you'll realize that Trump and his allies were intentionally distorting the facts to make it look like Biden's involvement was suspicious, when it was in fact exactly in line with the interests of the State Department.
I think it is fair to ask why Hunter Biden was working for Burisma, and I was always pretty sure it was indeed an everyday case of corrupt nepotism. That would be bad, make no mistake about it. I'm not trying to handwave that away. But it's an awfully rich allegation coming from *Donald Trump* of the *Trump Family*, and he went about handling it in precisely the wrong way if what he truly wanted was to address it through a legitimate legal process.
As US intelligence claims regarding Russia and Ukraine have been borne out the past week, I'm beginning to wonder whether Hunter Biden was actually there to perform a legitimate role in combatting/monitoring Ukrainian corruption or strengthening western business ties. I have no idea, but I think it's worth considering. It never made sense to me that Biden would expose himself to such blatantly bad PR (Hunter's position at Burisma was always public info) for the small benefit of granting his son, who already held a cushy job, another cushy job.
> fair to ask questions about influence peddling when the US Vice-President's son starts landing board seats on Ukranian oil companies despite zero knowledge of Ukraine or the oil industry
Yes, it's entirely fair to ask those questions. Do you think there was no coverage of it in the media at all?
> The odd thing to me is bundling that all together and calling it "Russiagate". It's throwing many perfectly good babies out with the bathwater.
But which is which? The objective, for far too many, was not to understand the truth but to discredit Donald J. Trump. If the truth is that Russia's leaders cynically decided that a Trump presidency (or more plausibly a weakened Hillary one) best served Russia's interests, and had their propagandists act accordingly, that doesn't discredit Trump. I suspect the Russian government preferred Obama to Romney, I suspect there was at least some Russian propaganda to that effect, and this is rightly perceived as irrelevant to Obama's legitimacy or reputation.
It's only if Trump colluded with Russia to obtain that favorable propaganda that Trump is discredited. So the truth of Russia's private support for Trump gets bundled with a dubious narrative of Trump/Putin collusion, and a nice juicy "piss tape" rumor, to get something that had at least a bit of truthiness to it.
"Trump is Putin's man in the White House" was the precious baby. Evidence of actual Russian meddling in the campaign, is the bathwater that kept that baby clean enough to be marginally presentable.
Well good for those people whose objective was to discredit Donald Trump. My objective was to understand the truth, and the truth seems to be that Donald Trump hired distinctly pro-Russian people to lead his 2016 campaign, welcomed shady Russian assistance without ever notifying the FBI, publicly blamed Ukraine for that election interference despite personally knowing that was untrue, and then repeatedly lied and obstructed the ensuing investigation. Afterwards, while president, he tried to blackmail Ukraine into announcing a frivolous investigation of his political opponent, and he repeatedly lied about that as well. All the while he's spoken of Putin's character and actions is bizarrely positive terms, even during the past week.
To normal people without any agenda, that all sounds rather suspicious. Only weirdo Trump acolytes treat all of that as fine and dandy and totally unsuspicious.
The core of "Russiagate" where Russia wanted Trump to win and Trump's campaign leadership actively embraced Russian help) has been shown to be literally-literally correct, right?
Yes. But some people choose to ignore that because pretending as if 'Russiagate' were just a bunch of pee-tape conspiracies apparently fits their narrative better.
Based purely on their campaign rhetoric, it would be natural for China to prefer Clinton over Trump, just as it was natural for Russia to prefer Trump over Clinton. The key difference is that, unlike Russia, China didn't carry out a concerted disinformation campaign with the aim of changing our well-established foreign policy strategy to better accommodate its own expansionary interests. What do you even mean by "counterbalanced"?
The complete lack of evidence. I mean they probably did do what they could behind the scenes to promote a favorable result, but I've never even heard it alleged that they carried out a concerted disinformation campaign, let alone seen evidence for that allegation.
IMO, the core of it was "Trump is in debt to Putin through Deutsche Bank". With the core evidence being when Trump Jr proudly declared to a crowd that the Trumps are funded by Russia, plus the fact that both Trump and Russia do business with the bank, and the bank is allegedly shady. And the fact that Trump never misses a chance to kiss Putin's butt (even now). AFAIK, that theory never got disproven, it just got forgotten after the useless Mueller report.
I've never heard any of those parts of the "theory".
"Both do business with Deutsche Bank" seems a ridiculously long bow to draw, it's the biggest bank in Germany, and no more or less shady than any other huge first-world bank.
Basically, it's 100% known that Deutsche Bank has laundered billions for Russian oligarchs, and also made really stupid loans to Trump that other banks were declining. Some people speculated this is what Mueller's grand jury was investigating; the grand jury was investigating and fining some foreign financial institution $50k per day for not providing some financial records.
But yeah, without any actual evidence linking those 2 activities, it's just one more conspiracy theory.
I always saw the core issue being what Adam said. "Trump is in debt to Putin through Deutsche Bank" is just one particular theory of many for *why* Trump was behaving in ways beneficial to Putin. Could definitely be true, but I've only ever heard speculation.
Some impressions based on UA & RU telegram channels, Russian imageboard 2ch, and having the whole thing happen ~1000 km from where I'm writing:
- The few extra days before shelling of cities started saved millions of lives. Poland is accepting ~100k refugees _per day_, with a surprisingly competent governmental response and a lot of citizen initiative. Random people are driving from across the country to transport refugees to their destinations - around 80% have a friend or family in Poland, the rest gets temporary shelter. Charities collecting goods for the refugees are overflowing, sometimes stopping the collection midway because they have no way to distribute all the stuff they already received. The humanitarian situation is as good as it can be given the circumstances.
- The Ukrainians really are ridiculously good at fighting. I don't know how much of their effectiveness is NATO-provided training and equipment, but I'm constantly surprised, given the economic and organizational clusterfuck the country was before the war. I don't think the West is overhyping their effectiveness at all tbh, the results speak for themselves.
- The Russian invading force is full of confused reservists and their logistics are atrocious. Siege of Kyiv seems nearly impossible at the moment because the sieging force would run out of supplies faster than the city.
- Russian soldiers are defecting en masse. This is not surprising - they sent 19 year old boys to roll tanks over civilians that are culturally almost the same as the family they left at home, and speak their language.
- Russian economy is in complete freefall, and Russians are noticing. If Russia wasn't an authoritarian state where dissent is crushed, Putin would be forced to resign. It may still happen. Tech-savvy users are scrambling to buy computer parts while they're still on the market, getting foreign currency is near impossible, anyone who had clients in the West is super fucked.
- Russia is run by oligarchs (so was Ukraine tbh), who just lost pretty much everything they had. I'd imagine they're not happy about the whole thing, and they're searching for solutions.
The Ukrainians have been practicing fighting in earnest since 2014. I guess western support (and training) plus an occupying force can sharpen some minds?
Not the whole population. They are not Switzerland or Israel with a fully armed population ready for total mobilization at a moment's notice, with regular refresher training in the use of firearms and explosives. Then agin neither were the defenders of Stalingrad.
Yep. I was about as wrong as anyone in thinking that Putin was content in being a pragmatic overseer of a kleptocracy. Seems like for some reason he decided to hard pivot into full-blown irredentist nationalism, no matter the costs. Economically this implies absolute reliance on China, which likely wouldn't support any serious embargoes, but would obviously make the most of its superior bargaining position by wringing Russia dry, to the cackling delight of the West.
> Poland is accepting ~100k refugees _per day_, with a surprisingly competent governmental response and a lot of citizen initiative.
I am positively surprised by my country. Note that 100 000 was on 28th February and it was increasing each day so far, with more and more streamlining (for example Ukraine at some point completely stopped passport control for woman and children).
I think, weird as it sounds, the Ukrainians were low-level fucked up rather than high-level fucked up.
In that people were doing lots of little corruption etc every day, but still were more or less of the view that it was wrong, it was just what was necessary to get by.
And thus, if you do something like invade them, they get their shit together, because that's important and (perhaps most importantly) there's not really a way to be small-scale corrupt in an existential war - it's all large scale, because even if what you're actually doing is small scale if it makes the country lose the war that's large-scale.
Reading diaries and memories of people who survived II WW had plenty of cases where people becoming collaborators and basically murdering people (happened not so often - in part because Germans considered them subhumans anyway) and plenty of people actually suddenly able to heroic sacrifice.
There were cases like raging anti-semites risking life to protect Jews. Because while they wanted deportation and discrimination - but murdering people, including children, was too much.
Pretty much all democracy indices (Polity V, Freedom House etc) give Ukraine much higher democracy scores than Russia. Ukraine is a flawed democracy, Russia is an outright autocracy.
"Canonical" is a strong word, but I meant to imply that Karlin is in a good position to know his stuff (ie Russian with an interest in this philosophy), it's well-written and thoughtful, it matches the things Putin's been saying in his speeches, and it did in fact predict what Putin did.
Something I thought was really interesting is John Mearsheimer’s prediction (Russia doesn’t invade because the Ukrainian nationalism will result in too much insurgency for Russia to hold Ukraine profitably) combined with Putin / akarlin rhetoric (Ukrainians will enjoy being gathered back up and are one people, broadly speaking).
I think this explains the reason Putin did invade, and also why so many people didn’t think he would - the costs they assumed he’d bear are not costs Putin thought he’d bear.
I’d recommend Mearsheimer generally - fantastic mind despite this miss.
John Mearsheimer is well regarded, but I also find McFaul's critique of the realist framework compelling. McFaul argues that the framing of Russia-US relations as zero-sum overfits for the Putin years, and doesn't explain well the 2009-2012 period when the two countries successfully cooperated under Medvedev. McFaul argues that domestic incentives might better account for Russia's posture and its collision course with the US, especially since Putin's re-election to a constitution-defying third term in 2012.
It seems there is a weak vs. a strong version and while the strong was is disproven the weak one has been confirmed.
Strong version: Trump was a Putin puppet being controlled through Kompromat and was taking orders from Russia.
This is where the pee tape and all that comes in.
Weak version: Russia saw Trump's victory as better for their policy preferences. Russia had its intelligence agencies hack the campaigns. Russia hacked both the Trump and the Clinton campaigns but only the emails from Clinton's campaign manager were given over to Wikileaks. Wikileaks then did the Trump campaign a solid favor by releasing the emails a few hours after the access Hollywood tape and making sure to release them in a continuous stream of small news nuggets for the next three weeks to dominate the news cycle.
We know the weak version is true, the question has always been how much did the Trump campaign know about it and how much did they actively work with Russia in the execution.
I would like to hear your thoughts as too many of the rest of substack made their bones by being "Anti Russia is just exaggerated neoliberal hype" aka Michael Tracy or Matt taibbi and the applicability of that heuristic has been called into question.
Facebook had a lot more to do with Trump's victory. They offered valuable data science advice for free to both campaigns in exchange for sweet, sweet political ad revenue, only Trump took up their offer, and ruthlessly targeted left-leaning voters in battleground states to induce them to abstain instead of holding up their noses, the rest is history.
The Russians were more focused on exploiting and amplifying fault lines in US society to weaken us generally. Like that episode where they induced right-wingers in Houston to go protest in front of a mosque armed with assault rifles, because, Texas, and at the same time encouraged counter-protesters to go there, clearly hoping for a blood bath to happen.
You don't have to assume Trump's deliberate complicity with Russia, the Russians clearly thought as president he would weaken the country, and have been cultivating him and pandering to his ego for a long time. When he fired Comey, I revised my priors, then revised them back when the Mueller report came out. Trump is often his own worst enemy.
The intelligence community is certainly concerned about him, and not all of it is due to Democratic political operatives (I seriously doubt the IC as a whole is a hotbed of liberal activism, apart possibly for a handful of top-level political appointees). The reports of Neustar executives using its access to the White House DNS server logs to fish for compromising information show it is an effort from outside the IC.
Being a commentator on substack means that people are going to put you into a box with Glenn greenwald, Matt taibbi, Michael Tracy and others who have hilariously bad takes on Russia especially where it intersects with US politics.
As far as I know, you don't really have a take on Russian election interference in 2016, but I think, absent you actually filling that void, people will assume you do have a take and that it's bad.
Was it ever "confirmed" that Russia had anything to do with the email leak, or was that just a Democrat narrative?
I remember arguing at the time that Russian intelligence involvement seemed very unlikely simply due to the meagre and relatively unembarrassing nature of what was leaked. I thought that if Russian intelligence wanted to start leaking stuff to embarrass the Clintons then it would be the _really_ good dirt, like the 30,000 deleted messages from her bathroom email server. After hearing so much about Russian cyber capabilities I thought surely they could do better than a bunch of random DNC emails from the account of a guy whose password was supposedly "passw0rd".
My estimation of the capabilties of the Russian state have gone down somewhat over the last week, but I'm still skeptical of Russian involvement in the DNC hack. Has any compelling evidence come to light since I stopped paying attention?
Off the top of my head, the Senate intelligence committee report confirmed that the hackers of the DNC were a Russian group.
You are right that what they got was a nothing burger, but they also knew that putting them in a news bun, labelled "fresh Clinton emails" would still cause the American media ecosystem to lap it up anyway. Wikileaks didn't have to release them a 2000 at a time for 20+ days if the purpose was clarity and government transparency. Release them all, let people pick them over, the few embarrassing ones get a magazine article and a story on A5 as there wasn't much embarrassing. (Clinton campaign was upset Bernie hadn't dropped out yet. Shocking!)
But, if the purpose was to get "Clinton emails" to dominate the news cycle for the month of October as a massive boost to the Trump campaign then the 2000 emails every day approach is perfect. The content didn't matter just the headline. People were primed to believe already.
At the time the major Russian campaign-meddling was taking place, the probability of a Trump win was sufficiently remote that Russia's actions were more plausibly an attempt to undermine the nigh-inevitable Hillary Clinton presidency than to actually put Donald Trump in office. Note that their propaganda and espionage was mostly anti-Hillary hedged with a bit of anti-Trump, not actually pro-either.
That is plausible. Though I'm not sure it makes much difference.
In WW2, no one outside if China thought that the Chinese Communists could actually win the Chinese civil war.
The USSR however helped them anyway by allowing them to seize Japanese weapon stocks in Northeast China as leverage against what they saw as a possibly hostile Republic of China.
That said, the help was absolutely crucial to their victory.
Anyway, the ambiguity about all of it is why I woukd love to see a ten thousand word well researched Scott Alexander post on Russian election interference now that most people involved are out of office.
The weak version isn't even true. It omits that the Steele Dossier was also a Russian intelligence action, which then successfully undermined the Trump administration. They were playing both sides.
I'm guessing it is less a strong Ukrainian resistance and more Putin pulling punches and trying to avoid "shock and awe" that would level Kyiv and other major population centers. He had no scruples like that in Chechnya or Syria, with much more decisive outcomes. Extremely low morale of the troops who are not eager to fight their kin is not helping, either. This may change and soon, though.
I agree with you. This remains a fairly asymmetrical war in which the two belligerents have very different goals, thus different strategies and executions: Ukraine is fighting against a foreign invader and a perceived threat on its survival. Russia is using military force in a very Clausewitzian form: "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means" and "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will".
This means that Ukraine is throwing at the invader all the firepower it could muster, using all available means to it, including all forms of propaganda. This gives the impression that the Ukraine is "winning" and that Russia is "failing". The Russians, on the other hand, seem to be trying to minimize civilian casualties and general collateral damage, and are trying to achieve their political goals less with overwhelming force than with strategically applied pressure, to bring Zelynsky to the negotiations table.
One reason analysis why so many people predicted that Russia will win quickly may be that those pundits made an implicit assumption that if Russia invaded they would follow their own standard doctrine which involves much higher levels of violence - including against civilians. I.E. you break their forecast down into two parts a) Russia will follow their doctrine, and b) if they follow their doctrine they will win quickly.
At this point we see they got part "a" wrong but we don't yet know if part "b" is wrong. If Russia steps up their violence to doctrinaire levels, only then will we get real evidence about part b. If it works, then b is more plausible, if it fails then b is less plausible. (Although in either case you could still argue that the initial lower level agression changed the situation and thus the likelihood of b being right - if b fails even after doctrinaire levels of aggression then maybe it's because the initial lower agression phase gave Ukraine space to establish it's resistance; b succeedscwith higher levels of agression maybe it's because the initial lower level agression didn't win but did wear down critical parts of Ukrainian capabilities and got Russian troops much closer to cities so b was done in more favorable conditions.)
Regarding Luttwak, he forgot Putin is a spook, not someone with military experience, and civilian leaders constantly overestimate what military power can achieve.
5k to win 33k in a prop bet is a pretty good return!
Looking back at those guesses, a lot of those calls did go up, but were really sensitive to timing. Brent oil the best play, but not purely driven by the invasion, it just steadily went up for the last few months. (Definitely spiking on 25 Feb, sure.)
Some of the others barely went up, or (natural gas) bounced around so much any gains would be really sensitive to timing.
I still think it's interesting that even if you confidently knew the future in January, it's still not obvious how to adjust investments.
If you think Putin will back down and retreat in the coming weeks, what would you do?
If you think Putin will expand the invasion to Poland in the coming weeks, how would you hedge?
I'm not sure there are obvious answers. Bet on direct outcomes I guess.
"But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, Zelenskyy was saying everything would be okay."
It's an assumption that this was a miscalculation. What was the alternative? Telling everyone an invasion was imminent? How long can you keep that up? What does it do to morale? And aren't you feeding into Putin's propaganda then? Out of the set of options available to him, quietly preparing for it militarily while calming the public was perhaps the least terrible one.
I thought the same. It’s not clear how Zelensky’s decision to downplay the risk of war meaningfully worsened Ukraine’s position. Calling it a miscalculation feels needlessly critical, and even a bit misleading in the context of discussing Putin’s own probable blunders.
Also, Ukraine likely knows it needs to play the geopolitical sympathy angle to some degree. Any proclamation that they are preparing for war only risks making them sound more like a willing participant, potentially.
Keeping it quiet limits the number of things you can do to prepare, though. For instance, the mobilization of their reserves was only announced a day before the war started. Probably that was because Ukraine didn't want to do anything that could be seen as provocative, but if Russia hadn't screwed up for the first few days the delay could have really cost them. (Maybe it did cost them, I don't know how long a mobilization takes.)
It seems to me that if you want to look at predictions, you have to divide them between (1) Russian objectives and (2) Stuff that might happen anyway.
Russian objectives are clear, and very limited, and Putin set them out very clearly. The first is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and that has already largely been achieved. Their command, control and communications are dead and the air force is grounded or destroyed. Most of their Army is deployed fighting the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass, and they are now being surrounded by Russian troops. They will either surrender, in which case the Russians will let them go, keeping the equipment, or try to escape on foot leaving the equipment. If they try to fight their way out they will be annihilated because the Russians have total air superiority. So the war in the Donbass region will end because the Ukrainians will have no weapons to fight with.
The second is a purging of extreme nationalists from the government and the capture of nationalist militias like the Azov battalion. The Russians are believed to have lists of names, and in practice most of these people will be running fast if they don't want to be put on trial for atrocities alleged in the Donbass. This will ensure a Ukrainian government which is weak and is respectful of Russia - much the status quo before 2014 but enhanced.
On the other hand, there's no point, it seems to me, in predicting what might happen by accident or outside the scope of planning. Too many people are assuming that this campaign will imitate the US in Iraq, annihilating everything they come across; But the actual forces the Russians have used are quite small, and their tactics have been to minimise collateral damage. We know the Russians aren't interested in capturing territory or cities and have taken no steps to do so. They will apply pressure by surrounding and entering cities if they can, but as good Clausewitzians, they know that military operations have to support the political objective. They have no political interest in destroying Ukraine, which they want as an ally, if a rather reluctant one.
Finally, I don't think the judgement of a week ago that the Russians would not invade was wrong at the time; the Russians believed that (slightly) reinforcing their forces on and near the border would concentrate Zelensky's mind and get them their objectives. After he began talking about acquiring nuclear weapons at Munich, the Russians decided that that was it, and there was no further hope with this government, under western control. They had a contingency plan and pressed the button to go. Some things are yes/no and can't be reduced to probabilities.
> Russian objectives are clear, and very limited, and Putin set them out very clearly. The first is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and that has already largely been achieved.
Unless I missed something Russian are trying to take capital of Ukraine, which indicates that while Ukraine is clearly losing - but they are still defending quite well.
> Russian objectives are clear, and very limited
Complete takeover of large country is not "very limited" goal.
The other reason no one predicted both an invasion and a strong resistance is that everyone, left and right, is using a rational actor frame that assumed that a necessary condition for Russia choosing to invade would be it had rationally assessed the risk of not doing so well as minimal. If I have learnt anything it is that the sad truth is that even when we think we are not using rational actor frames we usually are- there are really only two ways to predict behaviour - extrapolation from past behaviour and rational actor models.
Worth considering the opposite on the fertility hypothesis, that the childless are better able to commit themselves to abstract causes and more likely to seek glory, hence better partisans.
As for why war nerd makes up songs and "what is wrong with him" it's worth remembering this isn't it tennis. People die because of Hawks all the time and Gary sees that close up. It's very natural for him to want to retaliate in any way he can beyond mere polite expression of disagreement , e.g. satire. Even if you find this unpardonable it is understandable.
For myself, I thought there was a 50 percent chance of invasion, and a 20 percent chance of good conventional military resistance by Ukraine, so I did poorly. I give myself points though for having made the meta prediction that predictions were foolish in this instance, and thus not having made any publicly.
I think we should be wary of the Ukraine resistance narrative. Russia can’t afford to engage in the kind of atrocities that the US or it’s allies can, because of the way the world media works. If Russia was to engage in a starvation play like Yemen it would actually be reported as an atrocity.
From day one with the Russians not taking Kyiv it was condemned as a failure, but when was a capital city taken on one day? Where was the ukranian defence before that?
> If Russia was to engage in a starvation play like Yemen it would actually be reported as an atrocity.
Russia's reputation is already done for in the media - just look how much of the people usually defending their position have shut up and/or massively condemned the war. What I'm wondering is, what would happen if Russia tries starvation tactics or outright bombings? It seems the world community has cut the line for interference pretty clearly at stopping at the Ukraine. Sanction-wise we pretty much already nuked Russia, so the only step up I see would be direct engagement, but due to MAD this seems unlikely.
> What I'm wondering is, what would happen if Russia tries starvation tactics or outright bombings? [...] Sanction-wise we pretty much already nuked Russia, so the only step up I see would be direct engagement, but due to MAD this seems unlikely.
There are lots of things that could happen if Putin goes all Stalin on us. For example:
Europeans increasing defence spending to 3-4% of GDP. Poland getting nukes. Total, comprehensive sanctions: no trade with Russia, no trade with anyone who trades with Russia. Merchant ships docking at Russian ports banned from using Panama and Suez canals, and liable to be seized if they ever thereafter enter the West's territorial waters.
If Putin wants to starve Ukrainians, he'd better be ready for Russia to become a larger North Korea.
Thanks for responding! But I'm not quite convinced.
> Europeans increasing defence spending to 3-4% of GDP
This would really only be effective in the long term and, as long as the EU doesn't join the war, wouldn't affect Russia.
> Poland getting nukes.
That would be *extremely* provocative and not of much use. Also, there are already nukes in and around Germany and in China, which is sufficiently close to Russia.
> Total, comprehensive sanctions: no trade with Russia, no trade with anyone who trades with Russia.
Trade with the west is (AFAIK) already down to a minimum. We can't really shut down Gas, everything else seems pretty much dead already. I mean, they can't even pay. Probably not much room to go in deeper and we can't force China (although they seem to join in already).
> Merchant ships docking at Russian ports banned from using Panama and Suez canals, and liable to be seized if they ever thereafter enter the West's territorial waters.
Trade, as mentioned above, is also pretty much down and flight is completely out anyway.
So from what I see, the West has already sent Russia on the way to become North Korea. We can't block other countries (at least not without risking massive problems) and going to 100% when we're already at 90% doesn't seem like a threat anymore.
Sadly, it seems they started bombing civilians seriously this night, so (unfortunately) we will see where it goes :(
>That would be *extremely* provocative and not of much use. Also, there are already nukes in and around Germany and in China, which is sufficiently close to Russia.
The value of Poland getting nukes, in this context, is not that the nukes are closer to Russia, but that the nukes are under the control of someone who will almost certainly use them to prevent and/or avenge the conquest of Poland. Russia might plausibly believe that Washington, London, and Paris would back down in the face of a megadeath threat to their own population vs "just" wimping out in Poland; Warsaw having an independent nuclear capability would change that equation dramatically.
But, as you say, it would be extremely provocative and destabilizing, and isn't likely to happen under any plausible circumstance.
> The value of Poland getting nukes, in this context, is not that the nukes are closer to Russia, but that the nukes are under the control of someone who will almost certainly use them to prevent and/or avenge the conquest of Poland.
Yes, exactly.
> it would be extremely provocative
Not really, Putin sees the very existence of the West as provocative. There's nothing we can do to satisfy him except surrendering.
In a coordinated action of "no trade with anyone who trades with Russia", China would have to choose between a relatively minor partner and the vast majority of its total trade. Whereas China is typically 20% or less of the total trade for its partners.
So, it could go farther. That said, China doesn't want to be a pariah state and seems to be lining up with the "allies" of its own volition.
I partially agree. The problem is that we're quite interdependent on China - we need the trading as much or more than they do. We can force their hand, but with massive problems of our own, so we can't really.
But it seems like our and Chinas interest are pretty much aligned here (war is bad for trade, after all, and Russia can't offer much right now), so it seems it won't come that far.
I suspect China is right now advising Russia not to escalate things. It would be really helpful if they offered Putin a bolt hole (he probably won't take it unless he feels backed into a corner).
Before Poland gets nukes, I would expect the response to a starvation of Kiev would be a Polish convoy full of food, under the Polish flag, driving into Kyiv to deliver food, possibly under Polish airpower.
Yes. It would probably start off as an unarmed convoy under the UN or red cross. If they don't let the convoy in, that's a war crime, and therefore a valid casus belli.
Much more because this war is unlike America's wars. Putin said (and may genuinely believe) that Ukrainians and Russians are one people and that Ukraine is a puppet regime of the West. In Russian media this is presented as a war for liberation, so serious atrocities would undermine the already faltering morale.
I wonder how many (professional) super forecasters were looking at this ? Even certain second order liquid markets seem a bit confusing (gold up on day of invasion, equities down; and reversing that on day 2) although possibly overall markets may not immediately be impacted by initial happenings.
So what if Ukraine/Zelensky said that everything will be OK right up until the day of the invasion? That's just public statements, i.e. they wanted others to believe that they didn't believe an invasion was coming. More precisely, they probably wanted to avoid mass panic in their country, and to a lesser extent maybe they wanted Putin to think they were less prepared than they actually were (is this smart? If you're confident that you can humiliate Russia, then yes maybe. On the other hand if you really wanted to avoid war at all costs you obviously shouldn't signal weakness).
I've wondered the same thing. Even if they were 100% sure the invasion was coming, they would've probably stated the opposite in order to not provoke Russia and up the shock value.
There are some hints we might be right, like the massive resistance Russia encounters and the fact that we had similar ploys to the Iraq war (i.e. the destroyed-but-actually-not Airforce), but as long as this is an ongoing situation it probably won't be possible to find out the truth here.
"Samo is a rationalist success story and a smart guy... And he’s been careful not to say anything specific that might later get proven false... this isn’t exactly a compliment. I think it’s better optics, but worse rationality, compared to people like Karlin and Hanania who make extremely clear predictions with numbers attached, sometimes get them totally wrong, and then admit it and write thoughtful essays on how they screwed up."
To be honest this matches my general impression of his output (and this seems very much not like a compliment). I've always been somewhat confused about why he's seen as an authority (or even as generally interesting) in rationalist circles: what am I missing? This is a genuine question, so I hope it passes the true/necessary/kind test.
Great Founder Theory is something that a lot of us probably think implicitly, and borrows a lot from Scott's writing about Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient, but I'm not sure anyone actually wrote it down before Burja. That's definitely what I associate him with.
I may be utterly wrong here, and take this with a grain of salt because it's just an impression based off reading a broad array of his work and it would be difficult to elucidate specific examples: I don't exactly want to call Samo Burja a charlatan, but his "Bismarck Brief" claiming to provide "intelligence-grade analysis" (In what sense is this? Like government spy service level intelligence? What does this even mean?) has a very Leverage Research type of flavor to me, using rationality community terminology to push questionable narratives. I think his work may require to be read carefully and critically.
My takeaway from this is that people don't make predictions to predict the future. They make them to express an opinion without having to actually state it clearly.
One thing that made me - and possibly other people - doubt the US intelligence is that this situation is really good for the US (at least compared to everyone else involved, war is never great). The EU is closer to the US than ever, we moved away from Russian gas and trade even before the war, more countries are seriously considering to join NATO and, in the best case, the Ukraine comes closer to the EU and NATO now, which would be an immense strategic advantage. My point is, even if they weren't sure that the invasion was going to happen, it would have made sense for them to badmouth Russia and they have been caught doing similar things before. This is at least why I trusted the intel so little.
I thought Putin to be acting rationally and I definitely saw why he felt threatened by the NATO. Plus, some regions in the Ukraine are really close to Russia and not the EU. I wasn't pro-Russian, but I definitely saw their side of things.
So when I was told "look, that Putin guy is crazy and is going to start a war" by people who have a lot to gain by painting him as crazy, have (wrongly!) told the same thing before and paint the situation as black-and-white, this looked like a propaganda move and not actual intel to me.
And just to be clear, I condemn this war. I just didn't see Putin as clearly the bad guy before.
But in the counterfactual where Putin doesn't invade, what would the US gain from having falsely predicted that he would? It seems like it only works as propaganda if it's true.
It clearly degrades the relation between the EU and Russia further. Combined with Putins military show (well, we know now it's not just show, but back then), this could've easily moved the EU towards stricter sanctions. Maybe predicting the exact date was a bit overconfident - and easily spoiled and exploited by Russia -, but just saying he would would have worked. If he did not, you could still be quiet about being wrong or act like the intervention prevented it.
But you're right, now that I'm thinking deeply about the other side, them being completely mistaken would've reflected worse on them than I initially thought.
Man, I remember saying almost exactly " One of the best predictors of insurgency is having the kinds of terrain that governments cannot reach, like swamps, forests and mountains. Ukraine is the heart of the great Eurasian steppe" but it ended ended with "Iraq is a flat dessert" instead.
If Hasan is in the mix, maybe another livestreamer is worth mentioning: Vaush predicted war as likely from early on, without downplaying ukrainian resistance. Also, Glenn Greenwald is not a leftist by any stretch.
Scott, I know those aren't super serious, but please consider not using the wacky school grading scale. It's not a huge deal but they differ between countries, so it can be slightly confusing. ("What the hell is a C? Is that good or bad? About medium? Oh, it goes down to F. Wait, where's E? Somebody please invent numbers.")
Making the "Putin invades, which goes poorly" prediction would take some really big braininging. You'd essentially need to have reasons to believe that you have better understanding of Russian military strength(including in relation to Ukraine) than Putin, and *also* expect him to invade anyway *.
On Feb 1 I privately predicted 30% for the invasion and an extra 5% for the major flare-up, (without looking at markets/Matt's/Scott's**/Zvi's). I also didn't pay too much attention to the question before that point. I feel appropriately bad for my "below the markets" score but take the "very slightly better than Zvi" consolation.
* Which is especially hard given the subtlety of the situation, it seems less "russia weak, actually" and more that it turned out they needed a bigger hammer than expected, and might still be able to adjust within a few days.
** I managed on my own but I really wish the contest survey blinded the numbers for those who didn't want to see it to avoid anchoring.
> essentially need to have reasons to believe that you have better understanding of Russian military strength(including in relation to Ukraine) than Putin, and also expect him to invade anyway
Your emphasis sounds weird. Assuming for the sake of the argument that I have reasons to believe I understand the Russian military strength better than Putin, if I estimate it’s crap but that Putin thinks it’s great, there’s nothing weird about expecting him to invade anyway.
(Sure, the assumption is maybe hard to justify, but *given* the assumption the second part does not seem weirdly brainy.)
I phrased that a little strangely. The point is, a lot of people thought both that Russian army is really great(and presumably also that Putin is well aware), and that he won't invade. You'd have to disagree that russia strong, but agree on Putin's understanding of it(for different reasons), BUT disagree on invasion.
Ad absurdum, sure, if you know everything about the situation, then you can also probably predict exactly what Putin will do, but we're not talking about hypothetical omniscient people here.
I'll elaborate actually, because this is interesting to think about, and I don't want to edit the comments too much.
Imagine you believe Russian military is too weak for the instant win victory that most people seemed to be predicting. This alone isn't that strange, since we do have the one pundit in the post saying exactly this.
On top of this you also think that for some reason, Putin doesn't know this. I think we can agree that would be a pretty surprising opinion to hold, and I haven't seen anyone claim this, even though it might have been literally true.
However, the predictions for an invasion were below 50% for a while, despite the fact that the Russian military action was expected to be more effective. But imagine if the above two facts were actually the expert consensus - if everyone thought that Russia isn't that strong, then surely the invasion expectations should have been even lower, regardless of what Putin thinks(for instance, because someone in his circle might try harder to dissuade him from invading). There would be no reason for that to cause invasion expectations to be higher.
So if you believed all this, *and also* predicted an invasion to be likely, that would be quite impressive.
Who was predicting that the victory would be over in two days. There was a lot of "The Russians haven't taken Kyiv, disaster!" on day two. This is all social media contagion, and I don't think it has any leadership - it's not from Washington or the EU, just people posting stuff they know little or nothing about.
I too know little or nothing, but when the Russian troops were actually outside Kyiv on day two I though that was pretty good going, whether Kyiv is close to Belarus or not. That means there was no resistance until then, nothing at the border. And yet the fading away of the Ukrainian army at the border is shown as a great resistance.
Also the Russian army is at once not that much good at taking Ukraine, with a GDP equal to Kazakhstan, but is a major threat to Europe/ Nato - which is the GDP or the US/UK/EU( most of) and Turkey. So its Munich again.
I’m belaboring the point, just because it’s interesting to think about abstractly, not because it actually reveals something important about the situation.
What you say is true: if, counter-factually, everyone knew that Russia’s army was less effective that it was believed to be in reality, I would expect that “everyone’s” predictions of an invasion would have been lower than they were in our reality, so predicting the invasion would be “further” from consensus, despite starting from the same premises, and thus in some way more impressive.
However, in actual fact, and in the hypothetical we started from, everyone *didn’t* know that, and had a higher (though still below 50%) estimate of invasion. So if I believed Russia’s army was weak *despite* general consensus to contrary, then reaching *that* belief is impressive.
But if “consensus about low capability” raises impressiveness of “predicting an invasion”, then “absent consensus about low capability” cannot also raise impressiveness of same, regardless of what my non-consensus private opinion is about that capability, right?
Or, to say it another way: it’s impressive if you get a premise right that nobody else does, and it’s more impressive if you get two of those right. But if the structure of the situation is such that getting *only* one premise right and the other wrong would make you more wrong about the consequences does not *add* even more impressiveness to you deducing the correct consequences, since you did in fact got both premises right.
Correct. So he doesn't get an "A". The dissolution of Canada got a recent step in the "right" direction. Remains to be seen. But I think he gets a point for his prediction of Russian behavior
No longer an unequivocable prediction of war, but he seemed to think that war was decently likely. More interestingly, he thought that Ukraine would put up a good fight, saying that it would take ~3 months for Russia to take over Kiev. This could end up looking prescient, if things shake out that way.
Good example of how percentage predictions tend to be less useful for catastrophic events? If you predict there is a 1% chance of nuclear war in case so and so does such and such, how does anyone subsequently evaluate whether that was a good prediction or a bad prediction?
It seems like evaluating these kind of percentage predictions work best for Pareto percentages. If I say there's an 80% chance of X happening and you say there's a 20% chance, then one of us will look good and one of us will look bad. But I say there's a 50% chance, then whatever happens, meh. And if I say there's a 1% chance, that also is hard to evaluate.
I guess there's a negative feedback loop for good forecasters: good forecasts -> more reputation for being good forecaster -> people listen to your forecasts more -> they act on your forecasts more -> you can advance your preferred agenda by forecasts -> more incentives for bullshit.
Especially true for government actors like politicians or intelligence services
This is a topic where many people voiced their opinion and made predictions. If you're handing out everything from B to F but not a single A your grading scheme is probably not ideal.
What's the standard for an A? Predicting the fall of the capital within 2 days? 5 days? When did anyone make such an accurate forecast before an invasion started?
I agree that a grading rubric would be nice but working backwards from the grades an A would seem to be correctly predicting invasion AND correctly predicting “strong” Ukrainian resistance. Seems like predictions of invasion were correlated with assessment of weak resistance and vice versa (seems like Putin was in same boat).
Yes, that's apparently his standard. He could have made it a) more useful and b) less vague.
a) There is a rational behind grading on a curve. If you leave some buckets completely empty (mostly Es and Fs today because of grade inflation), you lose informational content for the remaining grades that are still handed out. Maybe he should have given an A to Clay Graubard.
b) "Strong resistance" is vague. What does that mean? We are on day 6. Kiev, the capital is getting surrounded. A 40 mile long Russian military convoy is slowly moving to further encircle it. The Ukrainians don't seem to be able to inflict any damage. That's target shooting for a "strong resistance", but the Ukrainian military does not have the capability to do anything about it.
From 28 Feb of wiki entry: "An analyst with the Royal United Services Institute stated that the Ukrainian regular army is no longer functioning in formations but in largely fixed defenses, and was increasingly integrated with Territorial Defense Forces and armed volunteers."
"No longer functioning in formations" after 5 days does not sounds like strong resistance to me.
German/Soviet invasion of Poland took 35 days, US invasion of Iraq 40 days. Is Russia still on track to meet that? How can anyone call that a "strong resistance"?
Probably there are some facts that support the claim of "strong resistance", but there are also many that support the opposite.
I look at that Metaculus "Kyiv to fall to Russian forces by April" question and I don't even know what I'm predicting.
It says
>This question will resolve positively if it is publicly reported by at least three reputable media sources or from direct statements from at least four Permanent UNSC members that the majority of Kyiv's raions are under Russian military control by April 1, 2022.
I couldn't find a list of "reputable media sources," but perhaps it's the "media" subset of "credible sources"
>A "credible source" will be taken to be an online or in-print published story from a journalistic source, or information publicly posted on a the website of an organization by that organization making public information pertaining to that organization, or in another source where the preponderance of evidence suggests that the information is correct and that there is no significant controversy surrounding the information or its correctness. It will generally not include unsourced information found in blogs, facebook or twitter postings, or websites of individuals.
They're gonna hold a post facto Wikipedia Talk style consensus discussion about what counts, maybe?
Or "direct statements from at least four Permanent UNSC members". Is that statements delivered in a security council session by the permanent members' representatives? A certain press release channel? Or anything uttered by anyone involved with those governments?
For me, more than being "regulated" per se, what Kalshi offers is that they try to provide clarity on exactly what the question is. There may not be as many decently clear Ukraine War questions right now. I think probably this Metaculus question resolves without issue, but "probably" throws a huge amount of extra risk into the question.
"But part of our civilizational immune system against shadowy Machiavellian genius figures is demanding that they do this even when they would prefer not to!"
I didn't get this sentence, can somebody explain it to me?
Thanks, I think we have such an immune system, but it's hard for me to think that it includes pushing for objective forecasts, at least for the time being.
I think your post on Heuristics That Almost Always Work is much more profound than the comments make it out to be, which is reinforced by your last paragraph here, that success in warcasting has more to do with bias alignment.
The big takeaway from Heuristics is that there is something inherent in iterative, distributive knowledge-updating that converges on credentialism.
Also, Polymarket should be blowing up, even without the U.S. The real explanation for the underwhelming reception is what someone in the ACX thread on Polymarket suggested, that there is little or no alpha in making general world predictions.
On the other hand, since this blog is in the effective altruism orbit, marginal benefits applied at scale are still worth a lot. So, is the faint signal from warcasting beneficial? Can it realistically be improved? Or does it bump up against a knowledge ceiling, e.g., that the ultimate point of war is to resolve uncertainty?
Heck, maybe warcasting feeds warmongering, and not in the speech-creates-dust kind of way, but in tempting people to test their claims.
> Over the past two years, the question has bounced between about 7 and 19 percent. Today it’s at 20%, its highest value ever - but still only a single-digit percent above its baseline.
Something I'd like to understand about metaculus: When a question was created long ago and then new events greatly affect it, do the majority of forecasters actually quickly return to that question and update their forecast?
If a large fraction of people who made a forecast months prior *don't* quickly update it, then I wouldn't trust the 20% so much.
Does anybody know whether or not the Ukrainian military was hitting civilian targets in Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas region as of February 23rd? I saw some information about this on the 23rd, and now I can find nothing.
I heard some claims but I classified it as "almost certainly Russian false flag".
I investigated the car bombing false flag, Russians have not bothered to even explode the same car model and they moved registration plate to some dilapidated car.
However, the invasion updated me in favor of it being a legitimate complaint, given that I don't put much credence in any of the other explanations offered as to why the invasion took place at all.
False flag is still slightly preferred as an explanation there, but no longer overwhelmingly, particularly given other aspects to how the invasion is being reported on, which lead me to believe that in general any information favorable to Russia is being suppressed. (In particular how the story is being made to be about Putin, and ignores entirely the role the 2014 coup had in setting up current events, information that becomes painfully apparent five minutes after you start googling)
>Why? Invasion preparation were happening long time before.
For the same reason that there is not much overlap between people predicting that Russia would invade, and people predicting that Ukrainian resistance would pose a serious issue to Russia: Because the invasion, as an invasion, does not make strategic sense to somebody who, like me, thinks that not only is long-term occupation impossible, but who also thinks that Russia knows that long-term occupation is impossible.
I’m a bit confused over this part. Wiki says that Yanukovych fled the city, but that the Rada voted to remove him from office. Was it a coup in the sense that “the Rada didn’t have the power to do that”, or something else?
> In the afternoon, the Verkhovna Rada voted 328-0[226] to remove Yanukovich from his post and to schedule a presidential election for 25 May.[89][227] This vote violated the impeachment process specified by the Ukrainian Constitution, which would have involved formally charging Yanukovych with a crime, a review of the charge by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, and a three-fourths majority vote—at least 338 votes in favor—in Parliament.
I was more with Peter Zeihan, who believed that Russian would want to expand its control over Ukraine, but believed that an invasion would be a quagmire. I thought an invasion deep into Ukraine beyond the Donbas was unlikely, so I was wrong about how Putin would try to exercise that control. That was a significant surprise. An invasion that deep was a part of a 40% chunk that I didn’t break down further. I also thought that Ukraine would take the path of quickly dispersing its troops to engage in long-term guerrilla warfare, at least after losing a set-piece battle or two. I was wrong about the relative effectiveness of Ukrainian and Russian regulars. I think that is less of a surprise than the extent of the invasion was.
Yeah, I think this has really improved my opinion of Zeihan, virtually the only commentator to call "Russia will invade Ukraine and this will be a quagmire". (I'm not sure how he did in the specific 2021-2022 crisis, but that's a pretty specific sequence of events to get right). I've read lots of criticisms of his views on China, but this has caused me to update towards them being correct.
Don't do that, take his arguments on China and investigate what can be investigated. I read one of his China posts and In a quick search there I find he has massively over-estimated the construction share of China's GDP - from 7% to 25%. A collapse in the former ( to no construction at all) would be a mild recession assuming everything else kept growing, a 25% drop would totally collapse the system.
I've failed in my predictions big time (10% in the start of Feb, 20% on Feb 15, went up to 50% on Feb 21) because I trusted too much in certain experts rationalizing Putin's behavior as a balance of influences in his administration. This predictive failure has cost me dearly: I advised my mother to return to Kyiv from a safe place. (She's okay.) I will make a post-mortem in the open threads once I have the energy for it.
If you're interested in how I was able to predict this, I have a Substack dedicated to the study of superforecasting group behavior - just click on my icon for more info. My substack also covers the science of manipulating group behavior, such as to collapse regimes or manipulate elections. I've had a lot of fun with practical experiments in this field: DM me for more details.
I think your framing is totally wrong. There is no eagerness to expand NATO to Ukraine by "the West". There is, howewer, an eagerness on the part of Ukraine to join it.
Po-TAY-to, po-TAT-o. It doesn't matter how I frame it, my point is simply this. We didn't have the power to stop Putin from simply rolling in and taking what he wanted, so we should have taken him up on it when he offered us a non-violent alternative. That's a pretty obvious truth regardless of how I "frame" it, so the fact that we didn't obey the Law of Necessity and instead chose to have a needless war which we knew our ally would lose is proof of our leaders incompetence.
> We didn't have the power to stop Putin from simply rolling in and taking what he wanted
That remains to be verified.
> we should have taken him up on it when he offered us a non-violent alternative
Putin demands were impossible to satisfy.
Also, Ukraine is actually not a vassal state of USA so it would not actually solve anything. Unless you propose USA helping Russia to take over Ukraine.
Um, just to be clear what I think just happened, I've claimed that you've commited rather basic and salient factual error in the post about which you brag as being the proof of your prescience. And you are handwaving it as unimportant. I guess I have nothing further interesting to add to this particular discussion beyond this.
I'm sorry, how did the US fail to predict this war? They were calling out warnings that it wasn't just a Russian military exercise for weeks before it happened. How do you see this and think anything other than "wow, US intelligence sometimes knows what they're talking about"?
Because they didn't DO anything to prevent it. Anybody can say "Oh, I totally predicted this" - and in the endless pages of word soup that the analysts churn out I'm sure there will be some sentences that can be cherry-picked to support that hypothesis, even though the majority of the word soup that I saw indicates that people thought Putin was bluffing - you can even see countless examples of that in the threads I linked to, while me and a select few other commentators were literally the only ones who got it right. But if our leaders knew that Russia was going to invade, and they knew that Russia had the overwhelming force that they clearly do, then why didn't they do anything in advance to *stop* the invasion? Shit, they could even have prevented the war altogether simply by agreeing that Ukraine wouldn't become part of NATO.
"Hey, if those geniuses at NOAA can predict when a hurricane is coming, why didn't they DO anything to stop it? What's this nonsense about evacuating cities and just letting Mother Nature destroy whatever she wants?"
The US government isn't omnipotent. If Putin decides he likes occupying Ukraine more than he likes not being sanctioned, we can't stop him except by going to war. And we aren't going to go to war with a nuclear state over anything less than a NATO member being invaded, which Ukraine isn't.
Also, we did do something - we shipped Ukraine a buttload of anti-tank missiles to use on the impending Russian tanks, and gave them advance warning of the invasion so they could fortify themselves in advance. While it's unlikely to stop the invasion, it's quite likely it will make Ukraine too expensive to occupy.
Also, I am extremely unconvinced that Putin would not have invaded if NATO had made a commitment to not invite Ukraine. I think that was a pretext rather than an urgent security concern for Russia (especially since Putin's actual demands were bigger than simply "don't invite Ukraine"), and that accepting those demands would have still resulted in an invasion of Ukraine eventually because "it was really Russian territory originally" or "actually the Donbass republic is the real government" or some other justification.
There's a very strange tendency among "realists" to speak as if "we" (probably meaning the US Government) can just impose any solution which seems convenient. It's as if the need to recognise that other actors have their own goals and interests begins and ends with Russia.
How *could* NATO make a commitment never to admit Ukraine? Article 10 of the Charter provides "The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty." To amend the Charter to say "except Ukraine", would (I think) require the unanimous agreement of the parties, which realistically was never going to happen.
But, as you say, this is all a red herring. Simply by holding Crimea, Putin was already de facto blocking Ukraine from joining NATO.
> Anybody can say "Oh, I totally predicted this" - and in the endless pages of word soup that the analysts churn out I'm sure there will be some sentences that can be cherry-picked to support that hypothesis, even though the majority of the word soup that I saw indicates that people thought Putin was bluffing
> (CNN)President Joe Biden on Friday said he is now convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine, but emphasized that room for diplomacy remains.
> "As of this moment, I am convinced he's made the decision," Biden said during remarks at the White House.
> The President also said the US believes Russian forces intend to attack Ukraine "in the coming week" or sooner, and that an attack will target the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv
This isn't "some analyst" or "a White House spokesman." This is Joe Biden, in the flesh, saying that he's convinced that Putin will invade.
US intelligence did pretty well here. Much of the rest of the world was sceptical ( and this is I think due to the WMD fiasco back in the day). I was too. They were right though.
On the performance of U.S. intelligence: my model there is that they may not have know too much more than "this military buildup sure looks like the precursor to an invasion," which was somewhat public knowledge at the time. Surely with greater detail than publicly available, but maybe not including any special insight into Putin's intentions.
Instead, giving repeated warnings of an invasion could have been a calculated action to make the invasion less likely. It makes invading less attractive for Putin because the invasion looks premeditated, lowering the credibility of any Russian claims that they were provoked or otherwise justified and thereby increasing the likelihood and magnitude of punitive economic responses by other countries. It also makes not-invading *more* attractive, because it gives an opportunity for Putin to demonstrate that the U.S. is panicky, over-reacting, obsessed with painting Russia as an enemy.
So I think U.S. intelligence might have been less confident about the invasion than they projected, and the confident messages were an attempt to shift Putin's incentives away from invading.
1) You are being too harsh on Burja. It is not the case that Russia is unexpectedly weak. What happened is that Ukraine is unexpectedly strong, compared to expectations of people like Hanania and Karlin.
2) Speaking of Hanania, although I fundamentally disagree with his conservative worldview, I have been impressed by his command of the facts regarding situation in Eastern Europe, which, speaking as an Eastern European native, is not always the strong suit of American pundits. The thing he got wrong was that Ukraine will not put much of a fight because it has a low birthrate, which according to him is a sign of a moral rot. I would argue that he was doubly wrong, since Russia also has a low birthrate and its army is also putting up a strong fight in the face of a stiff Ukrainian resistence.
It is almost as if something is wrong with the foundational assumptions of his brand of conservatism.
3) My prediction: 50 % Russia wins in a sense that peace terms will unambiguously make Ukraine worse off than it was before the invasion, 40 % there will be a messy compromise where Ukraine will be worse off in some respects but better off in others, 10 % Russia looses in that Ukraine will be unambiguously better off in a sense of controlling more territory than before the war or having cleared the path to NATO while not ceding its claim to Crimea and Donbass.
(of course 100 % that the war will be an economic disaster for both belligerents)
The birthrate argument is a real head scratcher for me too, although I believe his point might apply specifically to insurgencies rather than invading armies, which narrowly dodges the contradiction you've outlined.
With that said, the link does sound painfully tenuous, especially since the possible links between uprisings and high-birthrate seem far better explained by the age distribution, secular trends, and by the myriad confounders introduced by the robust inverse correlation between development and birthrate (material conditions, corruption, religious/ethnic divisions, quality of life, stability, etc).
I think his argument is that societies not devoted to traditional patriarchal norms, which among others include high value placed on having a lot of kids, are hedonistic and decadent, unwiling to sacrifice lives for a larger cause. Classic conservative stuff.
I think the idea is not so much about hedonism or decadence, but how much people see themselves as unique individuals for whom personal death is the end of the universe, rather than branches of a tree which will live on in descendants (not necessarily direct issue of the person themselves, more a societal or tribal thing.)
From a Darwinian standpoint, it may make sense that a society with fewer children (and higher investment per child) will be less prone to insurgency, more so even than war in general, since insurgent combatants seem to have a particularly low 'kill/death ratio,' at least from what little I know about insurgencies.
Bingo: “One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening.”
It seems a bit early to conclude that Ukrainian resistance is much stronger than expected. It's been 5 days, get some perspective. Unless you expected zero resistance (when combined with logistical support of the entire world), you'd have thought it would take a little while to take Kyiv. 14 days, for example, would still be amazingly fast by all historical standards.
There should also be some humility associated with fog of war. The press is aggressively portraying Ukrainian resistance as effective, but a lot of the portrayals are pretty transparently fake. Maybe the resistance is really strong, maybe it falls apart in a few more days. Maybe it would have already fallen apart without all the extraordinary international interventions.
Technically, it's still possible Kyiv falls within a week. Grading that as wrong at this point seems a bit premature.
I look at aerial photos of the 40 mile long slow-moving Russian convoy and figure that if Ukrainian resistance was _really_ that strong, they could have done some major damage to it.
Perhaps it's more that Russians have just been incompetent and/or unmotivated around Kiev (perhaps less so in the less publicized Southeast, though)? And will that last? For example, the Soviets got beat in Finland in late 1939, but regrouped and won in early 1940.
And will the Ukrainians fight to the last man, or might there be a tipping point at which they decide that being ruled by a bunch of fellow Slavs would be less bad than getting endlessly shelled by them? You should ask for quantitative forecasts!
I guess if one takes at face value that leaked document suggesting Russia expected to march right into Kiev in a couple days, then it's strong compared to their expectations. In general though I think you're right. Germany taking Poland in 2 weeks and France in 6 weeks in WW2 were very impressive feats. It took about 3 weeks for the US to take Baghdad I think. What's the benchmark for a well-orchestrated invasion here?
I looked it up and it took the US 27 days to take Baghdad. That is still considered extremely fast by most military historians. Russia could still halve that for Kyiv. Who knows?
> They admittedly had great heuristics: there are lots of warmongers, our intelligence community has been really wrong lots of times before, and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia.
A lot of people (in this as in other things) seem to use the heuristic: people I don't like predict X, therefore I will predict not X.
I'm not much of a prognosticator despite my having studied Russian history in university and do enjoy its literature but I did find this video made me realize that we over complicate reasons for war. In the end, it always comes down to resources and a perceived threat to national security. And women. Sometimes it's to impress them. Alas, there is no Helen in this one so it's gonna have to be straight realpolitik on the part of Russia. Without getting into the West and its own role in this saga.
>Meanwhile, GJI (superforecasters) seem the most reactive. I don’t have a good sense of how to think about this or whether reactivity is necessarily good.
Reacting to evidence instead of sticking with your priors is generally a good thing. And the empirical evidence is that super forecasters update much more often than non-superforecasters. Not sure what the anti-updating-often take would be?
edit: I guess the anti-update take would be that "all of this is just noise". IIRC, longer term forecasts (>1 year) might do better with less updates because most evidence that is more than a year out is just noise. Though I could be misremembering. But to me, this seems like a scenario with lots of signal. (Taleb agrees with me, but everything he says is probably just noise https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1497943606962839552)
Hi Scott, thanks for stimulating my brain on a cold and cloudy Tuesday morning.
I'd register a 90% prediction that conditional on Russia attempting to establish a new government in Ukraine, when Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine, within four months any Russian-established government will collapse (due to lack of any legitimacy). Basically, it seems reasonable to say that if Putin's goal is regime change, he will get his version of the US Afghanistan war all over again.
If that's true this is evidence of Putin and his circle's incompetence (less the extent to which this was about approval ratings but Putin could have earned that with far less of a military commitment). I think the source of the incompetence is that they sort of believed their own propaganda, especially that Ukraine's government is illegitimate to its people.
So obviously Putin made a mistake, but is he too stupid to course correct? I don't know what Vladimir Putin will do, but if I were Putin, I would try to just hold on to a token amount of Russian occupied land in the east Ukraine, maybe after removing the parliament and president in Kyiv, withdraw, and claim victory and that I have stopped a fake genocide, leaving the Ukranians to rebuild their government (which Russia can't stop).
By the way, if you have the stomach for it, you should read the Russian propaganda. It's truly fascinating, and I think it explains their incompetent behavior. In the sense that they believe the Ukranians were in some way complicit in mass murders in the Donbass and that Russia "owns" Ukraine and this better explains their behavior in many ways. Also, it appears that Putin is doing well in terms of approval and this seems to indicate that Russians truly have a separate narrative and reality (strong propaganda). Maybe Russian and American psychiatrists use different substances because they really do live in separate realities after all. :P
I will admit to getting this extremely wrong on the "will Russia invade", giving it about a 5% chance. My assumption was that it was obvious that an invasion would go badly and have huge downsides (military quagmire, crippling sanctions) and basically no upside (upside is... Control of strategic resources/industry? Not very useful if you're sanctioned. Territory? Not useful if you're getting bled dry trying to hold it. Intimidating the West? Invading a little country and doing poorly doesn't exactly scream I'm tough, and on top of that, your military force is being progressively degraded).
Second part the jury is still out. I still think there is no justification for this war on the realpolitik cost/benefit front. It's going to be almost all cost and little to no benefit.
I am aware. Not the best term to use. "Weaker neighbour" was more what I meant.
Little used not necessarily to mean small in population or area, but more little in the sense of supposed military capacity, economy, etc. Iraq had like "the fifth biggest army in the world" or something, but that didn't do them any good.
Is there anyone who was broadly right about the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian resistance, and some third thing in recent military events? Afghanistan? Myanmar? That person would be worth paying attention to.
Actually, we did. NATO – and especially US intelligence – was remarkably effective at predicting what Putin had planned before he did it, down to predicting the day the assault would begin. NATO intelligence agencies also warned in advance that Russian forces would stage false-flag attacks and shell Ukrainian positions trying to provoke Ukrainians into shooting back and the Russians did exactly that. Frankly, especially after the intelligence failures of the Global War on Terror, I was shocked by the degree to which US intelligence mostly nailed this; it goes to show that while organizations created to spy on the Soviet Union struggle to spy on terrorists and the Taliban, they are very good at spying on the Russian Federation. Frankly the entire thing has been a fairly stunning US intelligence coup and there are a whole lot of analysts and more than a few world leaders who woke up on the 24th owing US intelligence an apology.
So while the outbreak of hostilities has likely come as a surprise to a great many people for whom this issue has only recently gotten full attention, for specialists paying attention it has been clear something was coming for a while and the closer we’ve gotten the clearer it has been that it would be big. My first “this is going to be really bad” tweet thread was January 25th; I am not a Ukraine expert and in many ways was late to those realizations."
There are easily hundreds, and probably thousands, of people in Russia with useful information who are feeding it to intelligence agencies. It's not a hard country to spy on.
I think this is too critical of anti-interventionists and too favorable to the centrist-establishment people. It misses the larger point that anti-interventionists were correct that NATO expansion and supporting the coup in Ukraine were likely to lead to conflict with Russia. Not sure centrists made predictions on whether it would, but it’s a pretty clearly bad outcome as at least a partial result of their actions
The part where revolutionaries forced the president of Ukraine to flee the country, forced the parliament to (probably illegally) oust him, and put a new government in place which (again, probably illegally) dissolved that same parliament and called for new votes in the middle of a civil war in which large parts of the country, in particular those who had supported the ousted president where fighting was still ongoing, couldn't effectively vote?
> forced the parliament to (probably illegally) oust him, and put a new government in place which (again, probably illegally) dissolved that same parliament
OK, I agree that using "coup" can be a good description, I was unaware that it can be used also to cases where overthrow is not done by military
>One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening. Lots of people failed based on their political precommittments, but I suspect the successes were also based on political precommitments.
Strong agree. And as a result I'd give less kudos than Scott does for the supposed accuracy of the pundit's predictions. There's something a little Gell-Mann amnesiac about that.
What gets me is that the USG was so publicly confident about this and was willing to provide an insane amount of evidence to back up their confidence, and people still discounted it. Even after events began breaking in ways that backed up the USG's prediction, people still discounted it. Well, not discounted it: they immediately assumed that anything the government said had a secret ulterior motive.
I can't describe how sickened it made me that a bunch of "really smart" people all looked at a pile of evidence that Russia wanted to invade Ukraine and came to the conclusion that the USG wanted to go to war with Russia. I really think our intellectual class has reached toxic levels of cynicism.
You're claiming that the amount of evidence that the USG was willing to provide backing up their claims that Russia was intending to invade is like unto it being cool today backing up the claim of global warming being false. I don't think this is true, I think that these are fundamentally different tiers of evidence.
In my opinion, this is the same fundamental miscalculation that explains why so many pundits were wrong.
No, I am not claiming that the evidence is similar; I'm claiming that your claim is similar. It is not "The evidence is identical to the day being cool", it is "The USG making a claim and offering evidence is identical to the day being cool".
Because the USG routinely puts up large amounts of evidence on all sorts of claims, true or false. The last two years have been full of exactly this kind of behavior; here's a list of medical studies that prove that the current recommendations of not wearing masks is correct. Oh, here's the list of medical studies that prove that the current recommendations of wearing masks is correct. Oh, here's the list of studies ...
The fact that the USG is offering evidence is not, in itself, evidence; it routinely offers evidence. It does so in congress, in court, and in PR campaigns. And again, the cynicism didn't come out of nowhere.
If the USG is starting a new era of making claims that are true, great! But you don't get the benefit of the doubt the first day you make a true claim after decades of mixing lies and truth; you have to actually establish a reputation as an entity that can be trusted.
I'm not saying that the cynicism is entirely illogical or undeserved, I'm saying that it has reached such a peak that it is actively degrading people's ability to process information.
When someone discounts evidence, not because of its potential credibility or relation to other evidence, but merely because its tainted due to its association with the USG, they're operating with unhealthy levels of cynicism.
Imagine the existence of a hostile intelligence with access to a vast amount of information, sufficient to support or oppose any cause. It has a reputation for providing information which support any cause which it intends to further.
You believe that a cause that it intends to further is wrong. Should you update your beliefs based on information provided by that hostile intelligence?
Remember, regardless of whether or not the cause is correct, information will be provided which suggests the cause is correct, and information will not be provided which suggests the cause is incorrect. Or perhaps it uses a mixture of information - the point being that the existence of information which supports the cause is not dependent on the cause being correct.
I agree with you and I did in fact discount the US evidence, or believed it to be over blown. That said I think the Biden Admin is a fairly sober administration, and had restrained itself from provocative statements ( like dismissing the no fly zone), so maybe my priors needed re-evaluation.
I would grade these a bit differently, because in general I find the specifics of the predictions less interesting than the context and explanation that the pundits give for their predictions. I know this flies in the face of the ostensible purpose of holding pundits "accountable," but in truth I don't expect anyone to have a good track record over the long term. I want to have a clear sense of what they believe will happen and why, and then I want to understand after the fact why they were right or wrong. Whether they were right or wrong is less interesting.
So, for example, Edward Luttwak's predictions look pretty good to me. He provided some actually relevant expertise that bears on the current situation. Richard Hanania's look bad, because predicting military outcomes on fertility rates strikes me as obviously dubious. Tyler Cowen's predictions seem basically useless: he's doing some handwaving psychoanalysis of Putin, and although Cowen is an extremely smart guy, I don't think he has any special insight here.
Etc. I feel the same way about Scott's predictions. His accuracy level just isn't very interesting (to me). What is interesting is his reasoning.
How does Michael Tracey's prediction align with Scott's "Bounded Distrust"? Scott says "trust the experts" (with some caveats). Tracey trusts the Ukrainian President and intelligence, and comes out to be wrong. How could Tracey have improved his predictions?
The lesson I've learned from this, having been skeptical of the US intelligence community myself based on their past behavior, is, "A boy known to cry wolf, does not disprove the existence of wolves."
"My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance."
This is it. Luttwak was "right" - conquering all of Ukraine is really hard, and a Russian leader who didn't want to suffer a lot of losses and perhaps fail wouldn't do it.
Lots of people got the geopolitics/strategy right, (including, it seems, lots of Russians!) but not the leadership psychology.
Hanania's grade should be lower just because the internal logic of it is completely asinine. A war would have to drag out for literal *decades* before low birth rates had a significant amount of manpower. That would only be a serious strategic factor if the conflict kept going for 20 years or more.
According to what Scott says later in his post, Hanania's point was less the effect on manpower and more Hanania's general belief that a low birth rate is a sign of moral decline and civilizational decadence. Which doesn't make it necessarily less asinine.
"Even setting aside the geography of the country, there is no instance I’m aware of in which a country or region with a total fertility rate below replacement has fought a serious insurgency. Once you’re the kind of people who can’t inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal."
That's a very Western notion, and a very upper middle-class, weak sense of patriotism/nationalism because waving the flag is for rubes, we're all cosmopolitans now, haven't been in a real shooting war on our own territory since donkey's years view.
You may not have kids in peace time because you can't afford them, or you don't want to have six kids like your mom did, or it would interfere with your new upwardly mobile lifestyle. But when it's wartime and the tanks are heading towards your city? Maybe you have that sense of a connection to the country and the people around you that is in your bones because you're only three generations from the peasants trudging behind the ox-plough and the grannies telling callow young invading troops to put sunflower seeds in your pocket so that when you die, flowers will grow up out of your graves in our soil.
Even the silly entry for Eurovision has taken on more serious overtones:
"The band's lead singer Oleh Psiuk told Sky News: "This song which we have created [Stefania], it's the anthem for Ukraine and everybody is singing it. Originally, the song was dedicated to my mother, and now it's the song for all mothers."
When asked about reports that civilians have been urged to take defence into their own hands, he confirms that is true.
"My girlfriend today was making the Molotov cocktails, and it was the first time she was doing like something like that. It's very scary for all of us."
He too has taken action to defend his country and has set aside his life as a musician to do what he can to help.
"My day-to-day life has changed. Now I've been working with a volunteer team. We are helping people to go far away from Ukraine, to find food for those who need it."
It's also an incredibly transparent example of the selection effect - insurgencies, successful or not, only really happen in places with high TFR, because high TFR is strongly correlated with low development, which is strongly correlated with frequent regime change.
Few buildings destroyed and 3000 dead put USA into war frenzy (which, frankly - were small losses compared to what happened in history).
Even place with significant moral decline and decadence an outright invasion of entire country, with aggressor denying existence of your nation and claiming nonexisting nazi government may galvanize support.
Hanania arguing with "moral decline and civilizational decadence" is really strange.
But there is a similar theory that has at least a grain of truth to it. I don't think the effect occurs during the war (running out of manpower) but before. Young men are just much more aggressive and willing to fight than any other demographic group. Having more of them makes a country more willing to fight a war.
I think people are generally downplaying the strategic purposes of the IC's invasion date prediction. As soon as they predicted (and disclosed to news outlets) an invasion date, the probability that an invasion would occur at that date was decreased. Understandably, Putin wouldn't want it to look like US Intelligence knew everything he was going to do. This also gave Putin an out: if he were to drop the invasion, US Intelligence would look silly. While that sadly didn't happen, I'd still put it at a decent chance that the public prediction delayed the invasion a bit.
The other thing it accomplished is that it made all the subsequent manufactured pretexts for war more obvious. The US thus got to set the narrative around the invasion before Russia could. Then, when Russia did invade, the US narrative was immediately validated. Any moral ambiguity around the invasion was destroyed and the western world was able to scale up sanctions against Russia and funding for Ukraine at an unprecedented rate.
What's the lesson we can all learn? Trust experts, but trust only the experts who have demonstrated expertise in that field. Ukrainian intelligence is not the expert in determining whether Russia will attack Ukraine; the Russian military-government complex is (actually, Putin is. but he's hard to get a hold of). That is why Tracey was wrong.
Maybe the actual lesson is that we should always take people's biases into account. The Ukrainian government was unlikely to accept that Russia would attack because it knew that Ukraine was doomed if it was attacked. Keeping an account of our sources' biases can help us remove the undue influence of their opinions on our predictions.
In the section on Cowen, Scott seems to be going out of his way to avoid calling out for blatantly misrepresenting his previous beliefs/predictions. Would he have done the same for everyone?
>Still, I can understand why people who only caught snippets of certain tweets thought I was a 100% incorrigible “invasion denier.” I never denied the possibility of an invasion — again, I always made a point to explicitly allow for that very possibility.
The whole point of adding a disclaimer "maybe not X" is to indicate that you aren't so certain about X. In order for the disclaimer to be forceful enough for people to pay any attention to it, it also has to be forceful enough that it undercuts your apparent certainty in claiming X.
In other words, you can't have it both ways. You can't expect that if X comes true you'll be hailed as a prophet and still have a disclaimer just in case X doesn't come true.
Wow that is a lot of writing to take in. The last thing I saw predicting on any such scale was the pandemic and tikes predictions were pretty bad . But I sure there are AI super computers working on every data point where it doesn’t come to convincing the public
The Manifold market you’re thinking of was, AFAICT, the only market that asked whether an invasion would happen *by the end of February.* All other markets were longer-term than that. I think that at least partially explains why it seems to have performed so poorly.
One thing I wish you would pay more attention to is the Prediction Market Lizard Constant. You could make a market for 1+1=2 and still get only 90% true because of the inefficiencies of prediction markets. Seeing "Russia will invade another country at 12%" is barely above the Lizard constant, so it doesn't seem worth much notice.
Great post. Personally, I feel very conflicted here. This invasion is an enormous human tragedy and a complete waste and everything about it is profoundly depressing.
At the same time, I've participated regularly in related Metaculus prediction markets and various online and in-person discussions and "enjoyed" that process on some level. And I'm proud to have correctly predicted the invasion - I was above the Metaculus consensus since December 23rd, often by 20-30%. I was at 69% or above since January 19th and I made my final move up from 96% to 99% on February 21st. I also thought Richard Hanania's TFR-based argument against a Ukrainian insurgency was quite weak and underdeveloped, and told him so in the Substack comments. (Along with a couple of other people) My only real regret is not thinking past the invasion and actually doing the work to publicly predict whether there would be a serious insurgency. I think there were plenty of clues to that effect, such as the Ukrainian grassroots resistance in 2014, the large number of Ukrainian veterans from the ongoing war, and Lyman Stone's analysis of polling on willingness to fight for your country. But I didn't bother pursuing it further because I'm not a professional pundit and there wasn't a Metaculus question on it.
Lesson learned - even it just means private Metaculus questions or signing up for a Mantic account, to really practice my forecasting skills I should be thinking a step or two ahead, not just on what question I'm answering at the moment.
Considering the Arsenal available and considering what we have seen in Syria , Iraq, Palestine , and such , the use of ballistic weapons has been somewhat mild . It seems that it is a demonstration of that a negotiator is willing to go to distance .
“…the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia. Unfortunately, the relevant Less Wrong post here is Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, and the relevant ACX post is Heuristics That Almost Always Work, so they failed.”
I agree about the recent embarrassing Russia-related paranoia—and agree the posts you mention are relevant here.
To me what sticks out is that Putin is behaving in a way that most people wouldn’t have predicted. Sure, there’s the super-easy “He’s a madman, I tell you!” hypothesis, but that’s not really very convincing or satisfying. He’s shown no signs of complete irrationality before now.
So my best guess is he knows (or thinks he knows) something we don’t, which prompted him to act. It could be he was fooled by intelligence (his or ours) as well— or he might really know something we don’t (just as, say, that cretin Trump was briefed on the lab-leak hypothesis right away, when we rubes were all reading in Nature and the Lancet that such a thing was crazy-talk).
It’s hard to judge the pundits and predictors when they, like the rest of us, don’t have the facts that Putin has (or thinks he has). No wonder people make predictions at chance levels, when they don’t have the relevant information.
"Oh, and if Clay says there’s going to be a war, head for the bunkers."
The Metaculus question "Second US Civil War Before 2031" ( https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war-before-2031/ ) currently gives the chance as 3%. If we start just after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which marks the start of British control of the American colonies, and ask, "In what percentage of years was America not in a civil war, but would be within 8 years?", noting that it was in civil war in at least 1775-1783, 1794, and 1861-1865, we come up with a base rate of 26 / 260, or 10%. Either Metaculus has its head in the sand, or America is presently experiencing a period of unusual national unity.
I think the 1775 and 1794 wars are outside the reference class - America didn't exist as a country with a tradition of *not* having civil wars at that point. And the range you're using necessarily stops at a civil war year (ie American independence) - plausibly it should stop at Plymouth Rock or something.
Excluding revolutionary wars means excluding civil wars in which the separatists win--that is, excluding perhaps half of all civil wars, in which case we should multiply our result by 2 (and here end up with about the same number).
I didn't start at the American revolution anyway; I started at the treaty of Paris, which gave the British control of most of the colonies, and is, I think, the most-reasonable unbiased choice. You could argue for the Louisiana Purchase, but I think that would be a little silly since what was transferred was almost all ungovernable territory, making not very much political difference at the time.
If I'd extended it further backwards, to Plymouth Rock, it would have been difficult to define "civil war". Do we count when the British seized New Amsterdam, or when Connecticut went to war with New York City (IIRC; I'm fuzzy on this history)? But there was a lot of war going back to Plymouth rock. The base rate for "war", if not for "civil war", would have been higher.
Also, the 1794 Appalachian rebellion was purely an American civil war. Perhaps it should be excluded for having very few casualties. I may be biased because I live in Western Pennsylvania, the region Washington invaded. I didn't count the battles fought over the admissions of states as free states or slave states as civil war, nor (more egregiously) wars with Native Americans, nor the Mexican-American War, in which we captured the southwestern states.
Plus, even if you exclude both the Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion, you *still* get a base rate a bit higher than the Metaculus median of 3%.
> I think the 1775 and 1794 wars are outside the reference class - America didn't exist as a country
I was going to make this point rather less politely, so kudos for making it politely.
I do want to expand this to a general principle, but inspired by your example I will just gently suggest that:
Any time a question is asked whether a "Second X" will occur in the next eight years, if you believe that a Second X and a Third X both already occurred hundreds of years before the question was asked, then you are probably not working off of the same definition of X as the people asking the question, and they are the ones who will decide whether you get paid.
I don't think that argument applies. We don't call the American Revolution a "civil war" because there was a change of government. But the phenomenon of interest at the very least includes any time when a civil war broke out within the population being investigated; and the American Revolution began as a civil war. Excluding it, as I wrote above, would exclude all civil wars won by separatists, thereby dramatically biasing the results to show civil war as being less likely than it really is. Excluding it, and then starting the timeline immediately after it, is an even worse bias.
Would it be fair to say that you believe that, if a US Civil War occurs in the next eight years, if will be the Fourth US Civil War?
Maybe you're right! Maybe your analysis is better, in some objective sense, than that of the people asking the question. But the people asking the question, who decide whether you get paid, put the phrase "Second US Civil War" in the question itself. Given that you disagree with them about the past, it seems likely that, in the future, when the current-future becomes the past, you will disagree with them about what happened in it.
Even if you're "right" in some sense, that's not a matter of prediction at that point.
"Would it be fair to say that you believe that, if an American Civil War occurs in the next eight years, if will be the Fourth American Civil War?"
No. We would not call it the 4th American Civil War, because, as I've already explicitly written twice, we do not call the American Revolution a civil war here in America. But, as I've also already explained twice, the phenomenon we're asking about is the breakout of civil war; and the American Revolution was a breakout of civil war, so we must count it in our base rate, or else find some other unbiased beginning to our time period (which is most-definitely NOT the period immediately after a civil war we decided not to count).
That is: The phrase "civil war" is not an eternal Platonic form which must always mean the same thing. When naming civil wars for common usage by Americans, we don't count the revolution as a civil war. When asking about how likely it is that a civil war will break out in America, we should; we don't elevate naming conventions above the fact that a civil war occurred.
Or maybe national unity isn't the sole, or even primary, determinant of probability of civil war (e.g., technology matters a lot). I'd personally put the probability of a civil war trivially close to 0% for the next 10 years. We also are probably more 'unified' than you think in the ways that matter for this question. Despite the much talked about 'deterioration in public discourse' there's less political violence today than their was 50 years ago.
When the news of the build up was coming I often argued that Putin had to wait till after the Olympics to invade so as not to piss off China. Putin began the invasion essentially the next day. What a shock. It was always clear he was going to do it. The Putin/Ukraine "liberal tears" trolling idea was cute but dumb.
Too bad I'm poor and couldn't invest in any prediction markets.
Because I've been doing a lot of research on military logistics for the strategy game I'm developing it seemed to me insane that Putin would do all the stuff he did and then not invade. We defeated the Soviet Union because they were poor and Russia is even poorer. The time and political capital and wealth expended in the build up made it pretty likely they'd invade. You just don't do that for nothing.
>When the news of the build up was coming I often argued that Putin had to wait till after the Olympics to invade so as not to piss off China. Putin began the invasion essentially the next day.
Russia scheduling an invasion of a European country around China's Olympic TV schedule. What a crazy world.
Can you tell us about what you found about logistics, how your game is going, and what your thoughts are about the logistics of the invasion are? I'm curious, as far as I can tell this invasion is such an obviously bad idea logistics-wise that I'm wondering what could possibly make it look like a good idea.
> But it’s from February 21. On February 21, Putin announced he was sending “peacekeepers” in to Donbass. Most sources say the invasion of Ukraine started February 24.
Indeed, I wasn't sure how worried to be about the increasing reported probability of "invasion" because I wasn't sure if it would be an invasion of Donbas (East Ukraine) or a full-scale invasion.
It's only been a week, how are people already getting the timeline wrong?
The Russian "peacekeepers" in Donbas would be considered an invasion for prediction market rewards, that's why they correct.
However, the actual Russian assault that involved confronting Ukrainian forces in the rest of the country began at Feb 24th, 5am, Eastern European Standard Time. This is Feb 23rd 7pm PDT (west coast US). That's when people colloquially consider it an invasion, even though technically Donbas is still Ukraine and was being invaded by Russian "peacekeepers" earlier.
What people did and said on Feb. 22 can't be described as "wrong about the timeline". They didn't know a full-scale invasion was imminent, though for the superforecasters I imagine it must have seemed likely.
when judging ukrainian leaders who, pre-war, pooh-poohed the imminence of war, i think it’s important to remember accurate prediction was not their goal. instead, their goal was likely to avoid war.
one could argue such leaders felt western escalation of rhetoric increased the likelihood of war, as it further committed the prestige of putin’s regime to extracting concessions from the ukraine or the west.
furthermore, it’s quite possible even modestly decreasing the probability of war had a greater expected utility than increasing preparedness for war. and so, such leaders might even have been rational to ball up their ears, blot out the song of siren’s accurately crying out warnings of war, and continue to row with all they had to the quiet shore.
i feel the essay completely missed this dimensionality of decision making. and i suspect this dimension is applicable to many domains beyond the present one.
This entire piece...nothing you're saying is exactly wrong, but this entire approach that's implicit in statements like "One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening."...you're treating this like there's a volcano, and the queen asks all the vulcanologists to predict whether the volcano will erupt. Or they estimate a probability that the volcano will erupt. Or whatever.
But Vladimir Putin is not a volcano. Whatever your opinion on his rationality, last time I checked, the man is literate. And rumor has it he even speaks English.
This afterthought comment gets closer to the mark:
> 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.
...but this still seems to me to be missing the point. Vladimir Putin wasn't playing some kind of prank, giggling to himself about how the West thought he was going to attack when he totally wasn't.
Consider a matching-pennies game. Two players turn over pennies. If the pennies match, then the Queen wins. If the pennies don't match, then Putin wins. (This metaphor is getting a little mixed. The Queen is a vague gestalt of everyone who might do something, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.)
Putin has a variety of attacks he wants to make. He attacked Georgia. He attacked Crimea. He attacked Donetsk and Luhansk. In each case, he absolutely does not want to meet stiff resistance. He *didn't* attack lots of other places. He didn't attack anywhere he expected stiff resistance. What Putin wants, in every case, is a quick victory that he can present as a fait accompli. If the Queen bets heads, if the Queen moves resources into his way, then even if he could win the war in question eventually, he's still losing. Whenever Putin thought that the Queen was betting heads, he *didn't* play heads.
The Queen has a bunch of vulcanologists advising her on whether Putin is going to play heads. Some vulcanologists call other vulcanologists "hysterical" for suggesting that Putin might play heads. Some vulcanologists give specific probabilities to whether Putin will play heads. Some vulcanologists have "better optics, but worse rationality". Some vulcanologists accuse other vulcanologists of racist disinformation.
But...all of this is happening *in front of Putin*.
There is a direct, causal, inverse relationship between vulcanologists predicting that Putin will play heads, with that prediction being *believed* by the Queen...and Putin *actually* playing heads.
In this particular instance, the United States government was totally right, and nobody took them seriously!
...but if people *had* taken them seriously, then Putin *wouldn't* have pulled the trigger. They would have been "proven wrong".
Stephen Bosch touches on this from the other side:
> It's an assumption that [Zelenskyy saying Putin *wouldn't* pull the trigger] was a miscalculation. What was the alternative? Telling everyone an invasion was imminent? *How long can you keep that up?* [Emphasis mine.]
Vladimir Putin didn't move perishable blood supplies to the border of Ukraine because sometimes he gets bored and likes to ship blood around for giggles. He also didn't make an oath to an evil god to order troops forward. He was sniffing the wind to see what the reaction would be.
Am I saying that Putin might have gotten all his troops into position, and then, at the last minute, pulled them back and sent them home without doing anything? YES! Of course! If he wasn't willing to do that kind of thing occasionally, then the Queen would know whether to bet heads, and that's the last thing he wants. A few wasteful troop movements here or there are *cheap*.
...but no, he almost certainly wouldn't literally just send them home without doing anything. Being *somewhat* wasteful is just the cost of being unpredictable, but there's no point being *unnecessarily* wasteful. More likely he would have simply scaled back his objectives and diverted the troops to some safer use. I'm not a general, so I don't know what other smart moves may have been available, but he could have sent the troops into Donetsk and Luhansk, where he already had troops, which presumably would have counted as "lol the USG said Putin would attack and he totally didn't" from the standpoint of vulcanologists looking to score points.
You're treating this like there's some secret, like whether the volcano was going to erupt was an objective fact that some people were correct about and some people were incorrect about, and the only question is whether their correctness is repeatable rationality or unrepeatable bias. But that's not how this works. If you got a TIME MACHINE and carried a damning newspaper headline back in time and proved everyone that Putin was absolutely 100% going to pull the trigger...then he wouldn't have pulled the trigger...so you would have been wrong. You would have had perfect foreknowledge courtesy of a time machine...and you would have been wrong.
The "predictions" that you're talking about are directly causing (or in this case, inversely causing) the event that they're "predicting".
(Predicting the outcome of a war once launched is, of course, a whole other kettle of fish.)
In fact, United States intelligence *was* "proven wrong". United States intelligence said that Russian intelligence was planning to stage a fabricated attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence personnel against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people, to justify an incursion into Ukraine. Complete with options to use a variety of staged videos featuring NATO-supplied armaments.
After that accusation was made, they were "proven wrong" when Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do any such thing. And thus, "The delusional nature of this kind of fabrication, and there are more and more of them every day, is obvious to any more or less experienced political scientist."
They also said that Putin was sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage a provocation that would serve as a pretext for an invasion. They were again "proven wrong" when, after they made that prediction, Putin did not bother with that as a pretext. Because of course he didn't. Because the prediction was made, and believed by enough people to make it not in his interest to do that.
"In fact, United States intelligence *was* "proven wrong". United States intelligence said that Russian intelligence was planning to stage a fabricated attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence personnel against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people, to justify an incursion into Ukraine. Complete with options to use a variety of staged videos featuring NATO-supplied armaments.
After that accusation was made, they were "proven wrong" when Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do any such thing."
You're actually wrong on this. Western intelligence was intensely surveying for pretexts, found a variety of them (all the way to staging a shelling of a Russian border town), inoculated the population against them by broadcasting the ruses, and so in consequence the Russian state had no reasonable pretext anymore, best they tried, and went in anyway. "Ukraine is trying to get nuclear weapons. Ukraine (with 150k troops on their border, about to be invaded) suddenly decides now is a good time to start indiscriminately bombing Donbas. For strategic reasons, they also needed to make the invasion happen sooner then later, and couldn't keep delaying until Spring for a reasonable pretext.
I'm not sure what you mean? Someone "predicted" that Russian intelligence would stage a fabricated attack. Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do that. (Do you think that either of those two statements is wrong?) The prediction was proven wrong.
You might say that prediction is the wrong frame to look at all of this, because there's a direct causal relationship between the predictions and the events, which, uh, yeah, that's my entire point.
There were several events before the war that were widely called false flags by western sources - the two I remember were an IED found in Donetsk and a Russian border facility getting hit by artillery. While you obviously can't prove that it was done by Russian intelligence, they seemed fairly suspicious for two reasons: First because they were small events, as if someone wanted to generate a causus belli with as little destruction as possible, and second because the idea that Ukraine decided to wait until the moment when there were 190,000 Russians on their border to launch an assault on the separatists was just absurd.
Why hurry with the grades? I think if someone (like Karlin) made a prediction for what happens within "<week", you should wait 6 full days before grading. (Yes, of course it's very hard for this prediction to come true now.)
"Maybe we should trust it more on Great Power conflict than on tinpot dictator stuff? [etc]"
With respect to Ukraine (and this evaluation article), we are now in an n=1 situation. If you add something the Iraq war, we have n=2. Trying to make up reasons for the difference based on n=2 is not useful.
I think a possible source of error in many of those analyses is how they unquestioningly presume that
1. Putin did not expect Ukrainian resistance.
2. Putin just wanted a quick and painless addition to his fief, and will pull out as soon as it turns out to be neither quick nor painless.
3. Even if Putin is prepared to persist on the military front, his oligarch cronies will force him to pull out after the sanctions have cratered enough of their assets.
Of those, I think the most mistakenly held belief might be #2. Consider the possibility that Putin does not approach this as a leisurely addition of a fief, but as an existential matter. Some westerners might be miscalibrated about this by having ingested the west's own propaganda that NATO is a "purely defensive alliance", and presuming that Putin must therefore have ingested it too. Putin does not give off the impression that he did. (maybe because he came to office as NATO was bombing Serbia, a Russian ally, bombing it all the way until NATO achieved its goal of splitting Kosovo off Serbia and installing a huge-ass US military base in Kosovo - huge by local standards, I mean? or maybe because he then continued watching NATO's other engagements, all the while being aware of NATO's 1990 promise to halt expansion?) Anyway, if there is one point that Putin couldn't be more clear in communicating, it is: "No NATO. No buts. No discussion. If you don't agree, we will have as much war as you want to have, right here right now".
Under that lens, calculating that Putin will be put off by the invasion not being quick and painless, means miscalculating.
Bringing us to #1, i.e. that Putin didn't *expect* resistance. Putin is perfectly aware of the Ukrainian overtly-neo-Nazi military units which are hellbent on fighting Russians, and *have* been fighting them since 2014. Putin indeed mentioned them in his address. He must also be aware of the significantly larger contingents of patriotic-but-not-Nazi Ukrainians who are firm about (if not quite as hellbent) fighting the Russian invasion. (the gradient of this firmness increasing westwards). Thus, presuming that he didn't expect resistance is also a prediction miscalculation.
As for #3, I do not imagine any of the oligarch cronies smiling at this moment. Nor do I imagine them being moved by anything except money. But that's part of the point: I can even less imagine them welcoming the idea of Russia falling to the West -- which will usher in a boatload of foreign players and foreign interests who will divvy up the pie in a new deal by the newly installed regime, few of those being interested in joining up with the incumbents. As opposed to holding out for a Russian win, which will then let them recoup their wealth gradually under the old status quo.
I.e. oligarchs *are* incentivized to push for a rapid ending of hostilities and resuming of business, but they are *also* incentivized to ensure the long-term survival of the current regime - which might collapse rapidly *from within Russia* if Putin returns as a loser from this war that he started. While I am less confident on this, I still think that "oligarchs forcing Putin to pull out" is not a slam dunk.
Disclaimer: it turned out I'm a D- predictor at best. I thought Putin would not engage beyond the majority-Russian areas, something that he could do with almost no casualties on any side, and which would have resulted in fewer international repercussions while still giving him (probably) sufficient leverage to put NATO off the table. So I'm not making any further predictions, just correcting what appear to me as underlying miscalculations in other predictions.
I think the people who understimated the Ukrainian success to date in holding off the Russians (including very likely Putin himself, and his generals) were right, and what has actually transpired is a surprise. I think it originates from the little-known massive sale of Javelins to the Ukrainians in 2018 by the last Administration -- which is surprising on its face, since Trump personally didn't seem to give a shit about the Ukrainians in their long-running struggle with Russia -- and the well-known Russian preference for armor and lack of sophistication about portable anti-armor and anti-aircraft weapons. It's what fucked them over in Afghanistan, and it's a problem for them now. The only part of this that is a genuine surprise, I think, is that the Ukrainians had the sophistication and grit to use those weapons effectively. Personally I think they're getting very good intelligence from the Biden Administration and perhaps this has stiffened their resolve.
I agree the outcome has become much harder to predict, though. I would guess Putin counted on a quick decapitation, a la 1968 Prague, but now that this has become difficult it will be extremely difficult to climb down. It's hard to see him accepting the kind of humiliating abandonment of the field in the face of an inferior enemy that the Americans have accepted in Afghanistan. So what will allow him to save sufficient face at home? A recognition of the breakaway eastern provinces seems inadequate for the cost. On the other hand, what would the Ukrainians accept? Surely not the arrest and execution of Zelensky. Even the recognition of the eastern provinces seems unlikely.
So from the point of view of Putin and the Ukrainians, since there's no plausible compromise, I'd predict the war drags on and gets much, much bloodier, with an eventual Ukrainian surrender and messy ugly occupation. But then the 3rd factor comes into focus, the attitude of the Russian people and military establishment itself. Would they put up with a longer and far more expensive war, particularly if the EU and US stand firm in their economic attack? Not entirely clear. And *will* the EU stand firm, when they burn so much Russian gas? Good question indeed.
From Ukraine: Formal recognition of the Crimean annexation and a commitment not to pursue weapons of mass destruction is, whilst underwhelming, possible to be spun as a victory at home.
I'd be surprised if that feel enough for Putin. I think he will want at least formal recognition of Crimean annexation and separatist republic+a never join NATO treaty before even engaging in serious negociation.
I can imagine Ukraine accepting a referendum in the eastern provinces, under neutral auspices, and agreeing that if they vote for independence they can have it.
"Someone suggested that the intelligence community might suck at the sort of small-state terrorism work it’s been asked to do the past few decades, but that “infiltrating Russia” is kind of its bread and butter and a big part of its institutional DNA."
I think this is the difference between secrets and mysteries. Putin knew that he was going to invade Ukraine, but he didn't want other people to know that. He tried to keep that fact secret, but he had to tell some people if they were to make the preparations. So there was always the chance that the CIA (or whoever) would discover that secret.
But no one knew whether, for example, the Afghan National Army would collapse last year. The CIA could not discover that secret, because it was not information known secretly to anyone in the first place. Whether the ANA would collapse was a mystery, not a secret to be discovered by an espionage agency.
I'm curious what are the qualifications for being a "pundit". Seems to me it's a self-styled designation of a bunch of middle-aged white guys with opinions. They all seem to be intelligent enough, but why are their opinions important enough to pay attention to? What is their "skin in the game"? They don't seem to face any real consequences for being right or wrong, and they have precious little influence on actual events.
Markets are volatile since the Ukraine invasion. Where do you guys think a rationalist should invest money right now? Are there opportunities to be found?
VTS and chill. Trying to chase opportunities based on the latest news cycle is rarely worth it. You'll probably lose money relative to buy-and-hold, and you'll definitely feel like a fool when you do.
Set up a monthly automatic payment into a low-cost broad-based passive equity tracker, preferably into whatever your country has set up to be tax-advantages. That is, the same advice I would ever give, assuming you're not looking to retire.
Also for the avoidance of doubt nothing I say is tax, investing, accounting, relationship, or any other kind of advice.
If we're talking about predicting Ukraine, I would like to register a prediction of my own. I'm no expert on warmaking, foreign relations, politicians' psychology, nations' sociology, etc., and I can't say my assumptions have been always on point. Still, the things I did get right (most of which I cannot prove I did, hence this post to secure bragging rights in case things do continue to conform to my current priors) make me believe I have stumbled on an unique combination of (admittedly simple) insights that nobody else seems to be having. Here's the full story:
1. During the Afghanistan withdrawal, I stumbled (on r/themotte, I believe) on the claim that Biden is reliably, ideologically anti-war. This was later corroborated by reports of him more or less banning the US miliary from performing artillery and drone strikes. So, unlike most leftists, once the Ukraine conflict started, I've been assuming his administration to be making a good-will attempt at preventing it, and therefore the intelligence reports they published to be accurate, with the larger propaganda offensive aimed solely at exposing Russia's plans and intimidating them into calling them off. This has proven to be spectacularly correct.
2. I have also correctly assumed that Putin cannot act alone. One thing that really caught my eye was China publicly and explicitly asked Russia not to invade during their upcoming important vanity event. It made me confidently predict to my peers that the Olympics won't be interrupted, but in retrospect the period of calm that did transpire should have also alerted me to the important corollary that, all along, they knew and admitted what's coming right after them. (Obviously, China does not support Russia, and it's even less likely to support it now that the rest of the world united against it, but it does continue to politely stand aside, as it, assumedly, promised Putin to do.) I've had all the right info, I just wishful-thought it away.
3. Once the fighting started, I had little hope for any but the most token of sanctions to materialize. Europe needs that gas, I assumed. How wrong I was...
4. As a Polish citizen witnessing a large wave of post-2014 Ukrainian migration, I knew something that the Russians (and the likes of Richard Hanania) apparently missed. With each passing year, Ukrainians were becoming more and more aligned with the west. The millions of them who live and work in Poland and other Central European states kept sending back home stories of a better life - one which is apparently possible even in a country extremely similar to their own, separated only by 30 years of recent history. Surely, Ukrainians had little respect for their own failing government and its oligarchic caste of rulers, but their recent electoral choices (Klitschko! Zelenskyy!) should have made it perfectly clear they're symbolically pining for change and hope. (I was still worried the Ukrainian society will fold, Crimea-style, under intimidation by sheer superior military power, but that fear was unfounded. Hope isn't taken away so easily.)
So, my predictions are:
1. Russian invasion has already failed. The Ukrainians will continue to resist (99%). Not push back (90% on Ukraine never being able to go on a military counteroffensive or preventing subsequent territorial losses), Russia still has superior military power. But tie it up in a bloody, prolonged struggle against a motivated army and unrelenting underground resistance. Russia will not invade another country (90%), in large part because it will not be able to open another front while Ukraine keeps draining its blood and resources.
2. Putin has also lost the diplomatic and propaganda fight. The whole world turned against him, his own country slowly turns against him, and nobody is willing to come to his rescue. (So far, that's not a prediction, it's a statement of fact.) Russia will continue to be further and further isolated until it gets rid of him, one way of another, most likely sacrificing him to give itself a way out of the war and economic collapse (80%). After he's ousted, Russia's peace offer will be accepted, with only minor concessions (70%). Conditional on the above, Crimea and Donbass return to Ukraine, with no other border changes happening (90%). The only question is - how quickly does this happen. (I don't feel qualified to guess.)
3. The US will continue pushing against the invasion, while firmly refusing to take any miliary action (90%). Neither Ukraine nor any other country will get admitted to NATO during (99%) or immediately after the war (80%), though Ukraine might get fast-tracked to European Union during (20%) or after the war (70%).
4. Here's the crazy part. And I do mean crazy, I can't believe I'm typing this, I feel silly typing this. But, to my knowledge, nobody else is, and I'm increasingly convinced it's true, and someone needs to be typing this, so it might as well be me.
See, the leftists are correct. (No, wiseguys, that's not the silly part, let me finish.) They were correct all along and are being proven more and more correct with each passing day. It's just that they're so invested in fighting old fights and personal vendettas against The Man that none of them noticed yet. They're correct about the need for diplomacy over war, for deescalation and respect for other countries' self-determination. They just didn't notice the US foreign relations team has been actually acting out those wishes, to an unprecedented success, recovering all legitimacy by correctly warning about the war, slowly lobbying and building up the network of support that eventually made the current sanitary cordon against Russia possible. And they're correct about the liberal establishment being a hivemind of dangerous, greedy, corrupt warmongers intent on escalating the conflict as far as possible, up to and including a direct war with Russia and the resulting nuclear holocaust. They just didn't notice that the hivemind is all talk and no power, and the man who actually calls the shots is above that bullshit and has already proven himself to be willing to go against it if necessary.
Essentially, the entire world peace hinges on one person, and that person is Joe Biden. If something happens to him, the US reverts to its old, ugly, imperialist self and pushes Russia into a corner from which it can only continue to fight back (just as the leftists predicted).
Let me say this again. Joe Biden. Proving the great man theory true right before our eyes. Joe fucking Biden. An accidental hero. Who would have imagined this a mere year ago? (Not me, certainly.) In one of the recent open threads here, someone proposed a scenario where his visible dementia is actually so advanced that he's waking up every day discovering anew that his lifelong dream of becoming the president has finally come true. It's part of my headcanon now, but I've made it even better. I imagine him sitting at his desk every day, unable to recall the chain of events that led to the current problem he's presented with, much less able to plan and strategize. Forced to make choices using the only tools his brain has left - plain honesty and deeply held moral (in particular - pacifist) beliefs.
Hm. The first one in 3) is relevant, obviously. Otherwise: 70% chance of an agressive escalation by the US administration (defined as either directly involving its military, plans for NATO expansion, or opportunistically pushing demands irrelevant to the current conflict) shortly after Biden stands down, 80% if he stands down before his term ends. 20% chance of credible reports of Biden's cognitive problems during his presidency surfacing after it's over, sub-5% but non-negligible chance of him standing down because of them. (I was overblowing them for storytelling effect, but in my defense, it does make for a great story.) 50% chance of common knowledge circa a decade from now crediting Biden personally for his positive contribution to resolving the Ukrainian conflict, sub-1% chance of any lesson being learned from it by public-facing punditry.
Biden has never been anti-war. He just doesn't like Russians, or possibly anybody east of Paris. He was all in favor of bombing the fuck out of the Serbs, for example, and was a strong early supporter of the war in Afghanistan.
"My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance."
It would seem that only people who expected little resistance to a Russian invasion expected the Russians to launch one. After all, the more resistance you expect, the more reluctant you will be to invade. So it looks like no one who expected strong resistance ALSO thought Putin to expect little resistance.
If WW3 happens (and it doesn't miraculously avoid including anybody who has nukes), nobody will be left to collect their wins from the prediction market. So there is no point making predictions on that market.
I am skeptical of the "nuclear war will kill everyone on Earth" narrative. I don't think it was true in the 1980s when nuclear weapons were at their peak, and I don't think it's true now either.
I question whether the invasion has really "gone poorly" from the Russian point of view, so far. Obviously they haven't achieved the best case scenario, but are probably still well within range of what they expected. You don't bring 150,000 men to an invasion if you're not expecting to meet any resistance.
I remember the 2003 invasion of Iraq and how the media narratives played out in that case. The non-Fox media all wanted the invasion to be a huge embarrassment for George Bush, and the sequence of narratives that got reported was eerily similar to the current invasion. In the first week, the invasion was meeting "stronger than expected resistance". In the second week, the invasion was "bogged down" as things slowed down outside the capital. And in the third week, whoops, forget everything we said earlier, it's a complete walkover now.
The fact that the narrative is the same doesn't mean that the facts on the ground will be the same, there will always be massive differences that seem obvious and significant in retrospect. Still, I think the media narrative is likely to play out in roughly the same way regardless of the facts on the ground.
I feel like in the last couple of days media coverage has already switched from feel good stories of Ukrainian resistance to cold factual statements on Russian progresses.
> Luttwak is exactly the sort of guy who I expect to know how many troops it takes to invade a country, but I’m not sure why he should be an expert in Putin’s psychology and maybe he was so reliant on his military expertise that he made a (false) assumption of Putin’s rationality in order to be able to carelessly jump from “I know a lot about military strategy” to “I can predict what Putin will do”.
In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef quotes one of the superforecasters as identifying this as the bias responsible for one of their forecasting mistakes. The forecaster made their prediction based "what would I do if I were Shinzo Abe", not "what is Shinzo Abe going to do."
Good piece. Just one niggle (there's always one isn't there). To describe Matt Taibi and Glenn Greenwald as leftists was true probably, oh maybe circa 2010? To assert that they represent the left today goes beyond outlierdom , it's a truly surprising proposition. Taibi throwing his lot in with GOP types and switching sides in the culture wars? Greenwald being interviewed on Fox by his chum Tucker Carlson? They've left the left. Anyway try the Kyiv Independent for some non-Western punditry by Ukrainian military types.
I live in the UK so admit I had to google that guy. (Greenwald is familiar to us over here as an ex-Guardian writer before he fell out with the crew at the Intercept. ) What's Mr French been saying in his columns/blog/whatever to indicate a shift from conservatism?
I don't know why so many pundits missed the mark so badly on Ukrainian resistance. I was over there just a few months ago and some Ukrainians have been angling for a fight with Putin for years. I think that the pundits just bought too much into Putin's propaganda that Ukraine is an artificial polity, but that was always wrong. Ukrainian nationalism goes back centuries. The argument that Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks gets causation wrong; Lenin had to create the Ukrainian SSR to appease Ukrainians who declared independence multiple times during the revolution. They were no different than the Baltic states in that regard.
It's true that there's a bit of a difference between Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians and Ukrainian speaking western Ukrainians in that the easterners are more pro-Russian than the westerners, but neither of them were fans of Putin's occupations in Crimea or Donbas. Given that Zelenskyy was and is genuinely popular among Ukrainians all over the country there really isn't much room for that division to help Putin here. Once he invaded without provocation even folks who were on the fence about Putin are pretty strongly against him now.
It's worth pointing out that Putin's demands with regard to Donbas were always structured in such a way that he would have a say in Ukrainian internal politics if people gave into them, so Ukrainians have always kind of known that Putin was acting in bad faith.
Luttawak made a sub-point which I think adds a lot to how and why he was accurate on how 'difficult' it would be for Russia to take over Ukraine quickly or in large areas.
Luttawak said in his tweet that Russia does not want the Ukrainian people to hate them, at least any more than will happen due to the invasion and large scale death. So yea, Russia is going to raise its porcupine hackles of nuclear retaliation and take whatever time it needs to get to Kyiv and accomplish whatever other goals they think are necessary.
If it takes 2 months instead of 1 week, then that's ok with Russia and if they can avoid a decade of rebuilding shit they blew up for a 'quick victory' they don't really need or care about, then it makes more sense for them to go 'slowly'.
Not to mention a longer war over a few months will kill off more of Ukraine's willing fighters, reducing their capacity for any future insurrection/guerrilla tactics. So if anything, Russia has every incentive to take a bit more time and 'absorb' more losses in order to more truly defeat Ukraine rather than simply take it over. Can Russia not learn from the French resistance in WW2 after it fell to Germany too quickly and left a sizeable and well organised resistance of former soldiers gone underground?
In my view, too much of the commentary is fixated on the specifics of this event or Putin's mindset or calls to reestablish the former USSR...and not enough attention has gone into the how/why/etc. of strategy when forming empires. The West has been out of the habit of doing this since the decolonisation waves of the 1950s and 1960s and isn't' thinking clearly enough about how they used to act in the 1850s when they took over and held territory to expand their empire directly rather than using puppet dictators and corporations and finance/banks as the West has done for decades in their neo-colonialism....Russia's doing 'regular' colonialism.
This is a fairly important point in terms of how to view this war and when comparing it to other wars which had disparate goals. The 'return' of Russia's former territory full of people who speak their language in many cases and share their blood is the kind of thing that has to be done in a certain way in order for the propaganda to 'ring true'.
Russia seeks to rule and retain Ukraine in the long term, while the US's attacks on other nations or nato expansions have not had this goal in recent decades. The US left rubble and dictators in the wake of all the democracies which the US has crushed since the ascension/coup of the military-industrial-intelligence complex after FDR died.
Russia would bomb the fuck out of Ukraine, but they are not trying to win a war at all costs as quickly as possible. This is a massively asymmetrical war in terms of military power and Russia wants to take over Ukraine in the most intact state possible while eliminating as much resistance as possible.
This will slow the Russians down in terms of how quickly they can move and how much territory they can hold as they do not seek to create as much rubble and dead bodies as they possibly can for a paper victory alongside an enormous rebuilding cost they cannot afford.
The US erred/chose this way in Iraq with a very quick take over using brutal bombing methods followed up by decades of corrupt 'rebuilding efforts to line the pockets of military contractors. But it is also true that there was a LOT of rebuilding that needed to happen due to the reckless and violent way the US took over Iraq with far less regard than Russia will likely use, as they seek to take over an intact as possible Ukraine. Though with a brand new war I may be proven wrong if Russian patience wears thin at some point, Russia will not let this drag out without Kyiv for more than 4-6 months in my estimation, but 2-3 could readily happen or they take Kyiv and drag out the war in other cities for a bit to crush any future rebellion by dangling hope or desperation in front of an ongoing invasion/war.
Though of course, it is much easier for me to say this now, I made no predictions ahead of time and am now forecasting and describing based on a lot of information and perspectives the people in the article obviously didn't have.
But I'd say that Russia is 'slow playing' this war on purpose. And all the calls about a 'weak Russia' or 'overly strong Ukrainian resistance' are simply more things Putin will prove the western pundits wrong on over time. I think what people leave out or forget is that Putin is doing exactly what he wants and knew the obvious limitations of what could and could not be achieved with his troop numbers and what sanctions he'd face...
The West was telling him for a month or two before the invasion what sanctions they'd deploy and what they thought about the invasion happening, so Putin as an actor in the prediction markets had a huge advantage to act in ways which would surprise everyone.
Why would so many get this invasion so wrong and yet be so confident that Putin and Russia's military is experiencing a Ukrainian resistance surprise? His own intelligence operations and monitoring of Ukraine along with a quasi-civil war / quasi-invasion in Donbas area for 8 years....just somehow might have given Putin a solid idea of what resistance their would be.
Obviously reality is different and there will be things that do and don't go as predicted in any war, but the headlines of 'Russian invasion behind schedule' - reports Western governments....seems really silly. As if they have a copy of his itinerary like it was a travel package. It is just western propaganda to find a thousand ways to make Russia look bad when they say the invasion is going 'slowly'.
This take doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems pretty clear that Putin was hoping for a quick victory. He was already scheduling peace talks before his army reach Kyiv and was rebuffed by the Ukrainians. That sort of move only makes sense if Putin was expecting immediate capitulation, and when that didn't happen he found out he didn't have a real war-plan.
This whole theory that the invasion is happening slowly because Putin is afraid of killing civilians would also be a lot more compelling if there weren't so many stories of Russian forces shelling civilian areas. Or of Russian troops running out gas and abandoning their vehicles. This just wasn't well planned and Putin is having to get his act together. He was hoping for a lightning victory like in Crimea or South Ossetia but he miscalculated and it didn't work.
You're being a bit unfair to Hanania and Karlin. They were right about the much larger question of whether Russia will invade. Strength of Ukrainian resistance is a minor question in comparison. We're only in the sixth day of the war and the assessment of the Ukrainian resistance may change in the coming days. Lot of the stories about the resistance are surely propaganda (Ghost of Kiev, anyone?), I won't put too much stock in them. I believe Hanania and Karlin both deserve B+ or even A-.
I mean, invasion started on Thursday, today is Wednesday, so Karlin's prediction, with 90 % confidence, that Ukrainian resistence is not going to last more than a week, might technically still come true, but it is quite unlikely.
And Hanania's "Once you’re the kind of people who can't inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal", deducing low popular resistence to invaders from low birthrate, is less quantitative and thus less suspectible to falsification, but from what we see about Ukrainian resistence so far, it might imho be counted as already disproven.
Btw. Hanania follows his prediction of low resistence with another prediction, that Taiwan will fold to China in the case of an invasion. I think that Ukrainian events should obviously strenghten our confidence that Chinese conquest of Taiwan would be no cakewalk, low fertility of Taiwanese nothwithstanding.
Heard it claimed that the reason Ukrainians thought invasion was unlikely was because their intelligence was from the Russian military, where things were kept tightly under wraps, troops massing at the border were told that it was a military exercise. Whereas USG signals intelligence was out of the kremlin where the invasion was discussed.
Could explain why both the Ukrainians, and people going off of their judgements, read this so wrong.
I’ve got to be missing something important here because I don’t understand the endgame.
Everyone has their own information, expertise, heuristics and hunches but the plain truth is no one knows how this plays out.
We assign greater weight to the market that essentially makes the best guess and over time somehow certain predictions markets can more reliably show us the future? A certain group of predictor are more reliable than an individual? I can sort of see that but I’m not confident it will work out that way.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated in Sarajevo and kinda sorta because of this Europe and a good chunk of West Asia and North Africa are at war and millions die.
Historians are still teasing out what happened and why. One person’s case of food poisoning at critical juncture could have sent events in a different direction. Millions more dead or millions less.
Hanania’s “very intelligent friend” comes off sounding like an idiot. I wonder if his “I can understand the reaction, but…” is charity taken way too far.
Here's one thought that's been bothering me about grading prediction markets. For the sake of argument, consider this (admittedly contrived) scenario: Putin, on January 1st of this year, decided to himself that on the morning of February 24th he's going to flip a coin, and invade Ukraine if and only if it's heads. A theoretically optimal prediction market, that had access to Putin's thoughts and desires, would place odds of invasion firmly at 50% (well, a bit less, accounting for accidental death and all that) all the way up until February 24th, where it would either shoot up to 99% or decay to something lower. There's many things in the world that are like this--for instance, in a betting market about the high in NYC reaching 35 degrees a year from now, if you see the odds at 90%, you'd probably sell as much as you can, since the "optimal" knowledge we have right now is probably closer to 50%. If a year from now, it turned out that some third-rate prediction market had said--for the past year!--that NYC had a 95% chance of having a high over 35 degrees, you'd likely attribute that to it being a bad market, rather than being particularly prophetic. Similarly, to what extent can we attribute the success of markets that were giving high odds to Russia invading Ukraine months ago to the quality of the markets and the forecasters themselves?
I won't claim this was a solid prediction, or that I should get much credit for it, but on February 18th I wrote about the impending invasion, and suggested that there would be strong Ukrainian resistance: https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1494828037958946817
>President Biden said on Wednesday that he now expected President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would order an invasion of Ukraine.
>He added, almost with an air of fatalism: “But I think he will pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it.”
Not precise but overall predicts invasion and that Putin will pay a higher cost than he expects. This is what you want to say to publicly discourage an invasion, whatever the likelyhood, but is also an accurate prediction. And of course Biden is responsible for organizing the sanctions and producing the higher cost, but I think predicting that Europe and other countries would coordinate together as strongly as they did is also a legit prediction.
All of the "Putin will invade Ukraine" predictors should have their grades lowered in this post. This is because they almost all followed the IC, which means the predicted invasion multiple times before invasion actually happened. If you date-restrict your google search you can find multiple dates that the IC predicted the invasion including at least:
"If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world"
No he isn't! This is a mistake everyone has been making for the last five years and I do not understand why. Scott Adams didn't predict a Trump victory, he predicted a Trump *landslide*. He wasn't even a stopped clock being right twice a day, he was critically wrong on the one thing everyone tries to give him credit for!
It would be premature to be impressed with Ukraine's resistance after only one week. "blitzkrieg" took 5 weeks to get to Paris, and Ukraine is bigger than France. Metaculus is currently predicting a 65% chance Putin will take Kiev within 5 weeks of the start of the war. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9939/kyiv-to-fall-to-russian-forces-by-april-2022/
I expect it to be slower than the US's capture of baghdad (20 days after the start of the war) but that's not saying much. That's the world's largest superpower stomping on small dictatorship, and it still took three weeks to get a half-assed "victory".
I'm seeing a lot of sane-washing of "no one possibly meant Kyiv would fall in a few days"[1] but a lot of people really did literally expect that and mean that. And if Zelenskyy fled the capital city that could have precipitated the exact collapse of all formal military resistance in taking the capital.
I think it was crazy to predict Kiev would fall in a few days, because from an outside view nothing like that has ever happened in recent history. In Afghanistan the Taliban offensive began on May 1 and Kabul didn't fall until August 15. It took 74 days for the UK to retake the Falklands despite having overwhelming military superiority (the sea journey from UK to Falklands at 20 knots is only 14 days).
Abandoning the capitol city to a foreign conqueror without a fight would be unprecedented afaik. Even when Napoleon found Moscow abandoned before his arrival, in preparation for a Russian plot to burn down their own capitol to hurt Napoleon, this was after a series of victorious battles on Russian soil spanning months.
Not clear that this was part of a Russian plot. It's not even clear the burning was deliberately planned and not just some hooligans setting fires. The mayor of Moscow was credited with the plan but in later years he (strangely) denied that he had ordered it.
I did think that a competent Russian invasion of Ukraine would capture Kyiv in a week. And, well, that obviously didn't happen.
NB. "Capture" is a strong word. It would have taken at least a month or two before the victory parade. But what is going on in Kyiv today does not look like a victory march.
And in the alternate universe where that did happen, the Internet message boards are full of people saying "of *course* that was going to happen, we all knew it, what idiot could've thought otherwise?!?!!1"
Kyiv is literally next door to Belarus, which was a staging point for Russia. They were under Kyiv the first day, and they barely moved from that time.
> My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance. I couldn’t even really find anybody who predicted one correctly and was silent on the other. If you know someone in this category, please let me know so I can give them an appropriate amount of glory.
I think Rob Lee might qualify (at least strongly predicting invasion conditional on collapse of talks, and outlining how Russia had to worry about different levels of casualties based on how extreme the force they commit). On January 18, 2022 he wrote https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/01/moscows-compellence-strategy/
which states:
> A number of recent articles have suggested that the costs of a potential invasion are too high, or that the purpose of a Russian military operation in Ukraine would be to occupy territory. A better explanation of Moscow’s current actions is that they are part of a compellence campaign. If Moscow cannot convince the United States to agree to some of its demands and force Ukraine to make concessions, it may view military force as its last resort to change what it considers an unacceptable status quo. Russian behavior suggests that it believes the costs of inaction would be greater than the costs of a significant military escalation in Ukraine, particularly after reviewing the events in Ukraine over the summer and fall...
> In contrast to the public buildup this spring, Russia has made a concerted effort to obscure its movements this time, moving equipment at night, rotating units between training ranges, and blocking websites used for tracking trains... Russian officials are backing themselves into a corner by committing themselves to a strong response unless they receive concessions. If it does not achieve some of its stated goals, Moscow will suffer a cost to its credibility if it does not escalate...
> The most likely ground offensive option is that the Russian military would focus on destroying Ukrainian military units east of the Dnieper River, inflicting casualties, taking prisoners of war, destroying military equipment, and degrading defense capabilities. This could include a planned withdrawal — a punitive raid —possibly after one or two weeks. It could also involve occupying terrain outside Kyiv and threatening the capital unless Russia’s demands are met. Such an operation would more closely resemble a more aggressive version of Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008 than its annexation of Crimea. By inflicting heavy losses on the Ukrainian military, taking prisoners of war, and degrading Kyiv’s defense capabilities, Russia could potentially alter Zelensky’s incentive structure sufficiently to induce painful concessions. An additional benefit of such an operation is that it would likely be less costly and would not require Russian forces to enter cities, which would increase the risk of civilian casualties and make an insurgency more effective.
> Because of Russia’s stunted economy, demographic challenges and other weaknesses at home, Putin has dealt himself a poor hand — but until now he has played it rather skilfully. He has received a great deal of unintended help from the US. Our domestic divisions and near-paralysis in Congress, our perceived withdrawal from the Middle East and, more broadly, from our six-decade-long global leadership role, and ignominious scuttling out of Afghanistan — together these have led many countries to hedge their bets and develop closer economic, political and security ties with both Russia and China...
> Putin’s problem is that, as dictators are wont to do, he has overplayed his hand. His aggressive threats against Ukraine have galvanised Nato and reaffirmed its clarity of purpose. His menacing policies have made Ukrainians even more anti-Russian and driven the country further into the arms of the west. Any Russian military action will result in Ukrainian resistance as well as larger Nato military deployments on Russia’s western border, potential suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and painful economic sanctions.
> Moscow has deployed some 100,000 troops to the borders of Ukraine. What now? Putin finds himself in a situation where Russian success is defined as either a change of government in Kyiv (with the successor aligned with Moscow) or conquest of the country. The 18th-century French diplomat Talleyrand is meant to have said: “You can do anything you like with bayonets except sit on them.” Putin must use those troops soon or face the humiliation of withdrawing them without achieving anything except pushing Ukraine closer to the west. In either case, he has placed himself in a difficult position at home and abroad.
I have to say I feel a little bad about trying to predict the outcome or the occurrence of a war. This isn't like covid, where the virus doesn't much care what you think of its ability to kill this or that many people (although other actors may care). Whether Kyiv stands or falls depends largely on what its defenders think of their chances to resist the invader. Decisions to help, or start a war in the first place, depend on what the predicted outcome is, and have very real consequences.
I'm not saying prediction markets shouldn't cover the war. The media is full of idle speculation in any case, and I think there's a case to be made that it's a good thing somebody's really trying to make good, honest predictions based on the information they have. Still, I feel like there's an ethical discussion worth having about this, and I don't recall seeing it. It doesn't seem to me like prediction aggregators are providing much useful information about this, and maybe that's a good thing, as one argument for why this is okay to do is probably that the forecasting scene isn't big enough to affect anything. If we knew Putin was closely following the Ukraine tournament on Metaculus, how comfortable would we feel making guesstimates about his chances of winning?
What puzzled me about much of "the dialogue" on this topic was just how common it was for people to conflate "predicting an invasion" with "desiring an invasion" – people getting called warmongers for predicting Putin would attack.
I predicted both of these things, but not really that specifically, because vagueness sounds better. I will add the following for posterity:
Strong resistance continues; in the end, Russia makes a struggle of it but mostly appears to back down; retains Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin's aim is to legitimatize the incorporation of largely-ethnically-Russian areas of Ukraine, in my reading.
There's a guy Youtube randomly recommended to me a while ago called S2 Underground who so far seems to have been right about everything. When I saw Tracey et al. pop up in my email feed I was shocked he was so much further behind than I was just from watching this one Youtube channel. He has big ol' maps I don't understand and uses weather satellites to take pictures of tanks. Maybe more of us should listen to this guy?
A huge amount of your marking down seems to be based on "Ukraine resistance strong" and "Russia weak". I'm not sure these are even close to accurate.
A remarkable aspect of the war that's not being remarked upon enough by the West is how "gentle" it has been. Yes, yes, war is never gentle, but every actually confirmable detail about Russian behavior (as opposed to the usual propaganda) seems to be precision munitions, warning civilians before targeting buildings, and so on. Not only do we not have WW2 type behavior, we're seeing what looks like behavior that's more gentle than America in Iraq or Vietnam.
So this, IMHO, requires everyone to recalibrate in multiple ways.
- it doesn't tell us *anything* about the relative strengths of Russia or Ukraine if Russia is deliberately fighting with both hands and one foot tied behind its back.
- why would Russia behave this way? At the very least it suggests that perhaps their goal is not actually "Smash Ukraine"?
If one were to learn from history (a tough proposition, sure, but hear me out) two lessons that one might learn are
+ fighting no-holds-barred for a territory one ultimately hopes to assimilate is not an especially rational strategy. Resentment about this during the US Civil War is still with us in some form or another 150 years, and that's in the country with the world's shortest attention span. In other words if the goal is sincerely to bring Ukraine back into the fold, the war is being conducted in a way very much as commensurate with that aim as possible.
+ the claim that punishing the civilians of a nation will make that nation weaker and more eager to sue for peace (along with variants like "social order will collapse the instant something unexpected happens, whether bombing or aliens") has been a favorite of the West from WW1 through WW2 to Korea and Vietnam. It has never worked, but remains popular because (a) revenge and (b) it works in the movies.
It looks to me like Putin, learning from history and behaving rationally rather than emotionally, sees there's zero upside and plenty of downside to behaving like Tamerlane or Hitler or even Westmoreland, and is conducting the war appropriately.
One can go even further albeit more speculatively.
Everyone is saying that Russia is losing the propaganda war. But, as the Burmese saying goes, "Don't teach the crocodile where the water is".
Sure, the West is getting the early propaganda wins and memes, winning the Twitter war, but that was always going to be the case given who controls the internet and TV outside Russia. No point in even trying to fight that battle.
So look beyond the *immediate* wins. Russia is both being "gentle" and (as far as I can tell) essentially honest in its claims. Meaning that at some point, after the immediate war calms down, they're in a very good position to tot up
- who behaved what way in this war? (Ukraine, or US in Iraq vs us.)
- who told the truth in this war vs obvious lies and immediately exposed propaganda?
And that's going to be a non-trivial point in their favor in terms of the long (generational or so) game, especially in terms of winning the favor of the incompetent but entitled middle class youth of the West, the ones always looking for a reason to hate the system they live under. Basically an easy way to fire up the equivalent of Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades in 20..30 years as a reaction to "here's how terrible your parents and their system were, and here's all the evidence you need".
I'm not claiming this operation is being done today solely as a way to control the narrative in 25 years! I'm saying that it is being executed by people who understand that actions have cultural consequences long after the immediate physical consequences, and who are tailoring their behavior appropriately.
Now this is all predicated on the assumptions that
- Russia is being "gentle". I think if this were not so we'd have plenty of evidence of that already.
- This pattern will continue. And maybe that will change if the operation takes longer to achieve its ends than planned. But I think it would be a mistake to imagine that Russia always assumed they'd control the country in three days, not when you look at the way they are fighting with what looks like substantial care for minimal damage and casualties.
(And yes, yes, I know we'll get the usual crowd telling us just how brutal they have been, blah blah.
Sorry kids, when your comparison points are US Civil War, WW2, Korea, or even Vietnam, this behavior is nothing close to brutal; and insisting that it is does just reveals your ignorance of history.)
> - it doesn't tell us *anything* about the relative strengths of Russia or Ukraine if Russia is deliberately fighting with both hands and one foot tied behind its back.
It depends on what part. Leaving working tanks with fuel that get taken be Ukrainian civilians is sign that something really went wrong (obviously, among 100 000 people all kinds of unusual things can happen and individual case is hard to distinguish from large-scale issues).
The same for large failure rate, inability to delete Ukrainian air force, apparent failure to target stuff (destroying Holocaust/Soviet crime museum instead of TV tower nearby)
> - why would Russia behave this way? At the very least it suggests that perhaps their goal is not actually "Smash Ukraine"?
Yes, nothing indicates so far that they plan genocide like Germans or Soviets during WW II. Though destruction of culture is planned (denying that Ukrainians can exists as nation etc)
> this behavior is nothing close to brutal
For example tanks stopping because people are standing on road. Russians or Germans during WW II would run over them.
We haven't had exactly that war yet, but we have had Iran-Iraq, Eritrea-Ethiopia, and the Great African War in the Congo (along with the endless flare-up/calm down around Liberia/Sierra Leone), all of which essentially conducted themselves like WW1 and WW2.
We have had Syria/ISIS in the modern age, but I'm unaware of how well that was covered by locals with cell phones; certainly not enough to make much impression on Twitter, but I have zero feel for the reality of that conflict.
In other words I think it's too early to tell if the difference is the presence of cameras everywhere, or who the combatants are.
Even if this didn't start off as a Ledeen Doctrine, it's seemingly headed for that place, with those consequences...
Interestingly, Donald Kagan gave something of the same analysis for much of the later brutality in the Vietnam War; that once the US was seen to be committed, they believed they could not be seen to be weak. Pointless destruction, just to show that pointless destruction could be imposed anytime anywhere. Oderint dum Metuant.
So if the historical lesson of THIS war going to be "don't even bother with the easy option next time; start at full Genghis just to remind people how things actually work"?
I think your hypothesis fails the test of history. I'm not convinced people remember the brutality of a particular war much past the lifespan of those who actually fought it. Americans do not seethe with resentment towards the Japanese to this day over Bataan or Iwo Jima, and the Japanese are not burning with hatred over Hiroshima or the firebombing of Tokyo. The Vietnamese are actually pretty friendly towards the Americans, Agent Orange and Operation Linebacker notwithstanding. The American North is not bitter about secession, even despite the long rows of graves at Gettysburg.
Contrariwise, the Americans were "gentle" in the sense you specify in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it didn't do a speck of good, if anything we left far *more* resented than when we arrived.
So I think I would look for the reason people nurse grudges in other aspects of the war -- like whether your side won or lost, whether it was over fast or dragged on -- and what happened in the post-war order, like whether there were some separate reason to nurse a grudge, e.g. in the post-bellum American South a resistance to the upending of the social order occasioned by the 13th Amendment, and the vast expansion of Federal authority that came with the 14th -- indeed, the struggle over the scope of the 14th Amendment continues to this day, and has nothing to do with Sherman burning down Atlanta.
What do people think about military casualty estimates thus far? This seems underdiscussed as an important factor in how things go. Russia admits that 500 soldiers have died, Ukraine says they've killed 7,000 Russian soldiers, and the Pentagon estimates each side has lost 1,500 in the first 5 days (https://news.yahoo.com/moscow-says-hundreds-of-russian-troops-killed-thousands-more-injured-in-ukraine-182037954.html). That's about all I know. If the Ukrainian estimate is even in the ball park (or even the Pentagon estimate is right), then in just a couple months this could already be the deadliest war Russia has fought since WW2, right (they lost 15k in Afghanistan)? Will domestic support for the war hold up under that pressure?
It highly depends on how much Kreml can control information flow. In country with over 140 000 people both 150, 1500, 15 000 and 30 000 dead soldiers are not a problem by itself - reaction of population is what is going to matter.
Completely suppressed death of 30 000 (or well blamed on someone) can be a smaller problem than death of 3 of symbolic and well known.
"Russia is closer to Kyiv than America was to Baghdad at this stage of their Iraq invasion, and everyone was impressed with that stage of the American campaign"
This.
It's gobsmacking to me that you and the commenters and seemingly almost everyone else in the Western hemisphere thinks Putin's invasion is going badly and/or that Putin was truly unprepared for this level of resistance.
It took the Americans three *weeks* to take Baghdad, and it took the *bloody German Army* six weeks to take Poland, and those are two of the gold standard examples for fast conventional wars.
I have never in my life seen a stronger example of "you're calling it too soon". These grades, at least the ones on strength of resistance, are coming a month too soon.
Kiev is only about 50 miles from the Russian border and there's not much between it and the border, so Russia had a pretty good head start. It took about 5 weeks for Germany to take France, which should've been close to equal to Germany in manpower and technology. Outperforming WW2 France may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but Russia is in a much stronger relative position and has way fewer geographical barriers. To some extent, you're probably right, but it's not clear to me what the reference point should be. If someone told me prior to the invasion, 'Russia should take Kiev within a week,' it wouldn't have sounded like an implausible claim.
Fair, but I'm not saying it shouldn't be surprising, just that it shouldn't be called so early. This is the first trickle of evidence. There's an irresistible incentive for our side to say it's strong evidence, to encourage more of it into existence. But it's not.
"We are giving the civilians guns and molotov cocktails as the tanks roll up" does not fill me with confidence in the Ukrainian side and it really shouldn't anyone else either.
I agree, I think they were. People ignore demographics in war prediction. It amazes me.
Kyiv was the center of a 25 year political battle to Westernize Ukraine. It's where you could reliably get a protest crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Western/Euro/Democracy side of Ukrainian politics. It's one of the places that *would* resist in a fight. Since Putin was the guy behind the shadows pushing the Eastern/Slavic/Russian side, he's got to know that from 20 years of experience.
Crimea is far away from the centers of power, geographically disconnected, and has a huge group that self identifies Russian. Note how it hasn't been a hotspot of insurgency or anything these past 8 years.
Popular writers could have known all this and taken it into account, but seem to have mostly not done that.
Lesson for rationalists, and it's an old lesson: popular writers in this topic space aren't very rational.
I don’t see how you can run a useful prediction market for World War III or more specifically a US-Russian nuclear exchange. You should always bet that it won’t happen: if it doesn’t, the market resolves in your favor and you make money; if it does, the market doesn’t resolve the other way or pay out any money because it and your counterparties have been vaporized.
Other events short of a nuclear exchange may allow the market to pay out with meaningfully positive probability, but still have such a high probability of one that they’ll yield distorted odds.
>My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance. I couldn’t even really find anybody who predicted one correctly and was silent on the other (I think Clay Graubard of Global Guessing managed this, but he’s a superforecaster, not a pundit). If you know someone in this category, please let me know so I can give them an appropriate amount of glory.
I don't know what you think a "pundit" is, nowadays, so I'll answer a better question.
Did anyone compare pundit and prediction-market predictions on Ukraine to financial market predictions?
For example, apparently on the 24th Feb credit-default-swaps were priced consistent with a 90% probability of Ukraine not paying their debts back (presumably being insolvent (or not existing)) within five years. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/ukraine-debt-swaps-signal-80-chance-of-default-as-stress-mounts and it looks like CDSs have twice the return today that they had on the 24th https://cbonds.com/indexes/13643/ . I don't really understand how CDS returns could double from a 90% probability -- I guess the price factors in both inflation and the probability of default, but the UAH currency seems to have kept its value (since the 24th). Maybe the doubling isn't a matter of the probability of Ukraine's defeat going up, but a matter of the currency falling if it doesn't get defeated? I don't know. I'm pretty confused.
"NATO – and especially US intelligence – was remarkably effective at predicting what Putin had planned before he did it, down to predicting the day the assault would begin. NATO intelligence agencies also warned in advance that Russian forces would stage false-flag attacks and shell Ukrainian positions trying to provoke Ukrainians into shooting back and the Russians did exactly that. Frankly, especially after the intelligence failures of the Global War on Terror, I was shocked by the degree to which US intelligence mostly nailed this; it goes to show that while organizations created to spy on the Soviet Union struggle to spy on terrorists and the Taliban, they are very good at spying on the Russian Federation. Frankly the entire thing has been a fairly stunning US intelligence coup and there are a whole lot of analysts and more than a few world leaders who woke up on the 24th owing US intelligence an apology."
What? US intelligence has certainly been good, and some agency like the NSA may have predicted the date behind closed doors, but the best public prediction I saw - which was still slightly less precise - was Leah McElrath on Twitter, as linked above.
BTW, I think she also predicted Putin would besiege a city in Ukraine, due to some trauma of his. However, Twitter's search function sucks and I hate it with a passion.
Lack of technical experience in the US Intelligence Community may be a greater cause of error than bias here. By technical experience, I don't mean journalistic or policy experience, but technical experience creating intelligence products, as a collector, targetter, etc. I observed this with Russia-gate, where based on how we collect intelligence there were significant red-flags about the credibility of the narrative (e.g., when the NSA had lower confidence than the FBI, CIA).
As to the Russian invasion, an understanding of how we collect on Russia, the nature of our relationships with Kremlin insiders, and how the information was communicated (via State Department spox not leaks, etc.) were all critical to the analysis. It was fairly obvious, given those factors, that some of the most senior Kremlin officials were unambiguously communicating to us, for self-serving reasons of course, that the invasion was going forward. That doesn't mean the invasion would go forward, but it is where an analysis should begin.
IMO, any analyst without the technical intel background, who doesn't know what they don't know, will have a tough time separating signal from noise. It would be like trying to predict the outcome of a US election without knowing how the election process works. In sum, the problem is lack of knowledge more than rationality or bias.
The problem with this is that it's a really complex prediction to get both sides (invasion chance and poor military performance) right since there's an apparent contradiction that needs to be resolved.
Since if Russia is likely to display poor military performance then they will probably not invade a successful prediction must incorporate incorrect Russian assessments about the Ukrainian-Russian balance of power. It is very reasonable to assume that the Russian administration knows more about both Russian and Ukrainian military capabilities and plans than you do, so it follows that making a correct prediction here probably requires extremely specialised knowledge or a reasoning procedure that would normally produce the wrong result.
I would also note that prediction markets are likely to handle foreign policy less well than most other things. Deception is a very large part of foreign policy, especially where military options are concerned. Great effort goes into obfuscating the probability, timing and location of military actions using deception, misinformation and deceit.
About two weeks out I was somewhat sure he would invade, but only in the southeastern half. I thought Ukrainian resistance would be too strong to hold more than half the country. But if you asked me if he world have attacked Kyiv I would have said maybe 20%. It really shocked me when he did.
This is a KGB war, not a generals war. It's not going to be pretty.
It seems the direction everybody failed in was prediction Putin's rationality. They either had expert knowledge that Ukraine would put up strong resistance so they assumed Putin wouldn't invade, or they had expert knowledge that Putin was planning to invade and assumed he wouldn't be doing it if it was going to be a disaster. Both directions of assumption are entirely reasonable and could only have been overcome if these sets of experts had taken each other more seriously than Putin's rationality.
I think people who gave the war high probability from the start were actually not good forecasters, but rather they happened to get lucky in this specific case.
I was predicting something around 50% for RU invasion of UA until the final days, and I went up to 95% after Putin's speech on February 22. I think this was a good forecast, even in hindsight. The primary reason to doubt warnings given by the US government in this case wasn't that they were lying about the concrete intelligence they had but that the genuine intelligence in their possession may have been part of a disinformation campaign on Putin's part to make invasion look more credible.
Putin could've achieved a lot by threatening invasion in a legitimate way: he could hurt the Ukrainian economy in a serious way by making investors skittish about a possible Russian invasion, he could communicate to the West that he's serious about invading if Ukraine being admitted to NATO becomes a real possibility and so on. In my opinion whether Putin was bluffing in this way or whether he actually meant to invade was unclear until the final days before February 24.
As an example of this, consider the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the First Balkan War in 1912:
Both Austria-Hungary and Russia mobilized the districts on their shared border for war. Just as it is in this case, whether war would truly break out or not was unclear, but in the end the 1912 crisis didn't result in war. The July crisis of 1914, similar in many ways to the crisis over Serbian expansion in 1912, did result in war. It's quite difficult to see a difference between the two cases right until the final days of July 1914, similar to how I think whether Russia would invade Ukraine this time around was unclear until the final days before the invasion.
The more interesting question is whether different actions and briefings from the US and Europe could have changed the course of events. Most people I know, including myself, were of the view that publicly stating Putin would invade ensured it would happen (so our predictions from mid Jan were 80% pus) as he had no way to withdraw (and it wasn't clear there would be material consequences to invading). And the relevant question is what to do now....send troops to Estonia in large numbers, force China to take a side? I honestly don't know what does everyone think?
Russian language military analyst on the Ukraine invasion, Feb 3 2022, English translation. Some excerpts:
>In Russia’s expert community recently a sufficiently powerful opinion has taken root that it won’t even be necessary to put troops on Ukraine’s territory since the armed forces of that country are in a pathetic state.
>Some pundits note that Russia’s powerful fire strike will destroy practically all surveillance and communications systems, artillery and tank formations. Moreover, a number of experts have concluded that even one crushing Russian strike will to be sufficient to finish such a war.
>Let’s start with the last. To assert that no one in Ukraine will defend the regime signifies practically a complete lack of knowledge about the military-political situation and moods of the broad masses in the neighboring state. And the degree of hatred (which, as is well-known, is the most effective fuel for armed conflict) in the neighboring republic toward Moscow is plainly underestimated. No one in Ukraine will meet the Russian army with bread, salt and flowers.
>But even the Russian-speaking population of this part of Ukraine (including also cities like Kharkov, Zaporozhe, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol) didn’t support similar thoughts by a huge majority. The “Novorossiya” project somehow imperceptibly deflated and quietly died.
>Now about “Russia’s powerful fire strike,” by which “practically all surveillance and communications systems, artillery and tank formations of the VSU2” will supposedly be destroyed.
>To this it’s certainly necessary to add that supplies of prospective and highly-accurate weapons in the VS RF5 don’t bear any kind of unlimited character. “Tsirkon” hypersonic missiles still aren’t in the armory. And the quantity of “Kalibrs” (sea-based cruise missiles), “Kinzhals,” Kh-101 (air-launched cruise missiles) and missiles for “Iskanders” in the very best case number in the hundreds (dozens in the case of “Kinzhals”). This arsenal is completely insufficient to wipe a state on the scale of France with a population of more than 40 million from the face of the earth. And Ukraine is characterized by exactly these parameters.
>Sometimes in the Russian expert community it’s asserted (by the followers of Douhet’s doctrine6) that since hypothetical combat operations in Ukraine will be conducted in conditions of full Russian air superiority the war will be extremely brief and will end in the shortest time.
>But it’s somehow forgotten that the armed formations of the Afghan opposition in the conflict of 1979-1989 didn’t have a single aircraft or combat helicopter. And the war in that country stretched out for a full 10 years. Chechen fighters didn’t have a single airplane. And the fight with them continued several years and cost federal forces a great deal of blood and victims.
>And the Armed Forces of Ukraine have some combat aviation. As well as air defense means.
>Now as concerns assertions that western countries won’t send a single soldier to die for Ukraine.
>We have to note that most likely this will be the case. However this hardly excludes in the event of a Russian invasion massive assistance to the VSU from the collective West with the most varied types of arms and military equipment and large volume supplies of all kinds of materiel. In this regard the West has already exhibited an unprecedented consolidated position, which, it seems, was not expected in Moscow.
>One shouldn’t doubt that some reincarnated lend-lease in the form and likeness of the Second World War from the USA and countries of the North Atlantic alliance will begin. Even the flow of volunteers from the West of which there could be very many can’t be excluded.
>And finally, about the protracted hypothetical campaign. In the Russian expert community they say several hours, sometimes even several dozen minutes. Meanwhile somehow they forget we have already been through all this. The phrase “seize the city with one parachute regiment in two hours” is already a classic of the genre.
>Generally, there won’t be any kind of Ukrainian blitzkrieg. Utterances by some experts of the type “The Russian Army will destroy the greater part of VSU sub-units11 in 30-40 minutes,” “Russia is capable of destroying Ukraine in 10 minutes in a full-scale war,” “Russia will destroy Ukraine in eight minutes” don’t have a serious basis.
>And finally, most important. Armed conflict with Ukraine now fundamentally doesn’t meet Russia’s national interests. Therefore it’s best for some overexcited Russian experts to forget their hat-tossing fantasies. And, with the aim of preventing further reputational damage, never again to recall them.
One person who both predicted the Russian invasion and said that Ukraine could defeat it with the right support was Thomas C. Theiner (@noclador on Twitter).
For what it's worth, had I made any public predictions I would have done quite badly.
1. I thought the US government was exaggerating the probability that Putin would invade Ukraine, partly because of the many previous lies and blunders by the US intelligence community.
2. I thought Russian troops would rapidly take all the big cities in Ukraine, then face a prolonged insurgency wherever they didn't have large concentrations of troops.
3. I thought Putin would once again exploit NATO's internal differences to grab a little more Ukrainian land by bluffing.
I was, clearly, wrong about the above. But I didn't end up with the proverbial egg all over my face because I knew myself not to be an expert in foreign policy and therefore did not make any public posts about Ukraine before the war there had actually started. My expertise is in Virology. And in Virology, in March 2020 I posted that COVID-19 was going to be very very bad in the US because what was then known about the virus was very very bad.
FYI maybe of interest even if he is an insider and not a pundit. Oleksiy Arestovych (an Ukrainian presidential adviser), interview from 18-Mar-2019 mentions "... 99.9% probability of a Russian invasion from 4 directions in 2021-2022" full interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8&t=460s (with time code; H/T
Regarding Alperovitch'es predictions on the resistance. He wrote the following on Feb 24:
> It's becoming very clear that in the very near future, Russia is going to achieve it's objectives of overthrowing Ukrainian government and establish a puppet regime.
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.
Not seeing Samo at anything less than a B+ here. Early assault on airport failed, but it seemed like bad luck; Putin was hoping for a reasonably bloodless victory—but those events are always subject to chance, in a similar way to how the US might have flubbed the Osama assasination.
Now it’s just going to be a horrific slow grind as Russia rolls in heavy, mass-casualty weaponry. Putin has up to a 10:1 advantage in numbers, which translates into a 100x advantage even against similar class of weaponry — which Ukraine doesn’t have. Kharkiv as a preview for what this heavy gauge lower tech looks like. (Or visit Syria.)
Samo analysis seems similar (and a few days ahead) of solid FT reporting. Eventually this reality will sink in to the NYT readership but the Times is too busy selling Marvel movie fantasy.
Forgive my disgust at the latter. It’s the Quaker in me.
I think Russia can still win, but I think the position that their army did the needed reforms, is logistically pretty competent, and could counter NATO airpower are all looking less true right now.
I think what may be the case is that the Russian armed forces made the necessary reforms in the early 2010s. This made the honest, competent defense minister deeply unpopular with powerful special interests who had been profiting by the corrupt practices he was clamping down on, and they were able to engineer his removal and replacement with a political toady who was happy to return things to the status quo ante.
This doesn't obviously explain their extremely limited use of fixed wing air power to date, though - that aspect is frankly just strange.
I suspect they're avoiding fixed wing air power because Ukrainian drones and AA missiles make it very vulnerable, while Ukraine's limited quantity of aircraft of its own mean their fixed wings have less to do.
Other option: Russia's broker than we think and can't afford to use them. Which I think is extremely possible.
The drones Ukraine has (and in general) are not focused on shooting down aircraft, they're focused on attacking ground targets. Ukrainian drones are active wrecking convoys as they are because Russia has not achieved air dominance from either the sky or the ground.
Sources that I've seen giving detailed information on the progress of the fighting are pretty unanimous that Russia is currently being relatively measured in its use of indirect fire, in order to avoid excessive casualties. (This is probably necessary in order to sustain Russian army morale and in light of Putin's notional motive to invade.) And the Russian army is apparently generally oriented around artillery indirect fire over airpower anyway.
I don't think anything about the relative lack of airpower is that odd.
A desire to win hearts and minds by avoiding indiscriminate destruction explains limited use of bombing in populated areas. It does nothing to explain the failure to rapidly eliminate Ukrainian aerial capability by some combination of ground based AA (in which Russia is supposed to be the world leader, and hasn't looked like any such thing), striking grounded aircraft and crucial basing facilities from the air and with long range missiles and artillery, and plain air-to-air combat. There is no way that slow, vulnerable TB2 drones should have been able to operate successfully against Russian ground forces on even day 2 of the conflict, and the small numbers of dated MiGs and Sukhois shouldn't have lasted much longer.
They also didn't know how many MANPADs the US sent to Ukraine, or are sending now. The Russians always think ground game, while the US loves the air. I speculate that as long as they think they can do it with armor and not risk extremely expensive air assets (including the pilots) to some militia recruit with a Stinger, they will.
MANPADS are great against drones and helicopters. They are very little threat to modern fixed wing fighters, and they also don't stop Russia's (far more extensive and sophisticated) ground based AA from shooting down Ukrainian aircraft). What is probably true is that the Russian air force sucks at SEAD, so they may have been worried about conventional Ukrainian SAMs I suppose.
Well...depends on the mission. If you're doing air superiority work, yes. If you're doing close air support, it's a different story. But yes it's a good point, I should have emphasized SAM systems in general, not just the most photogenic member of the family.
The point has been made elsewhere that Russia (and Putin) see Ukraine as being part of 'Greater Russia.' Perhaps this explains the dynamics of the armed conflict so far (Russian victory appearing to take much longer than many were predicting; Ukrainian resistance more dogged than many were predicting).
Given that the Russians see Ukrainians as fully or partly "fellow Russians" it's not unreasonable to think that Russia has been trying to achieve conquest with the minimum amount of force and with taking care to avoid civilian casualties where possible. In Putin's ideal world (I guess) Ukraine succumbs and is absorbed into Russia or is stabilised as a "Finlandised" state on Russia's border, but with the Ukrainian population not subsequently being entirely hostile to Russia.
If Russia had unleashed its full aerial, artillery and (non nuclear) missile capacity against the major Ukrainian cities it is likely that victory could have been achieved more quickly, albeit more brutally.
The Russian approach may prove to be a miscalculation: Russia invades with a relatively "softly softly" military approach; this approach allows Ukrainian resistance to solidify and stiffen; Russia is faced either with accepting a humiliating defeat or stepping up its military response (the latter being the far more likely option).
This is not just about the Ukrainian forces, but also the actions of the US and everyone else who's eager to take Putin down. The US wants to turn Ukraine into a new Afghanistan, pumping up the "local resistance" until the Moscow government collapses. Of course, this will be at great human cost to Ukrainians, but the US is plenty cynical enough to find that cost acceptable. We also weren't much concerned that bankrupting the Soviet Union didn't create much value for the Afghani people. What I see right now is a coordinated media effort to play up the ferocity of the Ukrainian "citizen resistance" - a part of which apparently needs to be collectively wished into existence. This resistance must be calibrated so that it's too weak to repel the invasion, yet strong enough to make the invaders increasingly desperate, brutal, and overstretched. Then we let the Dnieper run red with blood for a few months (hopefully not years) and the Putin regime is through. NATO only needs to feed this conflict with a precisely calibrated flow of "support" (weapons) to keep the killing at some strategically optimal level of intensity, all while highmindedly denouncing the violence.
The present stage of the plan is to overcome the instinct that both sides have against total war and maximum brutality. After all, regular Russians and Ukrainians do feel considerable kinship. I'm convinced that this is part of what's behind this week's media stories that actively dehumanize the Russians, presenting them as appendages of Putin rather than as human beings. It won't take much of this before real atrocities start happening, at which point the playground kids will no longer need to goad the fighters to hit harder.
When this ends Russia will be Putin-less, toothless, and utterly compliant. Ukraine will be a nation of bombed-out buildings and a people whose sacrifices served our geopolitical ends, not theirs. Russia will be such a mess that they will have to accept humanitarian aid on the condition that we name their new puppet government, and Nord Stream II can finally start pumping Russian gas into Germany with the self-congratulatory declaration that the money can now finally go to the Russian people and not Putin's oligarchs.
Of course, I write all this because I really really don't want my prediction to be right!
That's super cynical. But not necessarily wrong. However, I do think that we genuinely root for the underdog, and most American's are enthralled with the "Marvel-movie resistance". Not to say the support is not primarily to harm Russia, but to say we would be sad if too many Ukrainians got killed along the way.
You are describing the view of the American public. Spork is describing the view of the permanent foreign policy establishment (the deep State Department, if you like). I think you're both right.
I think this is true at both a genuine level and as an excellent example of manufactured consent; our propagandists are just great at stoking this.
> NATO only needs to feed this conflict with a precisely calibrated flow of "support" (weapons) to keep the killing at some strategically optimal level of intensity, all while highmindedly denouncing the violence.
That is assigning some malicious conspiracy to something that does not need it.
Note that complete destruction of invading Russian army would fulfill this goals even better!
They are not giving things needed to achieve that for multiple reasons, none of them requiring such malicious plans.
NATO is not furnishing the complete destruction of the Russian invading army because quite simply they can't. (At least, not without active NATO military intervention that would pose an unacceptable escalation risk; and quite possibly not at all.)
The whole point of trying to turn Ukraine into an insurgency quagmire to bleed the Russians out is that it is nearly costless on the part of NATO.
To be fair, the Ukrainians and Afghans are both rational. If they think it's worth burning the place to the ground rather than letting the Russians have it, they really would be in a better position to make that decision than us.
I also think your plan is too cynical and too involved. Western powers do not successfully plan that far ahead.
One of the reasons that wars occur is that people are very bad at making this rational decision.
If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare that will destroy my city and certainly kill many of my family and friends and quite likely me too.
That's just a cold-hearted and rational utilitarian analysis, but I feel guilty for saying it even in the face of a totally hypothetical and implausible threat of invasion. Rationality is cowardice, in a situation like this. If this were an actual invasion threat, my "Well actually surrendering
to the hated enemy is probably a more rational solution if you think about it" judgment would not be looked on kindly by some of my less rational and more hot-headed compatriots, I'd be shouted down in the best case and hung as a fifth-columnist in the worst.
And besides, there's always a _chance_ we might win a resounding victory quickly, shouldn't we at least try to fight? Of course then you don't win the resounding victory quickly and you're stuck in Sunk Cost Fallacy Land, and you need to fight on to avenge your lost comrades.
If people were rational about wars then wars would pretty much never happen.
> If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare
I *think* that in worlds where this preference is more wide-spread, invasions by Russia or China are more common than in those where it is not. I believe that means that the cold-hearted rational behavior is actually to prefer the horrendous urban warfare, so as to live in a world where invasions are less likely.
(To be fair, I’m skipping over a lot of complicated calculus of probabilities and preferences here, and tricky estimates of how bad Russian and Chinese takeovers are, and substituting gut feeling.)
> If I'm being totally cold-hearted and rational, then I have to admit that I'd rather have my country taken over by Russians or Chinese than to spend the next ten years involved in some kind of horrendous urban warfare that will destroy my city and certainly kill many of my family and friends and quite likely me too.
Maybe too late for Ukraine - but if you're being totally cold hearted and rational then you plan ahead for knowing that your people are unwilling to fight 10 years of urban warfare. For instance you have a well trained highly effective military, and a reliable predictable reputation.
The Chechens has lost 10% of their population, and the regime that follow the war was horrible, maybe communist china horrible. This isn't such an easy computation.
An interesting analysis, but I see a problem in that you are assuming the people who make the decisions are also the people who will go fight. Not usually the case. It seems to me leaders could coldly and rationally order other men to go fight and die, and probably would, and have, because their interests and viewpoints differ from those of the schmo in the trenches.
It's a little reductive here to say "The Ukrainians and Afghans". It's like Vietnam. Or anywhere, really. A huge portion are willing to fight to the death, and a huge portion are basically actually on the side of the opponent. Look at the American Revolution, even. In the early stages, it's thought to have been something like one third pro-revolution, one third silent uninvolved, and one third self identifying British. Ukraine will have a lot of people willing to fight to the death in both directions because a large minority of the country have enjoyed 30 years of Western life and come to identify with it, and another large minority of the country see themselves as Russian or basically Russian.
The Ukrainians want to fight. The US/NATO isn't calibrating anything about "feeding the conflict"; we want Russians to die until they leave Ukraine. But realistically there's no level of material support that would likely allow the Ukrainians to actually defeat the Russians in force-on-force conflict because the Russians have too much of an advantage. A "victory" is Ukraine winning an asymmetric fight and Russia eventually withdrawing.
What the US/NATO wants is for Russia to avoid invading its neighbors. Imposing costs here might get them to leave Ukraine and avoid repeating this mistake anywhere else.
The part of my point about which I'm quite confident is that it's not in Ukraine's interest to be the place where the Russian bear went to die. That kind of thing makes for a humanitarian catastrophe. I agree that Ukrainians don't have good options. But make no mistake: if they want to go fight and die, the US attitude will be "Great! Go fight and die! Here are some weapons so you can fight harder, escalate the violence, and die faster!" ...rather than something else more humanitarian. Probably because of geography, Ukrainians have a pretty good track record of being martyrs for other states' geopolitical agendas. And here we go again, cheering them on to throw their bodies into the jaws of today's villain.
It's also not in Ukraine's interest, according to them, to be dominated by a hostile invading power.
Not sure if you know, but prior bouts of Russian domination also involved some major humanitarian disasters in Ukraine. Lots of people would rather go down fighting than die of say starvation.
Properly employed, the weapons we're giving them will make the Russians die faster, not the Ukrainians.
This doesn't really align with what actually happened here, though. The US strongly signaled its non-involvement from the start, and had no intention of really arming them for a conflict -- if our goal was to get them to resist, why didn't we arm them like this beforehand? And the notion that we're spurring them on to go fight conflicts with the fact that we tried to get Zelensky to flee, presumably to set up a government in exile for political pressure later.
When you look at what has unfolded over the last few days, it's clear that the rest of the world was ready to let Ukraine become a new Belarus, and it is only the fact that the Ukrainians chose to resist so aggressively that has spurred the West to actually support them. Ukrainians are making the choice that they would rather make sacrifices than be ruled by a puppet regime, and your proposition would require a different timeline than what has actually played out.
Incidentally, this is worth remembering if Ukraine is able to win this: despite what Western politicians are likely to claim about their successful support (particularly the US and Germany, but others too), they were happy to concede immediately and deserve absolutely no credit for boldness or bravery.
> When this ends Russia will be Putin-less, toothless, and utterly compliant [...] I really really don't want my prediction to be right!
I really *do* want the world to be Putin-less, as that would greatly lower the risk of nuclear war. And a Russia that is not always looking to invade its neighbours will be a better place for Russians and for everyone else (except perhaps arms salesmen).
Yeah, I hoped it would be clear from context that the part I don't like is the human cost that would be borne by the Ukrainians as they become the instrument by which Putin is defeated.
Russia switched from "soft" to "hard" in like 72 hours.
It's not the relevant variable for Ukrainian resistance being tougher than expected.
US IC also predicted Russia would be doing quite a bit better right now. Tactically and logistically, the Russians are grossly underperforming expectations (independent of how much fighting spirit the Ukrainians are having).
- Vehicles running out of fuel
- "Precision" missile strikes were not very effective
- Air dominance not obtained
- Ukrainian drones having success instead of being blown out of they sky from above or below
- Ukrainian command and control still in place (Russia was expected to use kinetic, electronic warfare, and cyber attacks to great effect in the opening phase)
- Russian troops apparently using unencrypted COTS radios that ham operators, let alone NSA et al, can listen in on/jam.
- Poor morale among Russian troops because they were uniformed about the operation beforehand (so the Russians tried OPSEC, but US IC still knew the plans in advance even if the bulk of the Russian military didn't)
- Russians not operating with effective "combined arms"; they don't have much air support going, and their armor keeps getting blasted because troops aren't dismounting to protect against javelins and such.
- Massed artillery fires allows Russia to level cities and entrenched positions, but it won't help them a damn bit vs. Ukrainians armed with an infinite supply of sniper rifles and MANPATS/MANPADS provided courtesy of EU/NATO.
- "Precision" missile strikes were not very effective
- Air dominance not obtained
Regarding these points, this is good: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/mysterious-case-missing-russian-air-force
TL;DR: There are 3 possible reasons why Russia isn't using its air force much. (1) they don't have many PGMs. (2) they are worried their own army will shoot down their aircraft. (3) Russian pilots aren't very well trained.
All of these possibilities suggest the competence of the Russian air force should be downgraded.
I remember seeing (but who can trust these early reports) that one of the first aircraft downed in the war was a Ukrainian plane shot down by Ukrainian forces.
> Vehicles running out of fuel
I'm curious whether this is real or propaganda.
I think it's real, but less indicative of dysfunction than people are inclined to believe. IIRC it happened to the US in Iraq a couple times. Logistics is hard. Also, overrunning your supply lines can even be a result of unexpected success.
Not an expert but I've heard that Russia has been reforming its military since the 2008 war. This seems more like low morale than incompetence.
That was certainly what prompted the reforms, but Serdyukov - the defense minister widely regarded as being responsible for the reforms - was replaced in late 2012 with Shoygu - the current incumbent - under whom it appears there may have been considerable backsliding. Shoygu is the ultimate political cockroach: he's been a minister continuously since 1991. That suggests a certain flexibility on his part.
"Putin was hoping for a reasonably bloodless victory"
I think Putin's hope that the Zelenskyy government would just capitulate is part of the reason he's having so much trouble. He has troops deserting him because they feel tricked. They thought they were going to greeted as liberators but that's not happening and they're being confronted with the possibility have having to attack Russian speaking civilians, the people they were supposed to be liberating. I think Putin can still win but only by abandoning all of the pretenses he used to justify the invasion.
From what I've heard, many Russian troops genuinely thought they were just doing training exercises. Then all of a sudden they were instructed to invade Ukraine, which explains their low morale and poor supply lines.
One confident prediction that I can make for the coming week is that humanitarian situation in Ukraine will be deteriorating quickly. It's painful for me to write this since I have multiple Ukrainian friends with whom I chat daily in various Telegram groups.
In the second week of the war Russia is going to become much less selective in their actions. In the first days of the war they were trying to quickly take as much ground as possible without proper artillery support. This is about to change and it will mean much more civilian casualties than in the first week.
Multiple big Ukrainian cities are surrounded or semi-surrounded. It means that supplying food for civilians is becoming a problem. You can still go to a shop and buy food as in the peaceful time, but already yesterday my friend's relative living in Kiev spent 2 hours in line for groceries.
I think barring nuclear strikes the probability of Russia taking control of >50% of Ukrainian territory is low, say 20%. I expect the situation to become more or less a stalemate within one or two months from now. Russia simply doesn't have economic capabilities to lead a protracted war under the current (and future) sanctions.
Russia is going straight into an economic crisis. I see at least 50% probability of inflation in Russia exceeding 100% in 2022.
Despite that the probability of Putin being deposed is really low. In the past few years Russian opposition was mostly subdued by arresting their leaders. To have any effect the protests should count at least hundreds of thousands of people. From my understanding number of anti-war protestors in the last few days was in low tens of thousands. Around 5000 of protestors were arrested (these 5000 probably include a lot of people that were arrested, spent the night in jail, were released, went to the protests on the next day and were arrested again).
I agree on the humanitarian assessment.
On the question of control, it seems far more cut and dried. Russia is shifting to lower tech, but highly effective, heavy weaponry. This is being spun in the Western media as a sign of "desperation", but that's a loaded term that means very little. It's an option that Putin might not have preferred, but it's one he can take.
I think people are strongly underestimating pure numerical advantage. The rough calculus is that this scales as N^2. If you have twice as many forces, you dish out twice as much damage — but receive half as much incoming fire. (One tank firing on ten has to split its fire in ten chunks, at the same time it receives ten times as much.)
What that means practically: say you had a special pill that made a unit, magically, twice as effective. That might be "fighting spirit" or "desire to defend the homeland", or "super smart sharp wits", or it might be "new upgraded tech coming in from Poland". That's offset completely by a 40% (or so, sqrt(2)) numerical advantage in your opponent.
Russia is roughly x5 in armored vehicles, x10 in planes, x20 in helicopters. It can send in less than a third of its army and completely dominate even if the Ukrainian military is hyped up on the x2 effectiveness pill. N^2 is not exp(N), but you can lose in polynomial time. There's just no way to offset that.
Ukraine will lose, very badly. Handing out machine guns to civilians, and telling them to make Molotov cocktails, as I see celebrated in the WaPo, or the NYT, will only lead to more needless death. I wish I could say Western governments "made a major miscalculation"; I think it's more accurate to say that they just did it for the clicks.
All of this is pretty well captured in the prediction markets, BTW.
The thing is that Russia doesn't have a numerical advantage at least in manpower. Ukraine can and did implement the universal mobilization, while Russia can't do it. The number of eligible Ukrainians is on the order of 10 million (all males between 18 and 60 years old). The total size of Russian military is around 1 million + 2 million reservists.
The question about the military equipment is more difficult and very much depends on how much Europe and other countries are willing to help Ukraine. Multiple countries have already started supplying ammunition, aircrafts and other equipment, but I don't have a good grasp whether it's enough or not.
Further, many historical examples like Vietnam war show that seemingly overwhelming military advantage is not enough to win a war on the enemy territory.
Looking at CNN data from a few days ago, it looks like Russia is x5 in active personel (900k vs 190k), and x2 in reserve personel (2M vs 900k). So even there it's a large advantage. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-military-comparison-intl/index.html Ukraine could, of course, "recruit" everybody (what fraction of the adult male population can you arm simultaneously?) but in that total war scenario, that all would hope we never reach, Russia comes out on top for similar reasons.
The N^2 scaling, and rough technological parity between Russian and the West means that the only way for the West to offset that balance is by a serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft? That seems insane, and something equivalent to all out, nuclear-exchange-provoking war between Russia and the West.
A big difference between Russia in Ukraine, and the US in Afghanistan or Vietnam is (to use the Talebism) skin in the game. Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory. In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, we were attempting to prop up client states with no geographic continuity. Russia has already been managing chunks of Ukraine for years without breaking a sweat.
> Russia comes out on top for similar reasons.
As I wrote in the previous comment, universal mobilization in Russia is out of the question unless Ukraine starts counter-attacking on the Russian territory, which is currently unrealistic. Universal mobilization in Ukraine is ongoing. They've already drafted all the reservists and are planning to draft all the remaining eligible population.
> West to offset that balance is by a serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft?
I don't see why this is unrealistic. It is certainly within Europe's capabilities. At least equipping the infantry is cheap.
> Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory.
I don't think this is the case at all. Russia would probably swallow Donbas, but for the rest of Ukraine it would probably prefer to install a puppet government, making Ukraine into the second Belarus.
It remains to be seen whether universal mobilization is actually useful in the modern era. Can random dudes with a rifle plus no training or C&C actually do anything useful apart from taking the occasional potshot in the vague direction of an enemy soldier?
The thing is, many of the enemy soldiers are also just some random dudes going through their military training. Based on what we hear from the news, they are not very well prepared for the actual military action. (Though it is difficult to tell to what extent this is selection bias.)
> Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory.
Wouldn't that also mean they can not go all-out?
Difficult to say, most of Russia already seems to have been burnt to the ground and rebuilt several times already. Rebuilding Kyiv with ugly 2020s apartment buildings instead of ugly 1960s apartment buildings probably won't bother them too much.
>A big difference between Russia in Ukraine, and the US in Afghanistan or Vietnam is (to use the Talebism) skin in the game. Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine as part of its core territory.
It's possible this close relationship between Russia and Ukraine actually has the opposite effect.
As an analogy, consider how US troops might feel if they were ordered to shell Ottawa and kill or capture the Canadian government. Not super enthusiastic, I would imagine.
Say they’re so unenthusiastic they’re x4 less likely to shoot (!—very extreme numbers).
Numerical advantage and N^2 says they’re still going to win.
As a Canadian, I have commented recently that if the US tried the same thing on us half the US troops would refuse because they're smart enough to look at Ukraine and imagine the same scenario pretty much exactly, and the other half would refuse because everyone knows we're a subarctic wasteland and they'd freeze to death even in the summer.
I mean, US troops did burn down Atlanta.
Whatever squeamishness the Americans might have initially had about fighting their own countrymen in the Civil War, it seems to have evaporated pretty quickly once the war got started.
There were years of war building up to that, and decades of strife before that.
Putin seems to have skipped all the "here's why we hate Ukrainians" and his army has noticed.
I think time is on the Ukrainians' side. Russia is under severe economic pressure, while Ukraine will get resupplied as things go on.
> serious inflow of weapons that is equivalent to rearming Ukraine, repeatedly, five times? Ten times for aircraft? That seems insane, and something equivalent to all out, nuclear-exchange-provoking war between Russia and the West.
Military-industrial complex in USA presumably is excited about such scenario, and in this case their incentives are mostly aligning with mine.
It seems possible that Europe and USA can supply enough anti-tank and AA missiles that Russia would have problems (assuming that Ukraine will not collapse within hours).
> rough technological parity between Russia and the West
No. We don't have that. The Russian army uses inferior equipment to the West (e.g. it lacks PGMs, night vision goggles, even GPS in vehicles), and is much worse trained.
> Multiple countries have already started supplying ammunition, aircrafts and other equipment, but I don't have a good grasp whether it's enough or not.
One issue is that it takes time to train people to use new equipment, and the more sophisticated the equipment the longer it takes to train people. So it may well be that the West supplies Ukraine both with equipment and volunteer personnel to operate it.
N^2 in an open field.
In urban warfare you're lucky if your overwhelming force scales linearly.
If you're talking about the order of magnitude argument, there's nothing that says it has to be on a two dimensional grid. It works in arbitrary topologies, as long as there's line of fire between the parties.
And, unfortunately, it's pretty easy to get line of fire in a city: first, you level the city with missiles, as Russia just did in Syria. It's horrific, soul-destroying stuff to see.
Yes, Russia could level Ukraine. So far they don't seem to want that.
So the question is whether they can win without leveling the cities?
The fear is, no, they can’t. Putin wants to win. They’ll level the cities. As they did in Syria.
The West will have to watch. They can prolong the process, by shifting in weapons. The Ukrainian government can have teenagers burn themselves to death throwing Molotov cocktails.
The only thing that would stop it is giving Putin an out — whatever concession he needs to feel good. Split the country, perhaps, like East and West Germany.
Or the army decides to disobey and there is “regime change” — a chaotic process that will take place in a nuclear power currently on high alert.
I don’t think people grasp how bad the reality is.
I see what you are saying, but I'd also be wary of anyone who claims they can predict what Putin will do.
> The only thing that would stop it is giving Putin an out — whatever concession he needs to feel good
And then Putin will digest conquered territory and invade again. How that solves anything?
I'm honestly counting on the removal of Putin as a reasonable way out. His decisions are erratic enough to make his generals nervous.
> The only thing that would stop it is giving Putin an out — whatever concession he needs to feel good
No. Whenever you incentivise behaviour you don't like, you'll get more of that beheviour. Therefore it is not in the West's interest to give Putin any concessions.
The West should announce that any Russian soldiers/officers who surrender or enact a coup against Putin will thereby be exempt from war crimes charges. (to incentivise defection and coups) and also that they've asked China to give Putin a safe retirement should he choose to flee there (to get people talking about Putin fleeing, which gives the idea more salience).
>If you're talking about the order of magnitude argument, there's nothing that says it has to be on a two dimensional grid. It works in arbitrary topologies, as long as there's line of fire between the parties.
The point is more that if you can't actually deploy all of your force numbers don't convey any kill-ratio advantage. If the front is only wide enough for 1,000 tanks, then your 50,000 tanks to your opponent's 10,000 won't let you give more fire while taking less; you have to go through relatively-even combat until 9,001 of their tanks are dead and holes start appearing in their line while you still have reserves.
Bret Devereaux's ACOUP covers the issue here https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-ii-the-ruin-of-war/ and here https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-i-the-trench-stalemate/ .
I think we agree on the framework of analysis, but disagree on the relative power of topology (the contact point and line-of-fire network) and volume.
My feeling on these effects is that topology can only get you so far. We are struck by the exception cases (line of tanks in a city street, each tank can only see one partisan, etc). But in reality (1) they’re pretty easy to anticipate and avoid, and (2) air power and missiles make topology irrelevant — particularly if (like Putin) you don’t feel restrained morally.
Asymmetric warfare is the only sustainable strategy for Ukraine, yes.
Luckily for them, they're getting thousands of MANPADS and MANPATS to shoot from behind cover at Russian vehicles and aircraft. I wonder how long it will be before we see an IED employed.
“Luckily”, etc — these are really awful and disturbing outcomes. I worked on the Wikileaks data from Afghanistan years ago (first leak, of the on-the-ground reports). It gave me nightmares, literally, I would wake up in the middle of the night.
Imagine a really sick news story, something you wish you hadn’t read. Then imagine dozens a day, so many that there’s no time to grieve — like a horror movie where the slasher scene keeps going.
Luckily given situation. Alternative is occupation by regime that denies existence of your nation, apparently people claiming otherwise should be treated as nazis.
Nations are fictions. Convenient ones, at times. But (to paraphrase): nations were made for man; man was not made for nations. Democracies in particular. When things look bad, scatter. Don’t die, don’t kill. Trust in the long run.
The alternative is “the old lie”—Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Or the Randall Jarrell poem later:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
We don’t like to talk this way because countries that sold war as a reasonable response control the educational system. The smart countries were able to disappear and reappear in better conditions. Perhaps that’s a good chunk of 22nd Century wisdom dropped into the 21st.
Nations are the sort of fiction that becomes real when people believe in them. Cultural differences are real whether people believe in them. Many Ukraine do believe in Ukraine and this has been the case for generations. Ukraine is as much a separate nation from Russia as Latvia, (which Putin also wants to annex.)
> Don’t die, don’t kill.
Note that with such approach you are going to lose every conflict with someone willing to do this or credibly threaten to do this.
It makes sense to give wallet to a mugger if it allows you to avoid risking life.
But when someone wants to destroy your culture, take your property and rule over you?
War is terrible, yes. (I've in fact been to both Iraq and Afghanistan and had the pleasure of taking indirect fire.)
But if war is going to be terrible, I want the CARTOON-LEVEL BAD GUY to lose to the valiant and well-equipped underdogs. Sadly, the Russian troops themselves are not necessarily villains and I hope as many of them desert as possible.
We have very different psychologies. I find it hard to overlay phrases like “cartoon level bad guy” and “valiant underdogs” with the reality of how people die in a burning car.
For me it is quite clear, person who started without a good reason[1] an invasion that ends people dying in a burning car is “cartoon level bad guy”.
[1] There are people claiming that NATO invading nuclear capable Russia was at all plausible and that taking over Ukraine reduces this risk. Such people are either (1) uninformed consumers of Russian propaganda (2) idiots or (3) Russian trolls.
Leaving aside other things, noone is going to invade Russia with tank columns as long as Russia can launch nukes in response. That is a red herring.
> Handing out machine guns to civilians, and telling them to make Molotov cocktails will only lead to more needless death.
Yes it will lead to more death than surrender. But will it be needless? No, because (1) the longer Ukraine holds out the greater the chance of them receiving more significant military help from NATO, which would tip the balance. And (2) the longer the resistance, the more bitter Ukrainians will feel towards Putin and Russia, the less they will accept occupation or a puppet regime, and the sooner they will be free.
I'm not a tactician, and while I agree that RU is clearly the favorite, I assume the specific geography and tactics around a given objective can complicate the pure firepower equation you've laid out.
Could he be deposed by the military, if they are sufficiently unhappy about what he is doing with them?
They have all the guns, they can certainly depose Putin if they can find a way to internally build enough consensus for it.
I'd hate to be the first guy in the meeting to say "Hey, alternative plan, why don't we just raise a coup?" though.
I don't see any externals signs that would point to this. Putin is good at surrounding himself with loyal men.
On the other hand, are there any historical examples where imminent coup d'état could be predicted?
Regarding Lindyman's comment: if you remove the "without any resistance" part, and just ask whether the Russian army could conquer Europe up to the borders of France, I am *extremely interested* as to whether that is the case.
Consider: the Russian military is, apparently, making poor progress on several fronts of its invasion into Ukraine. But its losses thus far, in both personnel and equipment, are only a small fraction of its assets; and it has assets, particularly its fixed-wing air force, that have barely been employed thus far. It currently has the luxury of making mistakes, and learning from them, against an opponent which doesn't have the capability to seriously exploit them. Meanwhile, the multinational NATO force deployed to Eastern Europe has limited experience training as a combined unit, and could have any number of weaknesses ready to be revealed when it first undertakes real combat operations.
That said, I don't believe this is likely: the NATO advantage in technology, and particularly in air power, should be decisive. But I can't help thinking of the historical parallel to 1939, when nobody (?) believed the Allied forces in France would collapse in the face of a German invasion. If the probability that the Russian military could overwhelm the NATO forces currently in Eastern Europe is 5%, say - or, maybe more importantly, if Putin *thinks* it's over 50% - I think further NATO reinforcements are strongly motivated.
Any forecast here would depend on how far the participants would go. Would they use nukes? Would they be willing to level cities?
If Russian troops were pushing back NATO troops within the borders of Germany or Italy, NATO nukes would definitely fly, so in the possible worlds where the answer to "would they use nukes" is "no", then it can be confidently asserted that "the Russian Army could conquer Europe up to the borders of France" is false. The possible worlds where the answer is "yes" are those where Russia retains sufficient capability after nuclear bombardment to pull it off.
(I'm not saying NATO wouldn't defend Poland - we would. I'm saying that it's somewhat more questionable whether being pushed back in Poland would trigger an immediate *nuclear* reprisal from NATO. Equally, I'm not saying that Putin wouldn't use nukes to support a conventional invasion - I'm not confident on that one way or the other - only that NATO *would* if needed to support a conventional *defence* of Western Europe.)
As a measure of which countries, if invaded, would trigger a nuclear response from NATO, would it be reasonable to look at the list of countries with collaborative control over US nukes under the nuclear sharing programme? So: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey? (Plus the NATO nuclear powers themselves, of course.)
To be honest, I'm surprised to see Turkey still on that list, given their current relations with the West.
I don't think NATO would escalate to nuclear in response to a Russian invasion of anywhere, because NATO would be confident in its ability to win that war by conventional means.
The big concern would be preventing Russia from escalating to nuclear once it becomes clear that they're going to lose. For that there's two options:
1. Attempt to take out Russian nuclear sites and subs with conventional weapons, or
2. The exact opposite: make it clear that we will _only_ engage Russian troops outside Russian borders and will not attack Russia proper at all, hoping that we can prevent the war from escalating to homeland-attack mode.
I don't pretend to know which of these would be better, nor which would be chosen. Maybe it depends on what happens with the submarines.
I expect that if Russia were to invade a NATO country, we would see a full declaration of war and all enemy naval ships (especially submarines) would be immediately targeted.
There is a big difference between targetting attack submarines and targetting ballistic missile submarines. The latter operate in the most isolated convenient patch of ocean, and don't pose a threat in any scenario short of a nuclear exchange. Targetting them is an admission that you expect that scenario to occur, and would probably provoke it.
The point of a nuclear triad is that you cannot take them all out at once.
The usual proposed way of degrading a silo-based deterrent is using groundburst nukes from intermediate range (this is the reason Cuban Missiles were a Crisis, and later the reason for the INF treaty). Conventional bombing/missiles won't work very well due to their hardened design, and taking them with troops is far too slow to stop them launching (ICBM launches also give too much response time, hence intermediate range).
The consensus seems to be that a surprise, all-out Russian attack on NATO would overrun the Baltic states and push a bit into Poland. Then it would be stopped due to lack of supplies and gathering resistance, and then over a week or two, NATO would secure air control and grind them down. After that, it’s a roll-up.
A drive to the Rhine is simply inconceivable, utterly fanciful. There’s hardly any way the attack would even get into Germany. Russia isn’t the Soviet Union, and recent days have proven that they were weaker than anyone expected.
On the evidence of Russian buffoonery in Ukraine so far, I suspect they would lose badly to Polish army + NATO air power without any necessity for the involvement of other NATO ground forces. If their air defenses are letting Ukrainian drones hit meaningful targets several days into the invasion, the USAF and chums would wreak unfathomable havoc. The Russian air defense network specifically looks very much like a paper tiger at this point.
According to this article, the russian army doesn't have the logistical capablilities to wage Blitzkrieg campaigns:
https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/
Thanks - that's an informative article.
I wonder how to reconcile the discussion of track-gauge incompatibility with the posited threat of Soviet invasion during the Cold War. Wouldn't they have found it slow going, converting standard-gauge European railways to fit broad-gauge Soviet rolling stock? But the Soviet satellites - Poland, Romania etc. - used standard gauge, so perhaps their trains would have been the ones supplying the Red Army.
I know next to nothing about military strategy, but I find it hard to imagine Russia gracefully running supply lines all the way across hostile Central Europe. Even assuming Russia can miraculously establish air superiority, their current display in Ukraine doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their logistical operation. I wouldn’t want to be a Russian conscript running diesel back and forth through angry angry Poland.
On its face, the claim that the Russian Federation could overwhelm all of Europe doesn’t sound too serious. Unless of course you throw in some whacky assumptions about a decadent West constitutionally incapable of fighting Strong Orthodox Slav Gigachads (But at that point no appeal to military hardware or doctrine will matter anyway).
The Allied forces in France DIDN'T collapse in the face of German invasion. They generally fought very hard. French command-level incompetence did a lot of heavy lifting (they kept launching counterattacks 12-24 hours after they'd been ordered). But despite the popular description of the Fall of France as a rout, it wasn't. The British fought hard, as did the French. The Germans outmaneuvered them.
Also, once the Russians are out of range of their rail network, they're walking, because supplying them is extremely difficult due to the fuel needs. And I don't care how incompetent you think Western militaries are, once the Russians are walking across Europe it is defensible.
> the NATO advantage in technology, and particularly in air power, should be decisive
I agree. In every high intensity war where western-style forces/equipment/doctrines have fought Soviet or Russian style forces, the Western forces have won.
They wouldn't make it to Berlin because we'd start throwing tactical nukes and then everyone dies.
What are good benchmarks for invasion/resistance success/failure?
I would humbly propose the following hypothesis: the rationalist community (diverse as it is) tends to be receptive to anti-woke and anti-institution models and explanations. In some cases, this creates a blind spot when the culture war is an inappropriate explanatory framework (particularly when American institutions are involved)
I think a canary in the coal mine is the systematic discounting of the American intelligence community, inconsistent with its portrayal as an intrusively mighty all-seeing eye. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, this dissonance was waved away by the (hilariously uncharitable) notion that Joe Biden was manipulating intelligence reports in order to put us on the path to nuclear annihilation. It was a ridiculous explanation, but nevertheless gained purchase.
I suspect other Western institutions are likewise unfairly downweighted within the rationalist community. I hope this tussle causes a re-examination of the community’s dominant culture-war model.
>I think a canary in the coal mine is the systematic discounting of the American intelligence community, inconsistent with its portrayal as a intrusively mighty all-seeing eye.
These aren't wholly inconsistent. There are a couple of obvious ways of reconciling those:
1) They know everything but are lying i.e. the CIA director can trust the CIA but us plebs can't.
2) They're powerful and oppressive but incompetent (causing damage with power is easy; extracting things with power is not).
Not saying your larger point is *wrong*, just that the logic isn't particularly tight here.
You're right that it isn't much of a deductive argument, although I wasn't quite going for that level of rigor. A more modest rephrasing would be that: Joe Biden confidently making falsifiable predictions during special press conferences should have led more of us to update against either scenarios you propose, and towards the direction of 'the USA has probably collected convincing evidence that Russia will invade soon'. To the extent we didn't, I suspect this reflects strong systematic biases that have taken root within the community (or what I identify as such) over the course of fighting the culture wars.
As for the other point: a substantial minority apparently found credible the idea that ruling elites actively sought to wage war against a nuclear power. I don't think that's a serious idea, and I am left scratching my head as to the priors required to arrive at that conclusion.
Lots of people out there doing "reversed stupidity is intelligence" on Iraq WMDs (where the intel community did eff up) and "Russiagate" (where the intel community did not eff up, but the media et al did make a lot of unsubstantiated claims).
Bounded trust is hard to calibrate here because of the classified nature of the information.
I feel like to a certain extent this was an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in the sense that while US intelligence agencies are relatively credible when not excessively politicized, "Vladimir Putin is not a complete idiot" also seemed like a pretty reasonable and counterbalancing yardstick. If your point of view was something like "The US intelligence agencies are credible and there is a buildup of troops, but Vladimir Putin could be trying to pretend to signal an invasion to intimidate Ukraine with this buildup or or he must be up to something because he's not a complete idiot and only a complete idiot would invade Ukraine", the consensus view of 40% chance of Ukranian invasion did not seem completely crazy at the time.
This argument requires that you assume that the US intelligence agencies don't have the same presumption about Putin.
I think if you believe they are relatively credible, you should also believe they also don't operate from the assumption Putin is an idiot. That would mean they had strong enough evidence to trump that.
A given report would have to explain its epistemics for that to be knowable. Otherwise, determining the extent to which the US intel incorporated your other prior is really a big problem, and that's one way to get pushed into "I have no fucking clue" territory.
Here's a word problem. Let's say you know that US reports have a 70% hit rate, a report says Vlad will do a boneheaded thing, and you think there's a prior 90% chance that Vladimir Putin isn't going to be boneheaded. What's the probability that Vladimir Putin is going to do the boneheaded thing?
The answer is that there's no answer and you're screwed. You have (A) and (B) but you don't know how much (A) was already influenced by (B), so this is actually quite a difficult problem. If you treat (A) and (B) as independent you could reasonably have very low chance of Ukraine invasion because of the strong Putin prior -- if you treat B as completely incorporated into A, you could have a 75% chance of invasion by fully trusting the intelligence, but the real answer is that you're screwed because you don't actually know how much to adjust for this kind of a cascade, and this easily pushes into that perilous 40-60% "who the heck knows" territory.
Given current electoral prospects, "Ukrainian war" was probably to the advantage of Biden and the Democrats/establishment. As such, maybe it should have been presumed that they would instigate, if needed, for domestic gains.
I'm not sure 'presumed' is the right word here. Consider two competing explanations for "Joe Biden announces Russia will invade within a week":
A) The Biden government is fabricating evidence that Russia will invade, in order to escalate tensions and possibly cause war between Russia and Ukraine to break out. This plan will likely inflict unbearable suffering upon Ukraine and Russia, destabilize the region, and open the door to nuclear escalation, not to mention the risk of worldwide condemnation, criminal charges and eternal shame if the plan ever gets leaked or found out. The speculative electoral gains from the operation may rationally justify the immense political, military, economic and diplomatic risks to the US as well as the psychopathic torment of millions of Ukrainians and Russians.
B) The intelligence community has determined that the huge Russian army strategically assembled at the border with Ukraine is poised to launch an attack.
How in the world could anyone pick A as the likelier explanation, let alone 'presume' it must be true?
C: The intelligence community knows Russia *won't* invade, and the Biden administration wants to take credit for (appearing to) make Putin back down.
That's not absurd, but I think you still need unacceptable priors to weight this more than the much simpler option 'B'.
Your strategy has:
* High expected costs (undermines US diplomacy, damages credibility of US intelligence, strengthens Russian narrative of Western paranoia and meddling)
* Uncertain, and likely modest payoffs (assumes this complex narrative is compelling to the public; may be rebuffed by opposition counter-messaging; very unlikely to remain a top issue by November)
* Immensely high risks (military escalation with nuclear power, humanitarian cost of war, US seen as an instigator of the crisis, immense political and diplomatic risks from leaks or investigations, undermines US response to further Russian action closer to November, Russia convincingly presents evidence that invasion was never planned)
Again, I don't see how you can conclude that the Biden administration would make this gamble, without putting your finger on the scale with very strong assumptions. I think this brings the argument's rationality into question.
I would sort of agree except that I'm not sure where "rationalist community" figures into this. The only person I mentioned here who's a "rationalist" is *maybe* Samo, who didn't make this particular mistake.
My comment was actually in reference to the estimates of prediction markets (hence 'systematic' bias), and wasn't targeted at particular individuals like Samo. The term 'rationalists' was a messy shorthand connecting 'prediction market users' to a prevalent tribe within the greater LW orbit*, of grizzled Bayes enthusiasts returning from a fifth tour of duty in the culture wars.
If I'm not at all being clear, that'd be helpful to know
* Aella twitter threads, the subreddits, this lovely webzone, DSL, Scott Aaronson's blog's comments, Cade Metz summoning circles, etc.
I would counter with: The intelligence community was actually wrong several times on the timing of the invasion. Which is actually a huge and important aspect of predicting an invasion. So they still failed horribly, but also, sadly, in a way where they get to claim they were correct.
I personally think that revealing an aggressor's intents despite their flat-out denials is a reasonably impressive feat of intelligence. I am not aware of other agencies firmly predicting a more precise date of invasion, nor do I recall the exact timing being a sufficiently important item to attract much debate at all.
There were firm predictions of the 18th and 21st. The fact that they were erroneous means that Putin obtained knowledge that our IC didn't have the goods on him, possibly emboldening him to actually invade.
As a Russian living abroad I can say this has been a complete shock for me. I was nearly certain the war wouldn't happen. I thought I roughly understood what is happening in Russia and Putin's head. It turned out I was completely wrong.
My theory of Putin always was that he wasn't really interested much in anything else than his own power. He was authoritarian but not THAT bad (e. g. remember that Navalny was freely publishing his stuff and calling up protests for about 10 years, during which he was only harassed, and only then there was the weird poisoning attempt and ultimately prison), and he did try to be a good ruler for Russia, as he understood it, and insofar as it didn't contradict with his own goals. Previous military adventures kind of fit into this narrative: Georgia, Syria and especially Crimea were easy, quick and boosted his popularity; and every ruler has to worry about their popularity, even an authoritarian one. DPR/LPR were only supported half-heartedly, and for many years were a frozen conflict when Putin realized that no one actually cared much about DPR/LPR. Stuff like speeches about the unity of Russian people, the made-up identity of Ukrainians and the weird support for the Orthodox church I considered just pandering to his main audience, older Russians who miss the USSR.
But, well, turns out this theory is wrong, because the war in Ukraine cannot fit into it at all. It is very clearly completely pointless and suicidal; in a matter of days, Russia became a pariah state like Iran. Whatever his goals in the war are, even he accomplishes them all, he is now losing so much more. I thought it a valid argument that Ukraine aligned with NATO is genuinely bad for Russia, and assumed the events of last few months were posturing to make Ukraine and/or NATO guarantee their neutrality. Honestly I think if they agreed, there is a chance this mess could have been avoided... But they took a hard line, and instead of saving face (recognition of DPR/LPR, Russian troops officially there for good, some more minor sanctions in response; last Wednesday I was sure that's how it ends) he went all in. And even if he guarantees now Ukraine's loyalty somehow, he will have Finland and Sweden in NATO, he will have NATO stronger and more united than ever. Sweden taking sides, Germany re-militarizing and apparently even considers not shutting down their nuclear as they always wanted. This is insanity.
Right now I think -- although right now no one can be sure of anything -- he actually genuinely believes his shit. How Ukraine doesn't really exist and all. Apparently he really wants to resurreсt Russian Empire, the way he sees it at least. Possibly he wouldn't need the Baltics or Central Asia, but Ukraine is crucial, as "they are Russians too". And Belarus he basically already has anyway.
I don't know if that's always been his plan or just him being more and more detached from reality in the later years. Apparently he was really scared by COVID and spent the last two years in severe isolation, you can still see in pictures and videos the ridiculously long table which he uses now. Probably didn't do any good to his mind.
And apparently he really believed that Ukrainian people would welcome Russians as saviors. That's the only explanation I can see for the surprising weakness of the Russian army; like most, I expected Ukraine to collapse in days. Not only the troops appear incompetent, but the army that he gathered (was it 150,000?) is utterly inadequate for occupation of a country of 40 million, which was a major reason why I thought the war would be impossible to begin with. And Ukraine, as a heroically resisting victim of unprovoked aggression of Russia (which no one really liked to begin with), has now all the sympathy in the world, although it's of course good to remember that whatever we learn about the war now is mostly Ukrainian (and Western intelligence) own propaganda.
Unfortunately I don't know what happens now and I don't think WWIII scenario is completely excluded. Putin cannot go back, and the Western response has been utterly devastating and gets worse every day, they really should stop already... Russian economy is collapsing, it's in walking ghost phase right now. I fear this really backs him into corner. In his old memoires, year 2000, he says how the thing that made the greatest impression to him as a kid was how a cornered rat can turn to fight a man. Some consolation that I have is that he probably, in his mind, really wants to build a great Russia for all Russian peoples, and killing all Russian peoples in nuclear holocaust doesn't quite fit into these plans. And he appears afraid of death (of COVID or otherwise).
And of course the best thing we can hope for is him being deposed/assassinated very quickly now. I think that is possible, but I have no idea how likely. Clearly you don't stay an authoritarian leader for 22 years without preparing for the possibility. But also clearly apart from a few of his trusted siloviki NO ONE expected him doing THAT, and NO ONE expected that the West would react like THAT. Lives of everyday Russians will be devastated as well by collapse of entire industries, ruble freefalling, new Iron Curtain starting to fall, and I think it is actually likely that we could see really huge protests. The thing about Putin's Russia is that it mostly hasn't been all that bad for people at all. That's why he was tolerated and any protests always were relatively small; people actually had a lot to lose. Now they won't. The world is also much more interconnected than it was in the times Iran or North Korea became pariah states; just imagine losing microchips import in 2022.
But of course everything changes now in a matter of hours, so who knows? At least it's a good thing I emigrated 4 years ago, even though back then politics was the last thing on my mind. I'm afraid of anti-Russian sentiment abroad now (and hopefully the West won't start deporting all Russians), but well, for now let's at least hope there's no WWIII.
>you can still see in pictures and videos the ridiculously long table which he uses now.
It is not an important issue, but I have to ask what do Russians think about the long tables?
I assumed I was seeing photoshopped images, I was shocked these were official Russian released photographs and the tables are comically long. Even in photos with top military staff who Putin must have trust in. Is there any official explanation or is it ever talked about officially?
At least when he was talking with Macron there actually was an official explanation of Macron having refused to take a COVID test in Russia. But currently he is talking to his own ministers also using a ridiculously long table (actually a different one)... I can't help thinking it might also be for making it more difficult to aim, if one of his people suddenly decides to shoot him with their handgun. Or maybe he's thinking of the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, which was done with a bomb under a conference table.
The thing I don't understand is that if it is about avoiding assassination risks, why not just do video meeting in those government meeting rooms with the giant screens, and have a few real people in the room you actually trust so it doesn't look too weird. That would look fairly normal, especially post-Covid. I wouldn't think twice about it.
The crazy tables just make think, holy cow, our government doesn't even trust its own high level officials?
I've heard the conspiracy theory that Putin is not actually vaccinated against COVID – officially he's had 3 shots but he didn't do it live on TV as other heads of state did; there is no video of it. So, given his age, he's now absolutely terrified of getting COVID.
Even if he IS vaccinated, why take chances?
They do look a little silly, but of all the things he's been doing lately the long tables make sense. Especially if they already have them in inventory.
The most absurd part of it is that before the war, he could probably get Crimea peacefully (which is strategically important for Russia, and not really attached to Ukraine by anything other than a historical accident). Now he'll be lucky if he can get the sanctions lifted without paying reparations.
"Father of the nation" indeed.
Didn't he already get Crimea mostly peacefully in 2014?
De facto he did, sure. Getting it internationally acknowledged, getting a properly negotiated land corridor etc could stabilize the situations for multiple decades, and I don't think that was diplomatically out of the question (especially if phrased as giving Crimea some kind of autonomy, instead of outright annexation). NATO would of course throw a shitfit but an independent Ukrainian government (lol) could agree to it.
Right now he has a good chance of losing Crimea permanently, drastically weakening Russia around the Black Sea.
I see, thanks for the explanation.
I'm Russian still living in Russia. Congratulation on getting out of here, btw.
I think your original model is still pretty valid. I think the missing part is that Putin was originally counting on his army on the Ukranian border being an impressive threat that will make the West concede some of the pressure and stop applying new sanctions which could be pretty troublesome for his close friends. Basically he wanted the same thing that worked for Lukashenko with migration crisis: make the West fold due to the fear of an irrational dictator.
But Putin's move failed. Removing the sanctions was not a point that the West wanted to concede. And then he had only two options. Either fold himself, or double down. I can imagine the rationalization according to which double downing makes more sense. If he returned his troops it would mean that his threats are not credible, that harsh response to his provocation is the right thing to do. And he couldn't afford such a thing, it would ruin his main political strategy. But mainly, I think the final decision to attack was made due to much mundane reasons. At some moment he just asked his generals whether they can do it. And his generals did what they used to do: said what Putin wanted to hear.
> If he returned his troops it would mean that his threats are not credible, that harsh response to his provocation is the right thing to do.
The part I can't get my head around is that Russian diplomats and representatives were swearing on their mother's graves Russia would absolutely never invade. Almost literally right up to the point where troops were dropped into the capital of Ukraine.
Well I count it as an evidence in favour of "originally planning not to invade, but then invading out of spite" hypothesis. The diplomats got debriefed what to say and they kept doing it till the bitter end, even after the true intentions changed.
As I understand that, the threat was supposed to work like that: "We are definetely not invading, you paranoid, doublestandarded russiaphobes! Have you heard about all these time USA invaded other countries, btw? Still we have an army on the border. And do you know that our army is very powerful? No of course we are not invading. But if we invaded we would definetely win. So you shouldn't provoke us, if you catch our meaning". Such double talk is very representative of Putins regime.
Ah, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" tactic? Saying "We can either be good people who don't deserve sanctions and whom you negotiate with and who would never invade, or we can be bad people who deserve sanctions and whom you won't negotiate with and who will invade. Your choice."
> Basically he wanted the same thing that worked for Lukashenko with migration crisis: make the West fold due to the fear of an irrational dictator.
As far as I know migration crisis ended with some reputation loss to Poland and some dead migrants, but "make the West fold" has not happened.
Ironically, Poland solved it by increased oppression that was legally and ethically dubious - but it actually worked. (still not sure what was the proper action here...)
And right now we are building fence across Belarusian border.
I suspect that adding ant-tank ditch to it may be a worthwhile upgrade.
I think Putin might have read too much into the quick collapse of the Afghan government. He saw a government that had support from the US collapse in a matter of 2 days. And maybe he actually believes that the Ukrainian government are a corrupt drug gang. This made him think it would be a very quick win and then the West would just eventually shrug and accept the new situation.
I think this wasn't a completely crazy prediction, but, well, turns out Ukraine is not Afghanistan. Now he's stuck with this war he can't win without enormous cost (both politically and monetary).
I personally thought in mid-February that Putin would do _something_ – he wouldn't just gather troops for nothing – but I thought he would just occupy DPR/LPR. I really did not expect him to go for the whole of Ukraine.
Yeah, I predicted the "peacekeepers" but said I'd be mildly surprised if Putin actually went for Ukraine entire, simply because taking the Donbass already got/would get him his respect.
So I'm having to re-assess my model of Putin too.
Very interesting post, thank you.
"and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia."
Such as? I've found it really odd hearing leftist commentators like Michael Tracey and Kyle Kulinski bash Democrats for "Russiagate", as if all the speculations regarding Russia (and its connections to the Trump campaign) have since been conclusively disproven. They haven't - far from it. I'd have thought the events of the past week would put an end to such smug dismissiveness.
The original sources for a lot of that stuff have now been indicted for lying to the FBI.
But it still hasn't been "conclusively disproven" – and "far from it"! There's still a chance!
I'm unclear how "the events of the past week" would be related to 'Russiagate' tho.
You're unclear how the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is related to allegations surrounding Russia's involvement in the 2016 US elections?
Yes – particularly how the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is evidence for or against 'Russiagate', except, possibly, in some kind of convoluted 'everything is correlated' argument. But I still can't imagine any even somewhat concrete 'correlated' argument.
I'm not claiming that I haven't heard or read whatever argument(s) you might have in mind – I just don't know which one(s) that/they might be.
To be fair, from my remove (and because of my indifference), I'm skeptical of all kinds of claims that might seem like strong evidence to others. (I don't trust any of the people involved to make honest statements about this or anything like it.)
If you're skeptical of all claims that might seem like strong evidence to others, you don't sound like a very worthwhile conversation partner to me.
"all kinds of X" is an idiom that implies a wide variety and is not equivalent to "all X"
You could explain the connection if it's something other than the Russian government being part of both.
Is this relationship supposed to be self-evident? If Russia installed Trump as president, why'd they wait till over a year after he was out of office to invade Ukraine? I don't think Russia's timeline revolves around America's domestic politics.
That there is a relationship at all should be self-evident. The specific nature of the relationship is up for debate.
Saying "Russia installed Trump as president" is a strong statement, and not one that I made or would make. Putin definitely wanted Trump to win, and for obvious reasons, and he definitely put his finger on the scale. Whether it actually altered the election outcome is also up for debate.
I have no definitive answer as to why Putin invaded when he did. I've heard his military wasn't adequately prepared from some, including John Bolton. I don't know, but he was probably considering many different factors. I agree that American domestic politics were likely not a dominant factor, so I don't understand why you're asking the question. I think you're jumping to incorrect conclusions about what my views are.
With that said, the notion that Joe Biden being president rather than Donald Trump makes it easier for Putin to invade is laughable. I'm not a big Biden fan by any means, but under him the coordinated response with European countries has been tremendous. I don't know to what degree that can actually be credited to Biden, but I know that other European countries did not respect or trust Trump, and his antics very well could have impeded similar coordination from occurring had he been president instead. That, or maybe he would've outright opposed the sanctions - he had a tendency of objecting to Russian sanctions while he was in office.
I think there can be reasons that Russia would prefer Trump to Clinton that have nothing to do with whether they thought they could manipulate him or not. I think a pretty rational decision for Putin preferring Trump over Clinton may simply be how badly Clinton seemed to want to escalate tensions with Russia.
We can certainly see that now, with her giving interviews advocating for the US providing a no-fly zone over Ukraine (which is insane imo), but she was also loudly in favor of no-fly zones over Syria if I recall correctly. Further, Trump was loudly (and uniquely) against foreign wars and for domestic investment in American workers. Even Biden has had to cede ground on these issues, given how popular they proved. And again, this is in direct opposition to Clinton, who at the time was still preaching about the benefits of NATO and international trade.
From my perspective, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that "most" of the Russia allegations connected to Trump seemed to be exaggerated or fabricated. What remained seemed about as serious as, say, the Clinton email scandal. Which is not to say "totally un-concerning," but certainly eye-roll-worthy from most sources. So when I hear someone talk about Russiagate, I tend to agree with the general feeling that it was largely a thing that needed "debunking" for most Democrats.
Mostly, I find the debate about Trump vs. Biden's level of culpability to be uninteresting and missing a fundamental point; the American public wasn't paying attention to the NATO crisis in Ukraine because we were obsessed with our own domestic dramas, and so we allowed leaders of both parties to make increasingly stupid blunders on the world stage. If Americans were paying attention to actual policy instead of useless cultural bickering, then maybe both Trump and Biden would've been forced into having and communicating a more coherent international strategy.
But we Americans have recently been very bad at self-examination and self-correction, so instead we're already using our time trying to blame the other team for the situation we all helped create. I really hope we don't make similar mistakes going forward.
What stuff are you referring to here?
https://mate.substack.com/p/indicted-clinton-lawyer-hired-crowdstrike?s=r
And yet the FBI, CIA, every friendly foreign intelligence agency, plus the bipartisan Republican-led Senate intelligence committee report from 2020, continue to assert with certainty that Russia was behind the DNC (and RNC) hacks. It's unbelievable that people still cling on to these petty politically-motivated indictments on technicalities as if they actually bring into serious doubt the broad consensus conclusion on this matter. You're in wild conspiracy territory.
My impression is there's a core of definitely true stuff (eg Russia was sponsoring a lot of pro-Trump Facebook ads), a periphery of stuff that seemed plausible but didn't pan out (the "Trump's servers connecting to Russian servers" thing, the piss tape, etc) and a giant lunatic fringe of people who spent several years calling everyone who disagreed with them paid Russian agents.
I agree with that impression. The odd thing to me is bundling that all together and calling it "Russiagate". It's throwing many perfectly good babies out with the bathwater. It remains genuinely concerning that Trump had Paul Manafort working for him and that he withheld arms to drag Ukraine into a fabricated US electoral scandal. Did anybody watch the impeachment testimonies? He was privately undermining the consensus US foreign policy agenda, trying to weaken NATO (he was NOT trying to strengthen NATO, do not even get me started), offering consistent praise for Putin's bad behavior, and actively destabilizing our own country.
The Mueller report did not disconfirm any of this. I have never understood why it was so widely dismissed. It had a limited scope, and simply failed to find conclusive evidence of coordination or election fraud by Trump's campaign. It was mired by false testimony and missing information, and it said as much in the report. When Mueller issued it, he made it pretty clear that what they did find was alarming. Everything we know continues to seem consistent with Trump acting to further Russian foreign policy goals. In light of that, I don't think it makes sense to make the focus be the fringe conspiracies.
> It remains genuinely concerning that Trump ... withheld arms to drag Ukraine into a fabricated US electoral scandal
Without necessarily disagreeing with the rest of it, do you think it's fair to call it a "fabricated" scandal?
I think it's pretty fair to ask questions about influence peddling when the US Vice-President's son starts landing board seats on Ukranian oil companies despite zero knowledge of Ukraine or the oil industry. In a country with a functioning news media, those questions would have been asked.
Yes, 100%. Be real. It was absolutely not just innocently asking questions; it was demanding the *announcement* of a formal investigation based on nothing beyond speculation. It was clearly just mudslinging to help Trump's re-election chances. It is painfully clear that he cared about PR impact more than any legitimate investigation (because he himself knew there wasn't any there there!). Actually look into the evidence and background of Ukraine, Shokin, and our long-standing foreign policy strategy there, and you'll realize that Trump and his allies were intentionally distorting the facts to make it look like Biden's involvement was suspicious, when it was in fact exactly in line with the interests of the State Department.
I think it is fair to ask why Hunter Biden was working for Burisma, and I was always pretty sure it was indeed an everyday case of corrupt nepotism. That would be bad, make no mistake about it. I'm not trying to handwave that away. But it's an awfully rich allegation coming from *Donald Trump* of the *Trump Family*, and he went about handling it in precisely the wrong way if what he truly wanted was to address it through a legitimate legal process.
As US intelligence claims regarding Russia and Ukraine have been borne out the past week, I'm beginning to wonder whether Hunter Biden was actually there to perform a legitimate role in combatting/monitoring Ukrainian corruption or strengthening western business ties. I have no idea, but I think it's worth considering. It never made sense to me that Biden would expose himself to such blatantly bad PR (Hunter's position at Burisma was always public info) for the small benefit of granting his son, who already held a cushy job, another cushy job.
> fair to ask questions about influence peddling when the US Vice-President's son starts landing board seats on Ukranian oil companies despite zero knowledge of Ukraine or the oil industry
Yes, it's entirely fair to ask those questions. Do you think there was no coverage of it in the media at all?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/05/14/hunter-bidens-new-job-at-a-ukrainian-gas-company-is-a-problem-for-u-s-soft-power/
https://time.com/2964493/ukraine-joe-biden-son-hunter-burisma/
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/13/bidens-son-joins-ukraine-gas-companys-board-of-directors.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27403003
> The odd thing to me is bundling that all together and calling it "Russiagate". It's throwing many perfectly good babies out with the bathwater.
But which is which? The objective, for far too many, was not to understand the truth but to discredit Donald J. Trump. If the truth is that Russia's leaders cynically decided that a Trump presidency (or more plausibly a weakened Hillary one) best served Russia's interests, and had their propagandists act accordingly, that doesn't discredit Trump. I suspect the Russian government preferred Obama to Romney, I suspect there was at least some Russian propaganda to that effect, and this is rightly perceived as irrelevant to Obama's legitimacy or reputation.
It's only if Trump colluded with Russia to obtain that favorable propaganda that Trump is discredited. So the truth of Russia's private support for Trump gets bundled with a dubious narrative of Trump/Putin collusion, and a nice juicy "piss tape" rumor, to get something that had at least a bit of truthiness to it.
"Trump is Putin's man in the White House" was the precious baby. Evidence of actual Russian meddling in the campaign, is the bathwater that kept that baby clean enough to be marginally presentable.
Well good for those people whose objective was to discredit Donald Trump. My objective was to understand the truth, and the truth seems to be that Donald Trump hired distinctly pro-Russian people to lead his 2016 campaign, welcomed shady Russian assistance without ever notifying the FBI, publicly blamed Ukraine for that election interference despite personally knowing that was untrue, and then repeatedly lied and obstructed the ensuing investigation. Afterwards, while president, he tried to blackmail Ukraine into announcing a frivolous investigation of his political opponent, and he repeatedly lied about that as well. All the while he's spoken of Putin's character and actions is bizarrely positive terms, even during the past week.
To normal people without any agenda, that all sounds rather suspicious. Only weirdo Trump acolytes treat all of that as fine and dandy and totally unsuspicious.
The core of "Russiagate" where Russia wanted Trump to win and Trump's campaign leadership actively embraced Russian help) has been shown to be literally-literally correct, right?
Yes. But some people choose to ignore that because pretending as if 'Russiagate' were just a bunch of pee-tape conspiracies apparently fits their narrative better.
Would this be counterbalanced by the fact that China wanted Clinton to win?
Based purely on their campaign rhetoric, it would be natural for China to prefer Clinton over Trump, just as it was natural for Russia to prefer Trump over Clinton. The key difference is that, unlike Russia, China didn't carry out a concerted disinformation campaign with the aim of changing our well-established foreign policy strategy to better accommodate its own expansionary interests. What do you even mean by "counterbalanced"?
> China didn't carry out a concerted disinformation campaign
What makes you think it didn't?
The complete lack of evidence. I mean they probably did do what they could behind the scenes to promote a favorable result, but I've never even heard it alleged that they carried out a concerted disinformation campaign, let alone seen evidence for that allegation.
But weren't you just above complaining about people dismissing things about Trump/Russia that hadn't been proven or disproven?
The sting of "Russia wanted Trump to win and Trump's campaign leadership embraced Russian help[1]" is not the first part, it's the second part.
[1] I am not endorsing the second part, but merely explaining.
IMO, the core of it was "Trump is in debt to Putin through Deutsche Bank". With the core evidence being when Trump Jr proudly declared to a crowd that the Trumps are funded by Russia, plus the fact that both Trump and Russia do business with the bank, and the bank is allegedly shady. And the fact that Trump never misses a chance to kiss Putin's butt (even now). AFAIK, that theory never got disproven, it just got forgotten after the useless Mueller report.
I've never heard any of those parts of the "theory".
"Both do business with Deutsche Bank" seems a ridiculously long bow to draw, it's the biggest bank in Germany, and no more or less shady than any other huge first-world bank.
Basically, it's 100% known that Deutsche Bank has laundered billions for Russian oligarchs, and also made really stupid loans to Trump that other banks were declining. Some people speculated this is what Mueller's grand jury was investigating; the grand jury was investigating and fining some foreign financial institution $50k per day for not providing some financial records.
But yeah, without any actual evidence linking those 2 activities, it's just one more conspiracy theory.
I always saw the core issue being what Adam said. "Trump is in debt to Putin through Deutsche Bank" is just one particular theory of many for *why* Trump was behaving in ways beneficial to Putin. Could definitely be true, but I've only ever heard speculation.
I guess my impression is skewed by the time I spent trying to follow the Mueller investigation. And it's been 5 years now, Jesus...
Some impressions based on UA & RU telegram channels, Russian imageboard 2ch, and having the whole thing happen ~1000 km from where I'm writing:
- The few extra days before shelling of cities started saved millions of lives. Poland is accepting ~100k refugees _per day_, with a surprisingly competent governmental response and a lot of citizen initiative. Random people are driving from across the country to transport refugees to their destinations - around 80% have a friend or family in Poland, the rest gets temporary shelter. Charities collecting goods for the refugees are overflowing, sometimes stopping the collection midway because they have no way to distribute all the stuff they already received. The humanitarian situation is as good as it can be given the circumstances.
- The Ukrainians really are ridiculously good at fighting. I don't know how much of their effectiveness is NATO-provided training and equipment, but I'm constantly surprised, given the economic and organizational clusterfuck the country was before the war. I don't think the West is overhyping their effectiveness at all tbh, the results speak for themselves.
- The Russian invading force is full of confused reservists and their logistics are atrocious. Siege of Kyiv seems nearly impossible at the moment because the sieging force would run out of supplies faster than the city.
- Russian soldiers are defecting en masse. This is not surprising - they sent 19 year old boys to roll tanks over civilians that are culturally almost the same as the family they left at home, and speak their language.
- Russian economy is in complete freefall, and Russians are noticing. If Russia wasn't an authoritarian state where dissent is crushed, Putin would be forced to resign. It may still happen. Tech-savvy users are scrambling to buy computer parts while they're still on the market, getting foreign currency is near impossible, anyone who had clients in the West is super fucked.
- Russia is run by oligarchs (so was Ukraine tbh), who just lost pretty much everything they had. I'd imagine they're not happy about the whole thing, and they're searching for solutions.
The Ukrainians have been practicing fighting in earnest since 2014. I guess western support (and training) plus an occupying force can sharpen some minds?
Not the whole population. They are not Switzerland or Israel with a fully armed population ready for total mobilization at a moment's notice, with regular refresher training in the use of firearms and explosives. Then agin neither were the defenders of Stalingrad.
Yep. I was about as wrong as anyone in thinking that Putin was content in being a pragmatic overseer of a kleptocracy. Seems like for some reason he decided to hard pivot into full-blown irredentist nationalism, no matter the costs. Economically this implies absolute reliance on China, which likely wouldn't support any serious embargoes, but would obviously make the most of its superior bargaining position by wringing Russia dry, to the cackling delight of the West.
> Poland is accepting ~100k refugees _per day_, with a surprisingly competent governmental response and a lot of citizen initiative.
I am positively surprised by my country. Note that 100 000 was on 28th February and it was increasing each day so far, with more and more streamlining (for example Ukraine at some point completely stopped passport control for woman and children).
I think, weird as it sounds, the Ukrainians were low-level fucked up rather than high-level fucked up.
In that people were doing lots of little corruption etc every day, but still were more or less of the view that it was wrong, it was just what was necessary to get by.
And thus, if you do something like invade them, they get their shit together, because that's important and (perhaps most importantly) there's not really a way to be small-scale corrupt in an existential war - it's all large scale, because even if what you're actually doing is small scale if it makes the country lose the war that's large-scale.
I'm not so sanguine.
People don't suddenly turn into angels just because someone worse appears.
Many in Ukraine and around are still just as corrupt (and racist) as before. And I expect to see reports of corruption later.
You do have a point that an existential crisis tends to sharpen minds and bring focus.
Reading diaries and memories of people who survived II WW had plenty of cases where people becoming collaborators and basically murdering people (happened not so often - in part because Germans considered them subhumans anyway) and plenty of people actually suddenly able to heroic sacrifice.
There were cases like raging anti-semites risking life to protect Jews. Because while they wanted deportation and discrimination - but murdering people, including children, was too much.
(OT, but why the abbreviation of "II WW"? I've seen it for years but never could figure it out.)
II is 2 in roman numerals, ww is short for world war
Yes, but everyone else says "WWII" or "WW II". Why "II WW"?
Pretty much all democracy indices (Polity V, Freedom House etc) give Ukraine much higher democracy scores than Russia. Ukraine is a flawed democracy, Russia is an outright autocracy.
The statement "Putin is a brutal but rational mind" should be "Putin has so far been a brutal and rational mind."
Why is Karlin's Regathering... the canonical essay for understanding Putin? Is it a matter of fact or of style?
"Canonical" is a strong word, but I meant to imply that Karlin is in a good position to know his stuff (ie Russian with an interest in this philosophy), it's well-written and thoughtful, it matches the things Putin's been saying in his speeches, and it did in fact predict what Putin did.
Something I thought was really interesting is John Mearsheimer’s prediction (Russia doesn’t invade because the Ukrainian nationalism will result in too much insurgency for Russia to hold Ukraine profitably) combined with Putin / akarlin rhetoric (Ukrainians will enjoy being gathered back up and are one people, broadly speaking).
I think this explains the reason Putin did invade, and also why so many people didn’t think he would - the costs they assumed he’d bear are not costs Putin thought he’d bear.
I’d recommend Mearsheimer generally - fantastic mind despite this miss.
John Mearsheimer is well regarded, but I also find McFaul's critique of the realist framework compelling. McFaul argues that the framing of Russia-US relations as zero-sum overfits for the Putin years, and doesn't explain well the 2009-2012 period when the two countries successfully cooperated under Medvedev. McFaul argues that domestic incentives might better account for Russia's posture and its collision course with the US, especially since Putin's re-election to a constitution-defying third term in 2012.
Sorry I couldn't find a non-paywalled version: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/eastern-europe-caucasus/2014-10-17/faulty-powers?utm_medium=social
Could you do a bit about the "Russia Hoax".
It seems there is a weak vs. a strong version and while the strong was is disproven the weak one has been confirmed.
Strong version: Trump was a Putin puppet being controlled through Kompromat and was taking orders from Russia.
This is where the pee tape and all that comes in.
Weak version: Russia saw Trump's victory as better for their policy preferences. Russia had its intelligence agencies hack the campaigns. Russia hacked both the Trump and the Clinton campaigns but only the emails from Clinton's campaign manager were given over to Wikileaks. Wikileaks then did the Trump campaign a solid favor by releasing the emails a few hours after the access Hollywood tape and making sure to release them in a continuous stream of small news nuggets for the next three weeks to dominate the news cycle.
We know the weak version is true, the question has always been how much did the Trump campaign know about it and how much did they actively work with Russia in the execution.
I would like to hear your thoughts as too many of the rest of substack made their bones by being "Anti Russia is just exaggerated neoliberal hype" aka Michael Tracy or Matt taibbi and the applicability of that heuristic has been called into question.
Facebook had a lot more to do with Trump's victory. They offered valuable data science advice for free to both campaigns in exchange for sweet, sweet political ad revenue, only Trump took up their offer, and ruthlessly targeted left-leaning voters in battleground states to induce them to abstain instead of holding up their noses, the rest is history.
The Russians were more focused on exploiting and amplifying fault lines in US society to weaken us generally. Like that episode where they induced right-wingers in Houston to go protest in front of a mosque armed with assault rifles, because, Texas, and at the same time encouraged counter-protesters to go there, clearly hoping for a blood bath to happen.
You don't have to assume Trump's deliberate complicity with Russia, the Russians clearly thought as president he would weaken the country, and have been cultivating him and pandering to his ego for a long time. When he fired Comey, I revised my priors, then revised them back when the Mueller report came out. Trump is often his own worst enemy.
The intelligence community is certainly concerned about him, and not all of it is due to Democratic political operatives (I seriously doubt the IC as a whole is a hotbed of liberal activism, apart possibly for a handful of top-level political appointees). The reports of Neustar executives using its access to the White House DNS server logs to fish for compromising information show it is an effort from outside the IC.
I basically agree with your assessment, but I haven't been following it enough to have an informed opinion.
You probably should do a bit on it.
Being a commentator on substack means that people are going to put you into a box with Glenn greenwald, Matt taibbi, Michael Tracy and others who have hilariously bad takes on Russia especially where it intersects with US politics.
As far as I know, you don't really have a take on Russian election interference in 2016, but I think, absent you actually filling that void, people will assume you do have a take and that it's bad.
That seems like an incredibly bad reason for Scott to start publishing takes on things.
Was it ever "confirmed" that Russia had anything to do with the email leak, or was that just a Democrat narrative?
I remember arguing at the time that Russian intelligence involvement seemed very unlikely simply due to the meagre and relatively unembarrassing nature of what was leaked. I thought that if Russian intelligence wanted to start leaking stuff to embarrass the Clintons then it would be the _really_ good dirt, like the 30,000 deleted messages from her bathroom email server. After hearing so much about Russian cyber capabilities I thought surely they could do better than a bunch of random DNC emails from the account of a guy whose password was supposedly "passw0rd".
My estimation of the capabilties of the Russian state have gone down somewhat over the last week, but I'm still skeptical of Russian involvement in the DNC hack. Has any compelling evidence come to light since I stopped paying attention?
Off the top of my head, the Senate intelligence committee report confirmed that the hackers of the DNC were a Russian group.
You are right that what they got was a nothing burger, but they also knew that putting them in a news bun, labelled "fresh Clinton emails" would still cause the American media ecosystem to lap it up anyway. Wikileaks didn't have to release them a 2000 at a time for 20+ days if the purpose was clarity and government transparency. Release them all, let people pick them over, the few embarrassing ones get a magazine article and a story on A5 as there wasn't much embarrassing. (Clinton campaign was upset Bernie hadn't dropped out yet. Shocking!)
But, if the purpose was to get "Clinton emails" to dominate the news cycle for the month of October as a massive boost to the Trump campaign then the 2000 emails every day approach is perfect. The content didn't matter just the headline. People were primed to believe already.
At the time the major Russian campaign-meddling was taking place, the probability of a Trump win was sufficiently remote that Russia's actions were more plausibly an attempt to undermine the nigh-inevitable Hillary Clinton presidency than to actually put Donald Trump in office. Note that their propaganda and espionage was mostly anti-Hillary hedged with a bit of anti-Trump, not actually pro-either.
That is plausible. Though I'm not sure it makes much difference.
In WW2, no one outside if China thought that the Chinese Communists could actually win the Chinese civil war.
The USSR however helped them anyway by allowing them to seize Japanese weapon stocks in Northeast China as leverage against what they saw as a possibly hostile Republic of China.
That said, the help was absolutely crucial to their victory.
Anyway, the ambiguity about all of it is why I woukd love to see a ten thousand word well researched Scott Alexander post on Russian election interference now that most people involved are out of office.
The weak version isn't even true. It omits that the Steele Dossier was also a Russian intelligence action, which then successfully undermined the Trump administration. They were playing both sides.
I'm guessing it is less a strong Ukrainian resistance and more Putin pulling punches and trying to avoid "shock and awe" that would level Kyiv and other major population centers. He had no scruples like that in Chechnya or Syria, with much more decisive outcomes. Extremely low morale of the troops who are not eager to fight their kin is not helping, either. This may change and soon, though.
I agree with you. This remains a fairly asymmetrical war in which the two belligerents have very different goals, thus different strategies and executions: Ukraine is fighting against a foreign invader and a perceived threat on its survival. Russia is using military force in a very Clausewitzian form: "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means" and "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will".
This means that Ukraine is throwing at the invader all the firepower it could muster, using all available means to it, including all forms of propaganda. This gives the impression that the Ukraine is "winning" and that Russia is "failing". The Russians, on the other hand, seem to be trying to minimize civilian casualties and general collateral damage, and are trying to achieve their political goals less with overwhelming force than with strategically applied pressure, to bring Zelynsky to the negotiations table.
One reason analysis why so many people predicted that Russia will win quickly may be that those pundits made an implicit assumption that if Russia invaded they would follow their own standard doctrine which involves much higher levels of violence - including against civilians. I.E. you break their forecast down into two parts a) Russia will follow their doctrine, and b) if they follow their doctrine they will win quickly.
At this point we see they got part "a" wrong but we don't yet know if part "b" is wrong. If Russia steps up their violence to doctrinaire levels, only then will we get real evidence about part b. If it works, then b is more plausible, if it fails then b is less plausible. (Although in either case you could still argue that the initial lower level agression changed the situation and thus the likelihood of b being right - if b fails even after doctrinaire levels of aggression then maybe it's because the initial lower agression phase gave Ukraine space to establish it's resistance; b succeedscwith higher levels of agression maybe it's because the initial lower level agression didn't win but did wear down critical parts of Ukrainian capabilities and got Russian troops much closer to cities so b was done in more favorable conditions.)
Regarding Luttwak, he forgot Putin is a spook, not someone with military experience, and civilian leaders constantly overestimate what military power can achieve.
Annapurna on LessWrong asked on 23 December 2021 for possible financial actions if you expected Russia to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEsqKFabffwKXAPso/hedging-the-possibility-of-russia-invading-ukraine
And by 23 Jan appears to have bet on the prospect:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEsqKFabffwKXAPso/hedging-the-possibility-of-russia-invading-ukraine?commentId=fXT8PNm7tsrEBjHfS
5k to win 33k in a prop bet is a pretty good return!
Looking back at those guesses, a lot of those calls did go up, but were really sensitive to timing. Brent oil the best play, but not purely driven by the invasion, it just steadily went up for the last few months. (Definitely spiking on 25 Feb, sure.)
Some of the others barely went up, or (natural gas) bounced around so much any gains would be really sensitive to timing.
I still think it's interesting that even if you confidently knew the future in January, it's still not obvious how to adjust investments.
If you think Putin will back down and retreat in the coming weeks, what would you do?
If you think Putin will expand the invasion to Poland in the coming weeks, how would you hedge?
I'm not sure there are obvious answers. Bet on direct outcomes I guess.
"But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, Zelenskyy was saying everything would be okay."
It's an assumption that this was a miscalculation. What was the alternative? Telling everyone an invasion was imminent? How long can you keep that up? What does it do to morale? And aren't you feeding into Putin's propaganda then? Out of the set of options available to him, quietly preparing for it militarily while calming the public was perhaps the least terrible one.
I thought the same. It’s not clear how Zelensky’s decision to downplay the risk of war meaningfully worsened Ukraine’s position. Calling it a miscalculation feels needlessly critical, and even a bit misleading in the context of discussing Putin’s own probable blunders.
Also, Ukraine likely knows it needs to play the geopolitical sympathy angle to some degree. Any proclamation that they are preparing for war only risks making them sound more like a willing participant, potentially.
Exactly
Keeping it quiet limits the number of things you can do to prepare, though. For instance, the mobilization of their reserves was only announced a day before the war started. Probably that was because Ukraine didn't want to do anything that could be seen as provocative, but if Russia hadn't screwed up for the first few days the delay could have really cost them. (Maybe it did cost them, I don't know how long a mobilization takes.)
It seems to me that if you want to look at predictions, you have to divide them between (1) Russian objectives and (2) Stuff that might happen anyway.
Russian objectives are clear, and very limited, and Putin set them out very clearly. The first is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and that has already largely been achieved. Their command, control and communications are dead and the air force is grounded or destroyed. Most of their Army is deployed fighting the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass, and they are now being surrounded by Russian troops. They will either surrender, in which case the Russians will let them go, keeping the equipment, or try to escape on foot leaving the equipment. If they try to fight their way out they will be annihilated because the Russians have total air superiority. So the war in the Donbass region will end because the Ukrainians will have no weapons to fight with.
The second is a purging of extreme nationalists from the government and the capture of nationalist militias like the Azov battalion. The Russians are believed to have lists of names, and in practice most of these people will be running fast if they don't want to be put on trial for atrocities alleged in the Donbass. This will ensure a Ukrainian government which is weak and is respectful of Russia - much the status quo before 2014 but enhanced.
On the other hand, there's no point, it seems to me, in predicting what might happen by accident or outside the scope of planning. Too many people are assuming that this campaign will imitate the US in Iraq, annihilating everything they come across; But the actual forces the Russians have used are quite small, and their tactics have been to minimise collateral damage. We know the Russians aren't interested in capturing territory or cities and have taken no steps to do so. They will apply pressure by surrounding and entering cities if they can, but as good Clausewitzians, they know that military operations have to support the political objective. They have no political interest in destroying Ukraine, which they want as an ally, if a rather reluctant one.
Finally, I don't think the judgement of a week ago that the Russians would not invade was wrong at the time; the Russians believed that (slightly) reinforcing their forces on and near the border would concentrate Zelensky's mind and get them their objectives. After he began talking about acquiring nuclear weapons at Munich, the Russians decided that that was it, and there was no further hope with this government, under western control. They had a contingency plan and pressed the button to go. Some things are yes/no and can't be reduced to probabilities.
> Russian objectives are clear, and very limited, and Putin set them out very clearly. The first is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and that has already largely been achieved.
Unless I missed something Russian are trying to take capital of Ukraine, which indicates that while Ukraine is clearly losing - but they are still defending quite well.
> Russian objectives are clear, and very limited
Complete takeover of large country is not "very limited" goal.
The other reason no one predicted both an invasion and a strong resistance is that everyone, left and right, is using a rational actor frame that assumed that a necessary condition for Russia choosing to invade would be it had rationally assessed the risk of not doing so well as minimal. If I have learnt anything it is that the sad truth is that even when we think we are not using rational actor frames we usually are- there are really only two ways to predict behaviour - extrapolation from past behaviour and rational actor models.
Worth considering the opposite on the fertility hypothesis, that the childless are better able to commit themselves to abstract causes and more likely to seek glory, hence better partisans.
As for why war nerd makes up songs and "what is wrong with him" it's worth remembering this isn't it tennis. People die because of Hawks all the time and Gary sees that close up. It's very natural for him to want to retaliate in any way he can beyond mere polite expression of disagreement , e.g. satire. Even if you find this unpardonable it is understandable.
For myself, I thought there was a 50 percent chance of invasion, and a 20 percent chance of good conventional military resistance by Ukraine, so I did poorly. I give myself points though for having made the meta prediction that predictions were foolish in this instance, and thus not having made any publicly.
I think we should be wary of the Ukraine resistance narrative. Russia can’t afford to engage in the kind of atrocities that the US or it’s allies can, because of the way the world media works. If Russia was to engage in a starvation play like Yemen it would actually be reported as an atrocity.
From day one with the Russians not taking Kyiv it was condemned as a failure, but when was a capital city taken on one day? Where was the ukranian defence before that?
> If Russia was to engage in a starvation play like Yemen it would actually be reported as an atrocity.
Russia's reputation is already done for in the media - just look how much of the people usually defending their position have shut up and/or massively condemned the war. What I'm wondering is, what would happen if Russia tries starvation tactics or outright bombings? It seems the world community has cut the line for interference pretty clearly at stopping at the Ukraine. Sanction-wise we pretty much already nuked Russia, so the only step up I see would be direct engagement, but due to MAD this seems unlikely.
> What I'm wondering is, what would happen if Russia tries starvation tactics or outright bombings? [...] Sanction-wise we pretty much already nuked Russia, so the only step up I see would be direct engagement, but due to MAD this seems unlikely.
There are lots of things that could happen if Putin goes all Stalin on us. For example:
Europeans increasing defence spending to 3-4% of GDP. Poland getting nukes. Total, comprehensive sanctions: no trade with Russia, no trade with anyone who trades with Russia. Merchant ships docking at Russian ports banned from using Panama and Suez canals, and liable to be seized if they ever thereafter enter the West's territorial waters.
If Putin wants to starve Ukrainians, he'd better be ready for Russia to become a larger North Korea.
Thanks for responding! But I'm not quite convinced.
> Europeans increasing defence spending to 3-4% of GDP
This would really only be effective in the long term and, as long as the EU doesn't join the war, wouldn't affect Russia.
> Poland getting nukes.
That would be *extremely* provocative and not of much use. Also, there are already nukes in and around Germany and in China, which is sufficiently close to Russia.
> Total, comprehensive sanctions: no trade with Russia, no trade with anyone who trades with Russia.
Trade with the west is (AFAIK) already down to a minimum. We can't really shut down Gas, everything else seems pretty much dead already. I mean, they can't even pay. Probably not much room to go in deeper and we can't force China (although they seem to join in already).
> Merchant ships docking at Russian ports banned from using Panama and Suez canals, and liable to be seized if they ever thereafter enter the West's territorial waters.
Turkey is already blocking war ships: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44497/turkey-blocks-warships-from-sailing-into-the-black-sea-over-war-in-ukraine
Trade, as mentioned above, is also pretty much down and flight is completely out anyway.
So from what I see, the West has already sent Russia on the way to become North Korea. We can't block other countries (at least not without risking massive problems) and going to 100% when we're already at 90% doesn't seem like a threat anymore.
Sadly, it seems they started bombing civilians seriously this night, so (unfortunately) we will see where it goes :(
>> Poland getting nukes.
>That would be *extremely* provocative and not of much use. Also, there are already nukes in and around Germany and in China, which is sufficiently close to Russia.
The value of Poland getting nukes, in this context, is not that the nukes are closer to Russia, but that the nukes are under the control of someone who will almost certainly use them to prevent and/or avenge the conquest of Poland. Russia might plausibly believe that Washington, London, and Paris would back down in the face of a megadeath threat to their own population vs "just" wimping out in Poland; Warsaw having an independent nuclear capability would change that equation dramatically.
But, as you say, it would be extremely provocative and destabilizing, and isn't likely to happen under any plausible circumstance.
> The value of Poland getting nukes, in this context, is not that the nukes are closer to Russia, but that the nukes are under the control of someone who will almost certainly use them to prevent and/or avenge the conquest of Poland.
Yes, exactly.
> it would be extremely provocative
Not really, Putin sees the very existence of the West as provocative. There's nothing we can do to satisfy him except surrendering.
"The West" (including Japan and Korea) has an enormous lever on China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China
In a coordinated action of "no trade with anyone who trades with Russia", China would have to choose between a relatively minor partner and the vast majority of its total trade. Whereas China is typically 20% or less of the total trade for its partners.
So, it could go farther. That said, China doesn't want to be a pariah state and seems to be lining up with the "allies" of its own volition.
I partially agree. The problem is that we're quite interdependent on China - we need the trading as much or more than they do. We can force their hand, but with massive problems of our own, so we can't really.
But it seems like our and Chinas interest are pretty much aligned here (war is bad for trade, after all, and Russia can't offer much right now), so it seems it won't come that far.
> we need the trading as much or more than they do
Really? Most of what they sell us appears to be cheap consumer electronics that're also manufactured in other places.
What critical goods do they sell us, that we can't easily make ourselves?
I suspect China is right now advising Russia not to escalate things. It would be really helpful if they offered Putin a bolt hole (he probably won't take it unless he feels backed into a corner).
> Trade with the west is (AFAIK) already down to a minimum. We can't really shut down Gas
We can at least prepare for that (LPG terminal in ports, Norway-Poland gas line).
We can also for example relatively easily ban coal imports as coal is much easier to move at scale replacing it.
Before Poland gets nukes, I would expect the response to a starvation of Kiev would be a Polish convoy full of food, under the Polish flag, driving into Kyiv to deliver food, possibly under Polish airpower.
Yes. It would probably start off as an unarmed convoy under the UN or red cross. If they don't let the convoy in, that's a war crime, and therefore a valid casus belli.
I mean the UN could do that, without the air power.
Much more because this war is unlike America's wars. Putin said (and may genuinely believe) that Ukrainians and Russians are one people and that Ukraine is a puppet regime of the West. In Russian media this is presented as a war for liberation, so serious atrocities would undermine the already faltering morale.
I wonder how many (professional) super forecasters were looking at this ? Even certain second order liquid markets seem a bit confusing (gold up on day of invasion, equities down; and reversing that on day 2) although possibly overall markets may not immediately be impacted by initial happenings.
Remember how we all laughed at Comical Ali, proclaiming victory after victory ever closer to Baghdad?
So what if Ukraine/Zelensky said that everything will be OK right up until the day of the invasion? That's just public statements, i.e. they wanted others to believe that they didn't believe an invasion was coming. More precisely, they probably wanted to avoid mass panic in their country, and to a lesser extent maybe they wanted Putin to think they were less prepared than they actually were (is this smart? If you're confident that you can humiliate Russia, then yes maybe. On the other hand if you really wanted to avoid war at all costs you obviously shouldn't signal weakness).
I've wondered the same thing. Even if they were 100% sure the invasion was coming, they would've probably stated the opposite in order to not provoke Russia and up the shock value.
There are some hints we might be right, like the massive resistance Russia encounters and the fact that we had similar ploys to the Iraq war (i.e. the destroyed-but-actually-not Airforce), but as long as this is an ongoing situation it probably won't be possible to find out the truth here.
Exactly. I made this point some threads ago here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold/comment/5093770?utm_source=url
Mark Ames and the War Nerd were colleagues in the 2000s at The Exile, but not the same person.
They both host the War Nerd podcast so you see the grade as judging the podcast instead of the individuals.
Thanks.
I try not to make predictions, but if I had, I probably would have gotten both aspects wrong.
"Samo is a rationalist success story and a smart guy... And he’s been careful not to say anything specific that might later get proven false... this isn’t exactly a compliment. I think it’s better optics, but worse rationality, compared to people like Karlin and Hanania who make extremely clear predictions with numbers attached, sometimes get them totally wrong, and then admit it and write thoughtful essays on how they screwed up."
To be honest this matches my general impression of his output (and this seems very much not like a compliment). I've always been somewhat confused about why he's seen as an authority (or even as generally interesting) in rationalist circles: what am I missing? This is a genuine question, so I hope it passes the true/necessary/kind test.
Great Founder Theory is something that a lot of us probably think implicitly, and borrows a lot from Scott's writing about Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient, but I'm not sure anyone actually wrote it down before Burja. That's definitely what I associate him with.
I may be utterly wrong here, and take this with a grain of salt because it's just an impression based off reading a broad array of his work and it would be difficult to elucidate specific examples: I don't exactly want to call Samo Burja a charlatan, but his "Bismarck Brief" claiming to provide "intelligence-grade analysis" (In what sense is this? Like government spy service level intelligence? What does this even mean?) has a very Leverage Research type of flavor to me, using rationality community terminology to push questionable narratives. I think his work may require to be read carefully and critically.
My takeaway from this is that people don't make predictions to predict the future. They make them to express an opinion without having to actually state it clearly.
One thing that made me - and possibly other people - doubt the US intelligence is that this situation is really good for the US (at least compared to everyone else involved, war is never great). The EU is closer to the US than ever, we moved away from Russian gas and trade even before the war, more countries are seriously considering to join NATO and, in the best case, the Ukraine comes closer to the EU and NATO now, which would be an immense strategic advantage. My point is, even if they weren't sure that the invasion was going to happen, it would have made sense for them to badmouth Russia and they have been caught doing similar things before. This is at least why I trusted the intel so little.
I'm not sure I follow your trail of logic to your conclusion here.
I thought Putin to be acting rationally and I definitely saw why he felt threatened by the NATO. Plus, some regions in the Ukraine are really close to Russia and not the EU. I wasn't pro-Russian, but I definitely saw their side of things.
So when I was told "look, that Putin guy is crazy and is going to start a war" by people who have a lot to gain by painting him as crazy, have (wrongly!) told the same thing before and paint the situation as black-and-white, this looked like a propaganda move and not actual intel to me.
And just to be clear, I condemn this war. I just didn't see Putin as clearly the bad guy before.
But in the counterfactual where Putin doesn't invade, what would the US gain from having falsely predicted that he would? It seems like it only works as propaganda if it's true.
It clearly degrades the relation between the EU and Russia further. Combined with Putins military show (well, we know now it's not just show, but back then), this could've easily moved the EU towards stricter sanctions. Maybe predicting the exact date was a bit overconfident - and easily spoiled and exploited by Russia -, but just saying he would would have worked. If he did not, you could still be quiet about being wrong or act like the intervention prevented it.
But you're right, now that I'm thinking deeply about the other side, them being completely mistaken would've reflected worse on them than I initially thought.
Man, I remember saying almost exactly " One of the best predictors of insurgency is having the kinds of terrain that governments cannot reach, like swamps, forests and mountains. Ukraine is the heart of the great Eurasian steppe" but it ended ended with "Iraq is a flat dessert" instead.
If Hasan is in the mix, maybe another livestreamer is worth mentioning: Vaush predicted war as likely from early on, without downplaying ukrainian resistance. Also, Glenn Greenwald is not a leftist by any stretch.
Vaush has been mighty impressive through all this
Scott, I know those aren't super serious, but please consider not using the wacky school grading scale. It's not a huge deal but they differ between countries, so it can be slightly confusing. ("What the hell is a C? Is that good or bad? About medium? Oh, it goes down to F. Wait, where's E? Somebody please invent numbers.")
Making the "Putin invades, which goes poorly" prediction would take some really big braininging. You'd essentially need to have reasons to believe that you have better understanding of Russian military strength(including in relation to Ukraine) than Putin, and *also* expect him to invade anyway *.
On Feb 1 I privately predicted 30% for the invasion and an extra 5% for the major flare-up, (without looking at markets/Matt's/Scott's**/Zvi's). I also didn't pay too much attention to the question before that point. I feel appropriately bad for my "below the markets" score but take the "very slightly better than Zvi" consolation.
* Which is especially hard given the subtlety of the situation, it seems less "russia weak, actually" and more that it turned out they needed a bigger hammer than expected, and might still be able to adjust within a few days.
** I managed on my own but I really wish the contest survey blinded the numbers for those who didn't want to see it to avoid anchoring.
> essentially need to have reasons to believe that you have better understanding of Russian military strength(including in relation to Ukraine) than Putin, and also expect him to invade anyway
Your emphasis sounds weird. Assuming for the sake of the argument that I have reasons to believe I understand the Russian military strength better than Putin, if I estimate it’s crap but that Putin thinks it’s great, there’s nothing weird about expecting him to invade anyway.
(Sure, the assumption is maybe hard to justify, but *given* the assumption the second part does not seem weirdly brainy.)
I phrased that a little strangely. The point is, a lot of people thought both that Russian army is really great(and presumably also that Putin is well aware), and that he won't invade. You'd have to disagree that russia strong, but agree on Putin's understanding of it(for different reasons), BUT disagree on invasion.
Ad absurdum, sure, if you know everything about the situation, then you can also probably predict exactly what Putin will do, but we're not talking about hypothetical omniscient people here.
I'll elaborate actually, because this is interesting to think about, and I don't want to edit the comments too much.
Imagine you believe Russian military is too weak for the instant win victory that most people seemed to be predicting. This alone isn't that strange, since we do have the one pundit in the post saying exactly this.
On top of this you also think that for some reason, Putin doesn't know this. I think we can agree that would be a pretty surprising opinion to hold, and I haven't seen anyone claim this, even though it might have been literally true.
However, the predictions for an invasion were below 50% for a while, despite the fact that the Russian military action was expected to be more effective. But imagine if the above two facts were actually the expert consensus - if everyone thought that Russia isn't that strong, then surely the invasion expectations should have been even lower, regardless of what Putin thinks(for instance, because someone in his circle might try harder to dissuade him from invading). There would be no reason for that to cause invasion expectations to be higher.
So if you believed all this, *and also* predicted an invasion to be likely, that would be quite impressive.
Who was predicting that the victory would be over in two days. There was a lot of "The Russians haven't taken Kyiv, disaster!" on day two. This is all social media contagion, and I don't think it has any leadership - it's not from Washington or the EU, just people posting stuff they know little or nothing about.
I too know little or nothing, but when the Russian troops were actually outside Kyiv on day two I though that was pretty good going, whether Kyiv is close to Belarus or not. That means there was no resistance until then, nothing at the border. And yet the fading away of the Ukrainian army at the border is shown as a great resistance.
Also the Russian army is at once not that much good at taking Ukraine, with a GDP equal to Kazakhstan, but is a major threat to Europe/ Nato - which is the GDP or the US/UK/EU( most of) and Turkey. So its Munich again.
I’m belaboring the point, just because it’s interesting to think about abstractly, not because it actually reveals something important about the situation.
What you say is true: if, counter-factually, everyone knew that Russia’s army was less effective that it was believed to be in reality, I would expect that “everyone’s” predictions of an invasion would have been lower than they were in our reality, so predicting the invasion would be “further” from consensus, despite starting from the same premises, and thus in some way more impressive.
However, in actual fact, and in the hypothetical we started from, everyone *didn’t* know that, and had a higher (though still below 50%) estimate of invasion. So if I believed Russia’s army was weak *despite* general consensus to contrary, then reaching *that* belief is impressive.
But if “consensus about low capability” raises impressiveness of “predicting an invasion”, then “absent consensus about low capability” cannot also raise impressiveness of same, regardless of what my non-consensus private opinion is about that capability, right?
Or, to say it another way: it’s impressive if you get a premise right that nobody else does, and it’s more impressive if you get two of those right. But if the structure of the situation is such that getting *only* one premise right and the other wrong would make you more wrong about the consequences does not *add* even more impressiveness to you deducing the correct consequences, since you did in fact got both premises right.
Consider reading "The Absent Superpower" by Peter Zeihan.
https://www.amazon.com/Absent-Superpower-Revolution-Without-America/dp/099850520X
He unequivocably predicted the invasion of Ukraine by Russia back in 2016
Hasn't Zeihan predicted the collapse of China and dissolution of Canada without clear dates and probabilities as well?
Correct. So he doesn't get an "A". The dissolution of Canada got a recent step in the "right" direction. Remains to be seen. But I think he gets a point for his prediction of Russian behavior
Here's a more recent take: https://zeihan.com/a-ukraine-war-and-the-end-of-russia
No longer an unequivocable prediction of war, but he seemed to think that war was decently likely. More interestingly, he thought that Ukraine would put up a good fight, saying that it would take ~3 months for Russia to take over Kiev. This could end up looking prescient, if things shake out that way.
Now do one for people predicting nuclear war.
Good example of how percentage predictions tend to be less useful for catastrophic events? If you predict there is a 1% chance of nuclear war in case so and so does such and such, how does anyone subsequently evaluate whether that was a good prediction or a bad prediction?
It seems like evaluating these kind of percentage predictions work best for Pareto percentages. If I say there's an 80% chance of X happening and you say there's a 20% chance, then one of us will look good and one of us will look bad. But I say there's a 50% chance, then whatever happens, meh. And if I say there's a 1% chance, that also is hard to evaluate.
I guess there's a negative feedback loop for good forecasters: good forecasts -> more reputation for being good forecaster -> people listen to your forecasts more -> they act on your forecasts more -> you can advance your preferred agenda by forecasts -> more incentives for bullshit.
Especially true for government actors like politicians or intelligence services
Grading on a curve is very useful.
This is a topic where many people voiced their opinion and made predictions. If you're handing out everything from B to F but not a single A your grading scheme is probably not ideal.
What's the standard for an A? Predicting the fall of the capital within 2 days? 5 days? When did anyone make such an accurate forecast before an invasion started?
I agree that a grading rubric would be nice but working backwards from the grades an A would seem to be correctly predicting invasion AND correctly predicting “strong” Ukrainian resistance. Seems like predictions of invasion were correlated with assessment of weak resistance and vice versa (seems like Putin was in same boat).
I thought it was obvious from the post:
> My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance.
That's the standard for an A. Scott mentioned that Clay Graubard probably got it, but Scott's assessing pundits, while Clay is a superforecaster
Yes, that's apparently his standard. He could have made it a) more useful and b) less vague.
a) There is a rational behind grading on a curve. If you leave some buckets completely empty (mostly Es and Fs today because of grade inflation), you lose informational content for the remaining grades that are still handed out. Maybe he should have given an A to Clay Graubard.
b) "Strong resistance" is vague. What does that mean? We are on day 6. Kiev, the capital is getting surrounded. A 40 mile long Russian military convoy is slowly moving to further encircle it. The Ukrainians don't seem to be able to inflict any damage. That's target shooting for a "strong resistance", but the Ukrainian military does not have the capability to do anything about it.
From 28 Feb of wiki entry: "An analyst with the Royal United Services Institute stated that the Ukrainian regular army is no longer functioning in formations but in largely fixed defenses, and was increasingly integrated with Territorial Defense Forces and armed volunteers."
"No longer functioning in formations" after 5 days does not sounds like strong resistance to me.
German/Soviet invasion of Poland took 35 days, US invasion of Iraq 40 days. Is Russia still on track to meet that? How can anyone call that a "strong resistance"?
Probably there are some facts that support the claim of "strong resistance", but there are also many that support the opposite.
I look at that Metaculus "Kyiv to fall to Russian forces by April" question and I don't even know what I'm predicting.
It says
>This question will resolve positively if it is publicly reported by at least three reputable media sources or from direct statements from at least four Permanent UNSC members that the majority of Kyiv's raions are under Russian military control by April 1, 2022.
I couldn't find a list of "reputable media sources," but perhaps it's the "media" subset of "credible sources"
>A "credible source" will be taken to be an online or in-print published story from a journalistic source, or information publicly posted on a the website of an organization by that organization making public information pertaining to that organization, or in another source where the preponderance of evidence suggests that the information is correct and that there is no significant controversy surrounding the information or its correctness. It will generally not include unsourced information found in blogs, facebook or twitter postings, or websites of individuals.
They're gonna hold a post facto Wikipedia Talk style consensus discussion about what counts, maybe?
Or "direct statements from at least four Permanent UNSC members". Is that statements delivered in a security council session by the permanent members' representatives? A certain press release channel? Or anything uttered by anyone involved with those governments?
For me, more than being "regulated" per se, what Kalshi offers is that they try to provide clarity on exactly what the question is. There may not be as many decently clear Ukraine War questions right now. I think probably this Metaculus question resolves without issue, but "probably" throws a huge amount of extra risk into the question.
"But part of our civilizational immune system against shadowy Machiavellian genius figures is demanding that they do this even when they would prefer not to!"
I didn't get this sentence, can somebody explain it to me?
You make them actually make predictions, so you can tell if they know anything or are full of it.
Thanks, I think we have such an immune system, but it's hard for me to think that it includes pushing for objective forecasts, at least for the time being.
I think your post on Heuristics That Almost Always Work is much more profound than the comments make it out to be, which is reinforced by your last paragraph here, that success in warcasting has more to do with bias alignment.
The big takeaway from Heuristics is that there is something inherent in iterative, distributive knowledge-updating that converges on credentialism.
Also, Polymarket should be blowing up, even without the U.S. The real explanation for the underwhelming reception is what someone in the ACX thread on Polymarket suggested, that there is little or no alpha in making general world predictions.
On the other hand, since this blog is in the effective altruism orbit, marginal benefits applied at scale are still worth a lot. So, is the faint signal from warcasting beneficial? Can it realistically be improved? Or does it bump up against a knowledge ceiling, e.g., that the ultimate point of war is to resolve uncertainty?
Heck, maybe warcasting feeds warmongering, and not in the speech-creates-dust kind of way, but in tempting people to test their claims.
> Over the past two years, the question has bounced between about 7 and 19 percent. Today it’s at 20%, its highest value ever - but still only a single-digit percent above its baseline.
Something I'd like to understand about metaculus: When a question was created long ago and then new events greatly affect it, do the majority of forecasters actually quickly return to that question and update their forecast?
If a large fraction of people who made a forecast months prior *don't* quickly update it, then I wouldn't trust the 20% so much.
Question:
Does anybody know whether or not the Ukrainian military was hitting civilian targets in Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas region as of February 23rd? I saw some information about this on the 23rd, and now I can find nothing.
I heard some claims but I classified it as "almost certainly Russian false flag".
I investigated the car bombing false flag, Russians have not bothered to even explode the same car model and they moved registration plate to some dilapidated car.
That was my assumption at the time.
However, the invasion updated me in favor of it being a legitimate complaint, given that I don't put much credence in any of the other explanations offered as to why the invasion took place at all.
False flag is still slightly preferred as an explanation there, but no longer overwhelmingly, particularly given other aspects to how the invasion is being reported on, which lead me to believe that in general any information favorable to Russia is being suppressed. (In particular how the story is being made to be about Putin, and ignores entirely the role the 2014 coup had in setting up current events, information that becomes painfully apparent five minutes after you start googling)
> However, the invasion updated me in favor of it being a legitimate complaint
Why? Invasion preparation were happening long time before.
> 2014 coup
Which coup? (I bet that it is definitional issue and you refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan )
>Why? Invasion preparation were happening long time before.
For the same reason that there is not much overlap between people predicting that Russia would invade, and people predicting that Ukrainian resistance would pose a serious issue to Russia: Because the invasion, as an invasion, does not make strategic sense to somebody who, like me, thinks that not only is long-term occupation impossible, but who also thinks that Russia knows that long-term occupation is impossible.
>Which coup? (I bet that it is definitional issue and you refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan )
Euromaidan was the precursor to the coup, which is referenced here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
I’m a bit confused over this part. Wiki says that Yanukovych fled the city, but that the Rada voted to remove him from office. Was it a coup in the sense that “the Rada didn’t have the power to do that”, or something else?
It likely refers to
> In the afternoon, the Verkhovna Rada voted 328-0[226] to remove Yanukovich from his post and to schedule a presidential election for 25 May.[89][227] This vote violated the impeachment process specified by the Ukrainian Constitution, which would have involved formally charging Yanukovych with a crime, a review of the charge by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, and a three-fourths majority vote—at least 338 votes in favor—in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
("Verkhovna Rada" is Ukrainian parliament)
I was more with Peter Zeihan, who believed that Russian would want to expand its control over Ukraine, but believed that an invasion would be a quagmire. I thought an invasion deep into Ukraine beyond the Donbas was unlikely, so I was wrong about how Putin would try to exercise that control. That was a significant surprise. An invasion that deep was a part of a 40% chunk that I didn’t break down further. I also thought that Ukraine would take the path of quickly dispersing its troops to engage in long-term guerrilla warfare, at least after losing a set-piece battle or two. I was wrong about the relative effectiveness of Ukrainian and Russian regulars. I think that is less of a surprise than the extent of the invasion was.
Yeah, I think this has really improved my opinion of Zeihan, virtually the only commentator to call "Russia will invade Ukraine and this will be a quagmire". (I'm not sure how he did in the specific 2021-2022 crisis, but that's a pretty specific sequence of events to get right). I've read lots of criticisms of his views on China, but this has caused me to update towards them being correct.
Don't do that, take his arguments on China and investigate what can be investigated. I read one of his China posts and In a quick search there I find he has massively over-estimated the construction share of China's GDP - from 7% to 25%. A collapse in the former ( to no construction at all) would be a mild recession assuming everything else kept growing, a 25% drop would totally collapse the system.
I've failed in my predictions big time (10% in the start of Feb, 20% on Feb 15, went up to 50% on Feb 21) because I trusted too much in certain experts rationalizing Putin's behavior as a balance of influences in his administration. This predictive failure has cost me dearly: I advised my mother to return to Kyiv from a safe place. (She's okay.) I will make a post-mortem in the open threads once I have the energy for it.
>This predictive failure has cost me dearly: I advised my mother to return to Kyiv from a safe place. (She's okay.)
I'm not sure why I started a reply, my brain just froze reading this and all the abstract thoughts faded away. Gosh this situation sucks. Stay safe.
Hi, I'm just here to accept my share of glory.
I expressed my concerns about this scenario in advance, and was proven correct, not just once (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/s2gk0v/will_nato_expansionism_lead_to_a_war_between_the/) but twice (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/swhod5/what_will_be_the_outcome_of_the_russiaukraine_war/). Our leaders, by contrast, were absolute failures. Not only did they fail to predict the war that I saw coming, but they failed to predict the full scope (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/swhod5/comment/hxnd98j/) of the war (which, again, I accurately forecasted).
If you're interested in how I was able to predict this, I have a Substack dedicated to the study of superforecasting group behavior - just click on my icon for more info. My substack also covers the science of manipulating group behavior, such as to collapse regimes or manipulate elections. I've had a lot of fun with practical experiments in this field: DM me for more details.
I think your framing is totally wrong. There is no eagerness to expand NATO to Ukraine by "the West". There is, howewer, an eagerness on the part of Ukraine to join it.
Po-TAY-to, po-TAT-o. It doesn't matter how I frame it, my point is simply this. We didn't have the power to stop Putin from simply rolling in and taking what he wanted, so we should have taken him up on it when he offered us a non-violent alternative. That's a pretty obvious truth regardless of how I "frame" it, so the fact that we didn't obey the Law of Necessity and instead chose to have a needless war which we knew our ally would lose is proof of our leaders incompetence.
> We didn't have the power to stop Putin from simply rolling in and taking what he wanted
That remains to be verified.
> we should have taken him up on it when he offered us a non-violent alternative
Putin demands were impossible to satisfy.
Also, Ukraine is actually not a vassal state of USA so it would not actually solve anything. Unless you propose USA helping Russia to take over Ukraine.
Um, just to be clear what I think just happened, I've claimed that you've commited rather basic and salient factual error in the post about which you brag as being the proof of your prescience. And you are handwaving it as unimportant. I guess I have nothing further interesting to add to this particular discussion beyond this.
I'm sorry, how did the US fail to predict this war? They were calling out warnings that it wasn't just a Russian military exercise for weeks before it happened. How do you see this and think anything other than "wow, US intelligence sometimes knows what they're talking about"?
Because they didn't DO anything to prevent it. Anybody can say "Oh, I totally predicted this" - and in the endless pages of word soup that the analysts churn out I'm sure there will be some sentences that can be cherry-picked to support that hypothesis, even though the majority of the word soup that I saw indicates that people thought Putin was bluffing - you can even see countless examples of that in the threads I linked to, while me and a select few other commentators were literally the only ones who got it right. But if our leaders knew that Russia was going to invade, and they knew that Russia had the overwhelming force that they clearly do, then why didn't they do anything in advance to *stop* the invasion? Shit, they could even have prevented the war altogether simply by agreeing that Ukraine wouldn't become part of NATO.
> then why didn't they do anything in advance to *stop* the invasion
What they were supposed to do?
> they could even have prevented the war altogether simply by agreeing that Ukraine wouldn't become part of NATO
Why it would change anything? Ukraine wasn't going to become part of NATO anyway.
"Hey, if those geniuses at NOAA can predict when a hurricane is coming, why didn't they DO anything to stop it? What's this nonsense about evacuating cities and just letting Mother Nature destroy whatever she wants?"
The US government isn't omnipotent. If Putin decides he likes occupying Ukraine more than he likes not being sanctioned, we can't stop him except by going to war. And we aren't going to go to war with a nuclear state over anything less than a NATO member being invaded, which Ukraine isn't.
Also, we did do something - we shipped Ukraine a buttload of anti-tank missiles to use on the impending Russian tanks, and gave them advance warning of the invasion so they could fortify themselves in advance. While it's unlikely to stop the invasion, it's quite likely it will make Ukraine too expensive to occupy.
Also, I am extremely unconvinced that Putin would not have invaded if NATO had made a commitment to not invite Ukraine. I think that was a pretext rather than an urgent security concern for Russia (especially since Putin's actual demands were bigger than simply "don't invite Ukraine"), and that accepting those demands would have still resulted in an invasion of Ukraine eventually because "it was really Russian territory originally" or "actually the Donbass republic is the real government" or some other justification.
There's a very strange tendency among "realists" to speak as if "we" (probably meaning the US Government) can just impose any solution which seems convenient. It's as if the need to recognise that other actors have their own goals and interests begins and ends with Russia.
How *could* NATO make a commitment never to admit Ukraine? Article 10 of the Charter provides "The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty." To amend the Charter to say "except Ukraine", would (I think) require the unanimous agreement of the parties, which realistically was never going to happen.
But, as you say, this is all a red herring. Simply by holding Crimea, Putin was already de facto blocking Ukraine from joining NATO.
> Anybody can say "Oh, I totally predicted this" - and in the endless pages of word soup that the analysts churn out I'm sure there will be some sentences that can be cherry-picked to support that hypothesis, even though the majority of the word soup that I saw indicates that people thought Putin was bluffing
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/18/politics/joe-biden-russia-ukraine/index.html
> (CNN)President Joe Biden on Friday said he is now convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine, but emphasized that room for diplomacy remains.
> "As of this moment, I am convinced he's made the decision," Biden said during remarks at the White House.
> The President also said the US believes Russian forces intend to attack Ukraine "in the coming week" or sooner, and that an attack will target the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv
This isn't "some analyst" or "a White House spokesman." This is Joe Biden, in the flesh, saying that he's convinced that Putin will invade.
US intelligence did pretty well here. Much of the rest of the world was sceptical ( and this is I think due to the WMD fiasco back in the day). I was too. They were right though.
On the performance of U.S. intelligence: my model there is that they may not have know too much more than "this military buildup sure looks like the precursor to an invasion," which was somewhat public knowledge at the time. Surely with greater detail than publicly available, but maybe not including any special insight into Putin's intentions.
Instead, giving repeated warnings of an invasion could have been a calculated action to make the invasion less likely. It makes invading less attractive for Putin because the invasion looks premeditated, lowering the credibility of any Russian claims that they were provoked or otherwise justified and thereby increasing the likelihood and magnitude of punitive economic responses by other countries. It also makes not-invading *more* attractive, because it gives an opportunity for Putin to demonstrate that the U.S. is panicky, over-reacting, obsessed with painting Russia as an enemy.
So I think U.S. intelligence might have been less confident about the invasion than they projected, and the confident messages were an attempt to shift Putin's incentives away from invading.
Three unrelated points:
1) You are being too harsh on Burja. It is not the case that Russia is unexpectedly weak. What happened is that Ukraine is unexpectedly strong, compared to expectations of people like Hanania and Karlin.
2) Speaking of Hanania, although I fundamentally disagree with his conservative worldview, I have been impressed by his command of the facts regarding situation in Eastern Europe, which, speaking as an Eastern European native, is not always the strong suit of American pundits. The thing he got wrong was that Ukraine will not put much of a fight because it has a low birthrate, which according to him is a sign of a moral rot. I would argue that he was doubly wrong, since Russia also has a low birthrate and its army is also putting up a strong fight in the face of a stiff Ukrainian resistence.
It is almost as if something is wrong with the foundational assumptions of his brand of conservatism.
3) My prediction: 50 % Russia wins in a sense that peace terms will unambiguously make Ukraine worse off than it was before the invasion, 40 % there will be a messy compromise where Ukraine will be worse off in some respects but better off in others, 10 % Russia looses in that Ukraine will be unambiguously better off in a sense of controlling more territory than before the war or having cleared the path to NATO while not ceding its claim to Crimea and Donbass.
(of course 100 % that the war will be an economic disaster for both belligerents)
The birthrate argument is a real head scratcher for me too, although I believe his point might apply specifically to insurgencies rather than invading armies, which narrowly dodges the contradiction you've outlined.
With that said, the link does sound painfully tenuous, especially since the possible links between uprisings and high-birthrate seem far better explained by the age distribution, secular trends, and by the myriad confounders introduced by the robust inverse correlation between development and birthrate (material conditions, corruption, religious/ethnic divisions, quality of life, stability, etc).
I think his argument is that societies not devoted to traditional patriarchal norms, which among others include high value placed on having a lot of kids, are hedonistic and decadent, unwiling to sacrifice lives for a larger cause. Classic conservative stuff.
I think the idea is not so much about hedonism or decadence, but how much people see themselves as unique individuals for whom personal death is the end of the universe, rather than branches of a tree which will live on in descendants (not necessarily direct issue of the person themselves, more a societal or tribal thing.)
From a Darwinian standpoint, it may make sense that a society with fewer children (and higher investment per child) will be less prone to insurgency, more so even than war in general, since insurgent combatants seem to have a particularly low 'kill/death ratio,' at least from what little I know about insurgencies.
Bingo: “One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening.”
It seems a bit early to conclude that Ukrainian resistance is much stronger than expected. It's been 5 days, get some perspective. Unless you expected zero resistance (when combined with logistical support of the entire world), you'd have thought it would take a little while to take Kyiv. 14 days, for example, would still be amazingly fast by all historical standards.
There should also be some humility associated with fog of war. The press is aggressively portraying Ukrainian resistance as effective, but a lot of the portrayals are pretty transparently fake. Maybe the resistance is really strong, maybe it falls apart in a few more days. Maybe it would have already fallen apart without all the extraordinary international interventions.
Technically, it's still possible Kyiv falls within a week. Grading that as wrong at this point seems a bit premature.
I look at aerial photos of the 40 mile long slow-moving Russian convoy and figure that if Ukrainian resistance was _really_ that strong, they could have done some major damage to it.
Perhaps it's more that Russians have just been incompetent and/or unmotivated around Kiev (perhaps less so in the less publicized Southeast, though)? And will that last? For example, the Soviets got beat in Finland in late 1939, but regrouped and won in early 1940.
And will the Ukrainians fight to the last man, or might there be a tipping point at which they decide that being ruled by a bunch of fellow Slavs would be less bad than getting endlessly shelled by them? You should ask for quantitative forecasts!
I guess if one takes at face value that leaked document suggesting Russia expected to march right into Kiev in a couple days, then it's strong compared to their expectations. In general though I think you're right. Germany taking Poland in 2 weeks and France in 6 weeks in WW2 were very impressive feats. It took about 3 weeks for the US to take Baghdad I think. What's the benchmark for a well-orchestrated invasion here?
I looked it up and it took the US 27 days to take Baghdad. That is still considered extremely fast by most military historians. Russia could still halve that for Kyiv. Who knows?
Straight line distances from Google Maps (yeah, ok)
Kuwait/Saudi/Iraq border to Baghdad : about 530km.
Belrus border down the western bank of the Dneiper to Kiev : about 120km.
About one fifth of the distance, so 27 days becomes about 6, by that single route.
Russian forces went in on the 24th, so they should be there or thereabouts by 2 March, yesterday. Hmm.
Other straight line routes from Russia proper : about 200km or 300km, giving something like 15 days, or around 12 March, say.
So, if the US advance on Baghdad is a useful proxy, then I'm not really seeing much of a case for the Russians being particularly inept. Yet.
> They admittedly had great heuristics: there are lots of warmongers, our intelligence community has been really wrong lots of times before, and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia.
A lot of people (in this as in other things) seem to use the heuristic: people I don't like predict X, therefore I will predict not X.
I'm not much of a prognosticator despite my having studied Russian history in university and do enjoy its literature but I did find this video made me realize that we over complicate reasons for war. In the end, it always comes down to resources and a perceived threat to national security. And women. Sometimes it's to impress them. Alas, there is no Helen in this one so it's gonna have to be straight realpolitik on the part of Russia. Without getting into the West and its own role in this saga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE
>Meanwhile, GJI (superforecasters) seem the most reactive. I don’t have a good sense of how to think about this or whether reactivity is necessarily good.
Reacting to evidence instead of sticking with your priors is generally a good thing. And the empirical evidence is that super forecasters update much more often than non-superforecasters. Not sure what the anti-updating-often take would be?
edit: I guess the anti-update take would be that "all of this is just noise". IIRC, longer term forecasts (>1 year) might do better with less updates because most evidence that is more than a year out is just noise. Though I could be misremembering. But to me, this seems like a scenario with lots of signal. (Taleb agrees with me, but everything he says is probably just noise https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1497943606962839552)
I'd take my cue from how known effective prediction markets, like financial markets, do and do not react to news.
Hi Scott, thanks for stimulating my brain on a cold and cloudy Tuesday morning.
I'd register a 90% prediction that conditional on Russia attempting to establish a new government in Ukraine, when Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine, within four months any Russian-established government will collapse (due to lack of any legitimacy). Basically, it seems reasonable to say that if Putin's goal is regime change, he will get his version of the US Afghanistan war all over again.
If that's true this is evidence of Putin and his circle's incompetence (less the extent to which this was about approval ratings but Putin could have earned that with far less of a military commitment). I think the source of the incompetence is that they sort of believed their own propaganda, especially that Ukraine's government is illegitimate to its people.
So obviously Putin made a mistake, but is he too stupid to course correct? I don't know what Vladimir Putin will do, but if I were Putin, I would try to just hold on to a token amount of Russian occupied land in the east Ukraine, maybe after removing the parliament and president in Kyiv, withdraw, and claim victory and that I have stopped a fake genocide, leaving the Ukranians to rebuild their government (which Russia can't stop).
By the way, if you have the stomach for it, you should read the Russian propaganda. It's truly fascinating, and I think it explains their incompetent behavior. In the sense that they believe the Ukranians were in some way complicit in mass murders in the Donbass and that Russia "owns" Ukraine and this better explains their behavior in many ways. Also, it appears that Putin is doing well in terms of approval and this seems to indicate that Russians truly have a separate narrative and reality (strong propaganda). Maybe Russian and American psychiatrists use different substances because they really do live in separate realities after all. :P
I will admit to getting this extremely wrong on the "will Russia invade", giving it about a 5% chance. My assumption was that it was obvious that an invasion would go badly and have huge downsides (military quagmire, crippling sanctions) and basically no upside (upside is... Control of strategic resources/industry? Not very useful if you're sanctioned. Territory? Not useful if you're getting bled dry trying to hold it. Intimidating the West? Invading a little country and doing poorly doesn't exactly scream I'm tough, and on top of that, your military force is being progressively degraded).
Second part the jury is still out. I still think there is no justification for this war on the realpolitik cost/benefit front. It's going to be almost all cost and little to no benefit.
Ukraine is not a little country. Its population is 30 % of Russia, 8th largest in Europe, and in terms of land area, its third largest in Europe.
I am aware. Not the best term to use. "Weaker neighbour" was more what I meant.
Little used not necessarily to mean small in population or area, but more little in the sense of supposed military capacity, economy, etc. Iraq had like "the fifth biggest army in the world" or something, but that didn't do them any good.
Is there anyone who was broadly right about the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian resistance, and some third thing in recent military events? Afghanistan? Myanmar? That person would be worth paying attention to.
Bret Devereaux, ancient historian and blogger at ACOUP, wrote something relevant to predictions in his initial response to the war: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-war-in-ukraine/ . I'm asking him for specific individuals he's referring to.
"Why Didn’t We See This Coming?
Actually, we did. NATO – and especially US intelligence – was remarkably effective at predicting what Putin had planned before he did it, down to predicting the day the assault would begin. NATO intelligence agencies also warned in advance that Russian forces would stage false-flag attacks and shell Ukrainian positions trying to provoke Ukrainians into shooting back and the Russians did exactly that. Frankly, especially after the intelligence failures of the Global War on Terror, I was shocked by the degree to which US intelligence mostly nailed this; it goes to show that while organizations created to spy on the Soviet Union struggle to spy on terrorists and the Taliban, they are very good at spying on the Russian Federation. Frankly the entire thing has been a fairly stunning US intelligence coup and there are a whole lot of analysts and more than a few world leaders who woke up on the 24th owing US intelligence an apology.
So while the outbreak of hostilities has likely come as a surprise to a great many people for whom this issue has only recently gotten full attention, for specialists paying attention it has been clear something was coming for a while and the closer we’ve gotten the clearer it has been that it would be big. My first “this is going to be really bad” tweet thread was January 25th; I am not a Ukraine expert and in many ways was late to those realizations."
There are easily hundreds, and probably thousands, of people in Russia with useful information who are feeding it to intelligence agencies. It's not a hard country to spy on.
I think this is too critical of anti-interventionists and too favorable to the centrist-establishment people. It misses the larger point that anti-interventionists were correct that NATO expansion and supporting the coup in Ukraine were likely to lead to conflict with Russia. Not sure centrists made predictions on whether it would, but it’s a pretty clearly bad outcome as at least a partial result of their actions
> supporting the coup in Ukraine
That is a weird way of saying that they opposed rigged elections, or at least that they protested elections that were suspect at best ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ukrainian_presidential_election ).
Wrong decade. Go forward ten years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_presidential_election - which part of this was coup for you? Under which definition of "coup"?
The part where revolutionaries forced the president of Ukraine to flee the country, forced the parliament to (probably illegally) oust him, and put a new government in place which (again, probably illegally) dissolved that same parliament and called for new votes in the middle of a civil war in which large parts of the country, in particular those who had supported the ousted president where fighting was still ongoing, couldn't effectively vote?
In what sense was that not a coup?
> civil war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas - this one? Where initial protests where actually by local people but to turn it into outright war Russia needed to invade?
> forced the parliament to (probably illegally) oust him, and put a new government in place which (again, probably illegally) dissolved that same parliament
OK, I agree that using "coup" can be a good description, I was unaware that it can be used also to cases where overthrow is not done by military
TL;DR: Predicting war hard.
>One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening. Lots of people failed based on their political precommittments, but I suspect the successes were also based on political precommitments.
You'll fail to find a deeper insight elsewhere.
Strong agree. And as a result I'd give less kudos than Scott does for the supposed accuracy of the pundit's predictions. There's something a little Gell-Mann amnesiac about that.
What gets me is that the USG was so publicly confident about this and was willing to provide an insane amount of evidence to back up their confidence, and people still discounted it. Even after events began breaking in ways that backed up the USG's prediction, people still discounted it. Well, not discounted it: they immediately assumed that anything the government said had a secret ulterior motive.
I can't describe how sickened it made me that a bunch of "really smart" people all looked at a pile of evidence that Russia wanted to invade Ukraine and came to the conclusion that the USG wanted to go to war with Russia. I really think our intellectual class has reached toxic levels of cynicism.
This is a bit like observing that it's cool out today, so global warming is false.
The question isn't whether the USG was accurate this time; it is how often it is accurate, when it is accurate, and why it is accurate.
The cynicism towards the USG didn't come out of nowhere.
Lets unpack this analogy:
You're claiming that the amount of evidence that the USG was willing to provide backing up their claims that Russia was intending to invade is like unto it being cool today backing up the claim of global warming being false. I don't think this is true, I think that these are fundamentally different tiers of evidence.
In my opinion, this is the same fundamental miscalculation that explains why so many pundits were wrong.
No, I am not claiming that the evidence is similar; I'm claiming that your claim is similar. It is not "The evidence is identical to the day being cool", it is "The USG making a claim and offering evidence is identical to the day being cool".
Because the USG routinely puts up large amounts of evidence on all sorts of claims, true or false. The last two years have been full of exactly this kind of behavior; here's a list of medical studies that prove that the current recommendations of not wearing masks is correct. Oh, here's the list of medical studies that prove that the current recommendations of wearing masks is correct. Oh, here's the list of studies ...
The fact that the USG is offering evidence is not, in itself, evidence; it routinely offers evidence. It does so in congress, in court, and in PR campaigns. And again, the cynicism didn't come out of nowhere.
If the USG is starting a new era of making claims that are true, great! But you don't get the benefit of the doubt the first day you make a true claim after decades of mixing lies and truth; you have to actually establish a reputation as an entity that can be trusted.
I'm not saying that the cynicism is entirely illogical or undeserved, I'm saying that it has reached such a peak that it is actively degrading people's ability to process information.
When someone discounts evidence, not because of its potential credibility or relation to other evidence, but merely because its tainted due to its association with the USG, they're operating with unhealthy levels of cynicism.
Imagine the existence of a hostile intelligence with access to a vast amount of information, sufficient to support or oppose any cause. It has a reputation for providing information which support any cause which it intends to further.
You believe that a cause that it intends to further is wrong. Should you update your beliefs based on information provided by that hostile intelligence?
Remember, regardless of whether or not the cause is correct, information will be provided which suggests the cause is correct, and information will not be provided which suggests the cause is incorrect. Or perhaps it uses a mixture of information - the point being that the existence of information which supports the cause is not dependent on the cause being correct.
I agree with you and I did in fact discount the US evidence, or believed it to be over blown. That said I think the Biden Admin is a fairly sober administration, and had restrained itself from provocative statements ( like dismissing the no fly zone), so maybe my priors needed re-evaluation.
I would grade these a bit differently, because in general I find the specifics of the predictions less interesting than the context and explanation that the pundits give for their predictions. I know this flies in the face of the ostensible purpose of holding pundits "accountable," but in truth I don't expect anyone to have a good track record over the long term. I want to have a clear sense of what they believe will happen and why, and then I want to understand after the fact why they were right or wrong. Whether they were right or wrong is less interesting.
So, for example, Edward Luttwak's predictions look pretty good to me. He provided some actually relevant expertise that bears on the current situation. Richard Hanania's look bad, because predicting military outcomes on fertility rates strikes me as obviously dubious. Tyler Cowen's predictions seem basically useless: he's doing some handwaving psychoanalysis of Putin, and although Cowen is an extremely smart guy, I don't think he has any special insight here.
Etc. I feel the same way about Scott's predictions. His accuracy level just isn't very interesting (to me). What is interesting is his reasoning.
How does Michael Tracey's prediction align with Scott's "Bounded Distrust"? Scott says "trust the experts" (with some caveats). Tracey trusts the Ukrainian President and intelligence, and comes out to be wrong. How could Tracey have improved his predictions?
The lesson I've learned from this, having been skeptical of the US intelligence community myself based on their past behavior, is, "A boy known to cry wolf, does not disprove the existence of wolves."
"My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance."
This is it. Luttwak was "right" - conquering all of Ukraine is really hard, and a Russian leader who didn't want to suffer a lot of losses and perhaps fail wouldn't do it.
Lots of people got the geopolitics/strategy right, (including, it seems, lots of Russians!) but not the leadership psychology.
Hanania's grade should be lower just because the internal logic of it is completely asinine. A war would have to drag out for literal *decades* before low birth rates had a significant amount of manpower. That would only be a serious strategic factor if the conflict kept going for 20 years or more.
According to what Scott says later in his post, Hanania's point was less the effect on manpower and more Hanania's general belief that a low birth rate is a sign of moral decline and civilizational decadence. Which doesn't make it necessarily less asinine.
"Even setting aside the geography of the country, there is no instance I’m aware of in which a country or region with a total fertility rate below replacement has fought a serious insurgency. Once you’re the kind of people who can’t inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal."
That's a very Western notion, and a very upper middle-class, weak sense of patriotism/nationalism because waving the flag is for rubes, we're all cosmopolitans now, haven't been in a real shooting war on our own territory since donkey's years view.
You may not have kids in peace time because you can't afford them, or you don't want to have six kids like your mom did, or it would interfere with your new upwardly mobile lifestyle. But when it's wartime and the tanks are heading towards your city? Maybe you have that sense of a connection to the country and the people around you that is in your bones because you're only three generations from the peasants trudging behind the ox-plough and the grannies telling callow young invading troops to put sunflower seeds in your pocket so that when you die, flowers will grow up out of your graves in our soil.
Even the silly entry for Eurovision has taken on more serious overtones:
https://news.sky.com/story/eurovision-kalush-on-fighting-for-freedom-banning-russia-and-creating-an-anthem-for-ukraine-12554233
"The band's lead singer Oleh Psiuk told Sky News: "This song which we have created [Stefania], it's the anthem for Ukraine and everybody is singing it. Originally, the song was dedicated to my mother, and now it's the song for all mothers."
When asked about reports that civilians have been urged to take defence into their own hands, he confirms that is true.
"My girlfriend today was making the Molotov cocktails, and it was the first time she was doing like something like that. It's very scary for all of us."
He too has taken action to defend his country and has set aside his life as a musician to do what he can to help.
"My day-to-day life has changed. Now I've been working with a volunteer team. We are helping people to go far away from Ukraine, to find food for those who need it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foqgjD_SNss
It's also an incredibly transparent example of the selection effect - insurgencies, successful or not, only really happen in places with high TFR, because high TFR is strongly correlated with low development, which is strongly correlated with frequent regime change.
Excellent point! When was the last time an even semi-westernized country was invaded and occupied? Czechoslovakia?
> moral decline and civilizational decadence
Few buildings destroyed and 3000 dead put USA into war frenzy (which, frankly - were small losses compared to what happened in history).
Even place with significant moral decline and decadence an outright invasion of entire country, with aggressor denying existence of your nation and claiming nonexisting nazi government may galvanize support.
Hanania arguing with "moral decline and civilizational decadence" is really strange.
But there is a similar theory that has at least a grain of truth to it. I don't think the effect occurs during the war (running out of manpower) but before. Young men are just much more aggressive and willing to fight than any other demographic group. Having more of them makes a country more willing to fight a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid#Youth_bulge
I think people are generally downplaying the strategic purposes of the IC's invasion date prediction. As soon as they predicted (and disclosed to news outlets) an invasion date, the probability that an invasion would occur at that date was decreased. Understandably, Putin wouldn't want it to look like US Intelligence knew everything he was going to do. This also gave Putin an out: if he were to drop the invasion, US Intelligence would look silly. While that sadly didn't happen, I'd still put it at a decent chance that the public prediction delayed the invasion a bit.
The other thing it accomplished is that it made all the subsequent manufactured pretexts for war more obvious. The US thus got to set the narrative around the invasion before Russia could. Then, when Russia did invade, the US narrative was immediately validated. Any moral ambiguity around the invasion was destroyed and the western world was able to scale up sanctions against Russia and funding for Ukraine at an unprecedented rate.
What's the lesson we can all learn? Trust experts, but trust only the experts who have demonstrated expertise in that field. Ukrainian intelligence is not the expert in determining whether Russia will attack Ukraine; the Russian military-government complex is (actually, Putin is. but he's hard to get a hold of). That is why Tracey was wrong.
Maybe the actual lesson is that we should always take people's biases into account. The Ukrainian government was unlikely to accept that Russia would attack because it knew that Ukraine was doomed if it was attacked. Keeping an account of our sources' biases can help us remove the undue influence of their opinions on our predictions.
In the section on Cowen, Scott seems to be going out of his way to avoid calling out for blatantly misrepresenting his previous beliefs/predictions. Would he have done the same for everyone?
>Still, I can understand why people who only caught snippets of certain tweets thought I was a 100% incorrigible “invasion denier.” I never denied the possibility of an invasion — again, I always made a point to explicitly allow for that very possibility.
The whole point of adding a disclaimer "maybe not X" is to indicate that you aren't so certain about X. In order for the disclaimer to be forceful enough for people to pay any attention to it, it also has to be forceful enough that it undercuts your apparent certainty in claiming X.
In other words, you can't have it both ways. You can't expect that if X comes true you'll be hailed as a prophet and still have a disclaimer just in case X doesn't come true.
Wow that is a lot of writing to take in. The last thing I saw predicting on any such scale was the pandemic and tikes predictions were pretty bad . But I sure there are AI super computers working on every data point where it doesn’t come to convincing the public
The Manifold market you’re thinking of was, AFAICT, the only market that asked whether an invasion would happen *by the end of February.* All other markets were longer-term than that. I think that at least partially explains why it seems to have performed so poorly.
One thing I wish you would pay more attention to is the Prediction Market Lizard Constant. You could make a market for 1+1=2 and still get only 90% true because of the inefficiencies of prediction markets. Seeing "Russia will invade another country at 12%" is barely above the Lizard constant, so it doesn't seem worth much notice.
https://manifold.markets/Tetraspace/will-11-on-january-1st-2023
Will 1=1 on January 1st 2023?
98% chance
Reward function used by Manifold results in silly results for nearly impossible/certain events.
(I even bothered to open a tiny Manifold market to complain about it)
Great post. Personally, I feel very conflicted here. This invasion is an enormous human tragedy and a complete waste and everything about it is profoundly depressing.
At the same time, I've participated regularly in related Metaculus prediction markets and various online and in-person discussions and "enjoyed" that process on some level. And I'm proud to have correctly predicted the invasion - I was above the Metaculus consensus since December 23rd, often by 20-30%. I was at 69% or above since January 19th and I made my final move up from 96% to 99% on February 21st. I also thought Richard Hanania's TFR-based argument against a Ukrainian insurgency was quite weak and underdeveloped, and told him so in the Substack comments. (Along with a couple of other people) My only real regret is not thinking past the invasion and actually doing the work to publicly predict whether there would be a serious insurgency. I think there were plenty of clues to that effect, such as the Ukrainian grassroots resistance in 2014, the large number of Ukrainian veterans from the ongoing war, and Lyman Stone's analysis of polling on willingness to fight for your country. But I didn't bother pursuing it further because I'm not a professional pundit and there wasn't a Metaculus question on it.
Lesson learned - even it just means private Metaculus questions or signing up for a Mantic account, to really practice my forecasting skills I should be thinking a step or two ahead, not just on what question I'm answering at the moment.
This is best seen as a conditional prediction: Is it stupid to invade Ukraine XOR is Putin stupid
Considering the Arsenal available and considering what we have seen in Syria , Iraq, Palestine , and such , the use of ballistic weapons has been somewhat mild . It seems that it is a demonstration of that a negotiator is willing to go to distance .
“…the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia. Unfortunately, the relevant Less Wrong post here is Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, and the relevant ACX post is Heuristics That Almost Always Work, so they failed.”
I agree about the recent embarrassing Russia-related paranoia—and agree the posts you mention are relevant here.
To me what sticks out is that Putin is behaving in a way that most people wouldn’t have predicted. Sure, there’s the super-easy “He’s a madman, I tell you!” hypothesis, but that’s not really very convincing or satisfying. He’s shown no signs of complete irrationality before now.
So my best guess is he knows (or thinks he knows) something we don’t, which prompted him to act. It could be he was fooled by intelligence (his or ours) as well— or he might really know something we don’t (just as, say, that cretin Trump was briefed on the lab-leak hypothesis right away, when we rubes were all reading in Nature and the Lancet that such a thing was crazy-talk).
It’s hard to judge the pundits and predictors when they, like the rest of us, don’t have the facts that Putin has (or thinks he has). No wonder people make predictions at chance levels, when they don’t have the relevant information.
"Oh, and if Clay says there’s going to be a war, head for the bunkers."
The Metaculus question "Second US Civil War Before 2031" ( https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war-before-2031/ ) currently gives the chance as 3%. If we start just after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which marks the start of British control of the American colonies, and ask, "In what percentage of years was America not in a civil war, but would be within 8 years?", noting that it was in civil war in at least 1775-1783, 1794, and 1861-1865, we come up with a base rate of 26 / 260, or 10%. Either Metaculus has its head in the sand, or America is presently experiencing a period of unusual national unity.
I think the 1775 and 1794 wars are outside the reference class - America didn't exist as a country with a tradition of *not* having civil wars at that point. And the range you're using necessarily stops at a civil war year (ie American independence) - plausibly it should stop at Plymouth Rock or something.
Excluding revolutionary wars means excluding civil wars in which the separatists win--that is, excluding perhaps half of all civil wars, in which case we should multiply our result by 2 (and here end up with about the same number).
I didn't start at the American revolution anyway; I started at the treaty of Paris, which gave the British control of most of the colonies, and is, I think, the most-reasonable unbiased choice. You could argue for the Louisiana Purchase, but I think that would be a little silly since what was transferred was almost all ungovernable territory, making not very much political difference at the time.
If I'd extended it further backwards, to Plymouth Rock, it would have been difficult to define "civil war". Do we count when the British seized New Amsterdam, or when Connecticut went to war with New York City (IIRC; I'm fuzzy on this history)? But there was a lot of war going back to Plymouth rock. The base rate for "war", if not for "civil war", would have been higher.
Also, the 1794 Appalachian rebellion was purely an American civil war. Perhaps it should be excluded for having very few casualties. I may be biased because I live in Western Pennsylvania, the region Washington invaded. I didn't count the battles fought over the admissions of states as free states or slave states as civil war, nor (more egregiously) wars with Native Americans, nor the Mexican-American War, in which we captured the southwestern states.
Plus, even if you exclude both the Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion, you *still* get a base rate a bit higher than the Metaculus median of 3%.
> I think the 1775 and 1794 wars are outside the reference class - America didn't exist as a country
I was going to make this point rather less politely, so kudos for making it politely.
I do want to expand this to a general principle, but inspired by your example I will just gently suggest that:
Any time a question is asked whether a "Second X" will occur in the next eight years, if you believe that a Second X and a Third X both already occurred hundreds of years before the question was asked, then you are probably not working off of the same definition of X as the people asking the question, and they are the ones who will decide whether you get paid.
I don't think that argument applies. We don't call the American Revolution a "civil war" because there was a change of government. But the phenomenon of interest at the very least includes any time when a civil war broke out within the population being investigated; and the American Revolution began as a civil war. Excluding it, as I wrote above, would exclude all civil wars won by separatists, thereby dramatically biasing the results to show civil war as being less likely than it really is. Excluding it, and then starting the timeline immediately after it, is an even worse bias.
I'm having a hard time parsing your point.
Would it be fair to say that you believe that, if a US Civil War occurs in the next eight years, if will be the Fourth US Civil War?
Maybe you're right! Maybe your analysis is better, in some objective sense, than that of the people asking the question. But the people asking the question, who decide whether you get paid, put the phrase "Second US Civil War" in the question itself. Given that you disagree with them about the past, it seems likely that, in the future, when the current-future becomes the past, you will disagree with them about what happened in it.
Even if you're "right" in some sense, that's not a matter of prediction at that point.
"Would it be fair to say that you believe that, if an American Civil War occurs in the next eight years, if will be the Fourth American Civil War?"
No. We would not call it the 4th American Civil War, because, as I've already explicitly written twice, we do not call the American Revolution a civil war here in America. But, as I've also already explained twice, the phenomenon we're asking about is the breakout of civil war; and the American Revolution was a breakout of civil war, so we must count it in our base rate, or else find some other unbiased beginning to our time period (which is most-definitely NOT the period immediately after a civil war we decided not to count).
That is: The phrase "civil war" is not an eternal Platonic form which must always mean the same thing. When naming civil wars for common usage by Americans, we don't count the revolution as a civil war. When asking about how likely it is that a civil war will break out in America, we should; we don't elevate naming conventions above the fact that a civil war occurred.
So you agree that Metaculus will not call it the Fourth US Civil War. But you think that Metaculus will call it the Second US Civil War?
Or maybe national unity isn't the sole, or even primary, determinant of probability of civil war (e.g., technology matters a lot). I'd personally put the probability of a civil war trivially close to 0% for the next 10 years. We also are probably more 'unified' than you think in the ways that matter for this question. Despite the much talked about 'deterioration in public discourse' there's less political violence today than their was 50 years ago.
When the news of the build up was coming I often argued that Putin had to wait till after the Olympics to invade so as not to piss off China. Putin began the invasion essentially the next day. What a shock. It was always clear he was going to do it. The Putin/Ukraine "liberal tears" trolling idea was cute but dumb.
Too bad I'm poor and couldn't invest in any prediction markets.
Because I've been doing a lot of research on military logistics for the strategy game I'm developing it seemed to me insane that Putin would do all the stuff he did and then not invade. We defeated the Soviet Union because they were poor and Russia is even poorer. The time and political capital and wealth expended in the build up made it pretty likely they'd invade. You just don't do that for nothing.
>When the news of the build up was coming I often argued that Putin had to wait till after the Olympics to invade so as not to piss off China. Putin began the invasion essentially the next day.
Russia scheduling an invasion of a European country around China's Olympic TV schedule. What a crazy world.
Can you tell us about what you found about logistics, how your game is going, and what your thoughts are about the logistics of the invasion are? I'm curious, as far as I can tell this invasion is such an obviously bad idea logistics-wise that I'm wondering what could possibly make it look like a good idea.
> But it’s from February 21. On February 21, Putin announced he was sending “peacekeepers” in to Donbass. Most sources say the invasion of Ukraine started February 24.
It's labeled February 22, and notice that Good Judgement Inc. / GJ Open raised the probability of invasion to 99-100% on Feb 22, not Feb 24. On Feb. 22, "Biden begins to sanction Moscow for 'beginning of a Russian invasion' of Ukraine", when Putin ordered Russian troops into the two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-begins-sanction-moscow-beginning-russian-invasion-ukraine/story?id=83041555
Indeed, I wasn't sure how worried to be about the increasing reported probability of "invasion" because I wasn't sure if it would be an invasion of Donbas (East Ukraine) or a full-scale invasion.
It's only been a week, how are people already getting the timeline wrong?
The Russian "peacekeepers" in Donbas would be considered an invasion for prediction market rewards, that's why they correct.
However, the actual Russian assault that involved confronting Ukrainian forces in the rest of the country began at Feb 24th, 5am, Eastern European Standard Time. This is Feb 23rd 7pm PDT (west coast US). That's when people colloquially consider it an invasion, even though technically Donbas is still Ukraine and was being invaded by Russian "peacekeepers" earlier.
What people did and said on Feb. 22 can't be described as "wrong about the timeline". They didn't know a full-scale invasion was imminent, though for the superforecasters I imagine it must have seemed likely.
when judging ukrainian leaders who, pre-war, pooh-poohed the imminence of war, i think it’s important to remember accurate prediction was not their goal. instead, their goal was likely to avoid war.
one could argue such leaders felt western escalation of rhetoric increased the likelihood of war, as it further committed the prestige of putin’s regime to extracting concessions from the ukraine or the west.
furthermore, it’s quite possible even modestly decreasing the probability of war had a greater expected utility than increasing preparedness for war. and so, such leaders might even have been rational to ball up their ears, blot out the song of siren’s accurately crying out warnings of war, and continue to row with all they had to the quiet shore.
i feel the essay completely missed this dimensionality of decision making. and i suspect this dimension is applicable to many domains beyond the present one.
Also, it is entirely possible to do plenty of preparing for likely imminent war while declaring that war is not coming.
This entire piece...nothing you're saying is exactly wrong, but this entire approach that's implicit in statements like "One important thing I’ve learned again and again about prediction is that successes are usually less about being smart, and more about having a bias which luckily corresponds to whatever ends up happening."...you're treating this like there's a volcano, and the queen asks all the vulcanologists to predict whether the volcano will erupt. Or they estimate a probability that the volcano will erupt. Or whatever.
But Vladimir Putin is not a volcano. Whatever your opinion on his rationality, last time I checked, the man is literate. And rumor has it he even speaks English.
This afterthought comment gets closer to the mark:
> 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.
...but this still seems to me to be missing the point. Vladimir Putin wasn't playing some kind of prank, giggling to himself about how the West thought he was going to attack when he totally wasn't.
Consider a matching-pennies game. Two players turn over pennies. If the pennies match, then the Queen wins. If the pennies don't match, then Putin wins. (This metaphor is getting a little mixed. The Queen is a vague gestalt of everyone who might do something, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.)
Putin has a variety of attacks he wants to make. He attacked Georgia. He attacked Crimea. He attacked Donetsk and Luhansk. In each case, he absolutely does not want to meet stiff resistance. He *didn't* attack lots of other places. He didn't attack anywhere he expected stiff resistance. What Putin wants, in every case, is a quick victory that he can present as a fait accompli. If the Queen bets heads, if the Queen moves resources into his way, then even if he could win the war in question eventually, he's still losing. Whenever Putin thought that the Queen was betting heads, he *didn't* play heads.
The Queen has a bunch of vulcanologists advising her on whether Putin is going to play heads. Some vulcanologists call other vulcanologists "hysterical" for suggesting that Putin might play heads. Some vulcanologists give specific probabilities to whether Putin will play heads. Some vulcanologists have "better optics, but worse rationality". Some vulcanologists accuse other vulcanologists of racist disinformation.
But...all of this is happening *in front of Putin*.
There is a direct, causal, inverse relationship between vulcanologists predicting that Putin will play heads, with that prediction being *believed* by the Queen...and Putin *actually* playing heads.
In this particular instance, the United States government was totally right, and nobody took them seriously!
...but if people *had* taken them seriously, then Putin *wouldn't* have pulled the trigger. They would have been "proven wrong".
Stephen Bosch touches on this from the other side:
> It's an assumption that [Zelenskyy saying Putin *wouldn't* pull the trigger] was a miscalculation. What was the alternative? Telling everyone an invasion was imminent? *How long can you keep that up?* [Emphasis mine.]
Vladimir Putin didn't move perishable blood supplies to the border of Ukraine because sometimes he gets bored and likes to ship blood around for giggles. He also didn't make an oath to an evil god to order troops forward. He was sniffing the wind to see what the reaction would be.
Am I saying that Putin might have gotten all his troops into position, and then, at the last minute, pulled them back and sent them home without doing anything? YES! Of course! If he wasn't willing to do that kind of thing occasionally, then the Queen would know whether to bet heads, and that's the last thing he wants. A few wasteful troop movements here or there are *cheap*.
...but no, he almost certainly wouldn't literally just send them home without doing anything. Being *somewhat* wasteful is just the cost of being unpredictable, but there's no point being *unnecessarily* wasteful. More likely he would have simply scaled back his objectives and diverted the troops to some safer use. I'm not a general, so I don't know what other smart moves may have been available, but he could have sent the troops into Donetsk and Luhansk, where he already had troops, which presumably would have counted as "lol the USG said Putin would attack and he totally didn't" from the standpoint of vulcanologists looking to score points.
You're treating this like there's some secret, like whether the volcano was going to erupt was an objective fact that some people were correct about and some people were incorrect about, and the only question is whether their correctness is repeatable rationality or unrepeatable bias. But that's not how this works. If you got a TIME MACHINE and carried a damning newspaper headline back in time and proved everyone that Putin was absolutely 100% going to pull the trigger...then he wouldn't have pulled the trigger...so you would have been wrong. You would have had perfect foreknowledge courtesy of a time machine...and you would have been wrong.
The "predictions" that you're talking about are directly causing (or in this case, inversely causing) the event that they're "predicting".
(Predicting the outcome of a war once launched is, of course, a whole other kettle of fish.)
In fact, United States intelligence *was* "proven wrong". United States intelligence said that Russian intelligence was planning to stage a fabricated attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence personnel against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people, to justify an incursion into Ukraine. Complete with options to use a variety of staged videos featuring NATO-supplied armaments.
After that accusation was made, they were "proven wrong" when Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do any such thing. And thus, "The delusional nature of this kind of fabrication, and there are more and more of them every day, is obvious to any more or less experienced political scientist."
They also said that Putin was sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage a provocation that would serve as a pretext for an invasion. They were again "proven wrong" when, after they made that prediction, Putin did not bother with that as a pretext. Because of course he didn't. Because the prediction was made, and believed by enough people to make it not in his interest to do that.
"In fact, United States intelligence *was* "proven wrong". United States intelligence said that Russian intelligence was planning to stage a fabricated attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence personnel against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people, to justify an incursion into Ukraine. Complete with options to use a variety of staged videos featuring NATO-supplied armaments.
After that accusation was made, they were "proven wrong" when Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do any such thing."
You're actually wrong on this. Western intelligence was intensely surveying for pretexts, found a variety of them (all the way to staging a shelling of a Russian border town), inoculated the population against them by broadcasting the ruses, and so in consequence the Russian state had no reasonable pretext anymore, best they tried, and went in anyway. "Ukraine is trying to get nuclear weapons. Ukraine (with 150k troops on their border, about to be invaded) suddenly decides now is a good time to start indiscriminately bombing Donbas. For strategic reasons, they also needed to make the invasion happen sooner then later, and couldn't keep delaying until Spring for a reasonable pretext.
I'm not sure what you mean? Someone "predicted" that Russian intelligence would stage a fabricated attack. Russian intelligence did not, in fact, do that. (Do you think that either of those two statements is wrong?) The prediction was proven wrong.
You might say that prediction is the wrong frame to look at all of this, because there's a direct causal relationship between the predictions and the events, which, uh, yeah, that's my entire point.
There were several events before the war that were widely called false flags by western sources - the two I remember were an IED found in Donetsk and a Russian border facility getting hit by artillery. While you obviously can't prove that it was done by Russian intelligence, they seemed fairly suspicious for two reasons: First because they were small events, as if someone wanted to generate a causus belli with as little destruction as possible, and second because the idea that Ukraine decided to wait until the moment when there were 190,000 Russians on their border to launch an assault on the separatists was just absurd.
I downgraded Luttwak as a predictor after he made some claims about Trump that... didn't pan out (and frankly seemed bonkers at the time). E.g. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/trump-dynasty-luttwak/
Why hurry with the grades? I think if someone (like Karlin) made a prediction for what happens within "<week", you should wait 6 full days before grading. (Yes, of course it's very hard for this prediction to come true now.)
"Maybe we should trust it more on Great Power conflict than on tinpot dictator stuff? [etc]"
With respect to Ukraine (and this evaluation article), we are now in an n=1 situation. If you add something the Iraq war, we have n=2. Trying to make up reasons for the difference based on n=2 is not useful.
Also, see https://www.hoover.org/research/cuban-missile-crisis-intelligence-failure and https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/21/world/director-admits-cia-fell-short-in-predicting-the-soviet-collapse.html
I think a possible source of error in many of those analyses is how they unquestioningly presume that
1. Putin did not expect Ukrainian resistance.
2. Putin just wanted a quick and painless addition to his fief, and will pull out as soon as it turns out to be neither quick nor painless.
3. Even if Putin is prepared to persist on the military front, his oligarch cronies will force him to pull out after the sanctions have cratered enough of their assets.
Of those, I think the most mistakenly held belief might be #2. Consider the possibility that Putin does not approach this as a leisurely addition of a fief, but as an existential matter. Some westerners might be miscalibrated about this by having ingested the west's own propaganda that NATO is a "purely defensive alliance", and presuming that Putin must therefore have ingested it too. Putin does not give off the impression that he did. (maybe because he came to office as NATO was bombing Serbia, a Russian ally, bombing it all the way until NATO achieved its goal of splitting Kosovo off Serbia and installing a huge-ass US military base in Kosovo - huge by local standards, I mean? or maybe because he then continued watching NATO's other engagements, all the while being aware of NATO's 1990 promise to halt expansion?) Anyway, if there is one point that Putin couldn't be more clear in communicating, it is: "No NATO. No buts. No discussion. If you don't agree, we will have as much war as you want to have, right here right now".
Under that lens, calculating that Putin will be put off by the invasion not being quick and painless, means miscalculating.
Bringing us to #1, i.e. that Putin didn't *expect* resistance. Putin is perfectly aware of the Ukrainian overtly-neo-Nazi military units which are hellbent on fighting Russians, and *have* been fighting them since 2014. Putin indeed mentioned them in his address. He must also be aware of the significantly larger contingents of patriotic-but-not-Nazi Ukrainians who are firm about (if not quite as hellbent) fighting the Russian invasion. (the gradient of this firmness increasing westwards). Thus, presuming that he didn't expect resistance is also a prediction miscalculation.
As for #3, I do not imagine any of the oligarch cronies smiling at this moment. Nor do I imagine them being moved by anything except money. But that's part of the point: I can even less imagine them welcoming the idea of Russia falling to the West -- which will usher in a boatload of foreign players and foreign interests who will divvy up the pie in a new deal by the newly installed regime, few of those being interested in joining up with the incumbents. As opposed to holding out for a Russian win, which will then let them recoup their wealth gradually under the old status quo.
I.e. oligarchs *are* incentivized to push for a rapid ending of hostilities and resuming of business, but they are *also* incentivized to ensure the long-term survival of the current regime - which might collapse rapidly *from within Russia* if Putin returns as a loser from this war that he started. While I am less confident on this, I still think that "oligarchs forcing Putin to pull out" is not a slam dunk.
Disclaimer: it turned out I'm a D- predictor at best. I thought Putin would not engage beyond the majority-Russian areas, something that he could do with almost no casualties on any side, and which would have resulted in fewer international repercussions while still giving him (probably) sufficient leverage to put NATO off the table. So I'm not making any further predictions, just correcting what appear to me as underlying miscalculations in other predictions.
I think the people who understimated the Ukrainian success to date in holding off the Russians (including very likely Putin himself, and his generals) were right, and what has actually transpired is a surprise. I think it originates from the little-known massive sale of Javelins to the Ukrainians in 2018 by the last Administration -- which is surprising on its face, since Trump personally didn't seem to give a shit about the Ukrainians in their long-running struggle with Russia -- and the well-known Russian preference for armor and lack of sophistication about portable anti-armor and anti-aircraft weapons. It's what fucked them over in Afghanistan, and it's a problem for them now. The only part of this that is a genuine surprise, I think, is that the Ukrainians had the sophistication and grit to use those weapons effectively. Personally I think they're getting very good intelligence from the Biden Administration and perhaps this has stiffened their resolve.
I agree the outcome has become much harder to predict, though. I would guess Putin counted on a quick decapitation, a la 1968 Prague, but now that this has become difficult it will be extremely difficult to climb down. It's hard to see him accepting the kind of humiliating abandonment of the field in the face of an inferior enemy that the Americans have accepted in Afghanistan. So what will allow him to save sufficient face at home? A recognition of the breakaway eastern provinces seems inadequate for the cost. On the other hand, what would the Ukrainians accept? Surely not the arrest and execution of Zelensky. Even the recognition of the eastern provinces seems unlikely.
So from the point of view of Putin and the Ukrainians, since there's no plausible compromise, I'd predict the war drags on and gets much, much bloodier, with an eventual Ukrainian surrender and messy ugly occupation. But then the 3rd factor comes into focus, the attitude of the Russian people and military establishment itself. Would they put up with a longer and far more expensive war, particularly if the EU and US stand firm in their economic attack? Not entirely clear. And *will* the EU stand firm, when they burn so much Russian gas? Good question indeed.
From Ukraine: Formal recognition of the Crimean annexation and a commitment not to pursue weapons of mass destruction is, whilst underwhelming, possible to be spun as a victory at home.
I'd be surprised if that feel enough for Putin. I think he will want at least formal recognition of Crimean annexation and separatist republic+a never join NATO treaty before even engaging in serious negociation.
I can imagine Ukraine accepting a referendum in the eastern provinces, under neutral auspices, and agreeing that if they vote for independence they can have it.
"Someone suggested that the intelligence community might suck at the sort of small-state terrorism work it’s been asked to do the past few decades, but that “infiltrating Russia” is kind of its bread and butter and a big part of its institutional DNA."
I think this is the difference between secrets and mysteries. Putin knew that he was going to invade Ukraine, but he didn't want other people to know that. He tried to keep that fact secret, but he had to tell some people if they were to make the preparations. So there was always the chance that the CIA (or whoever) would discover that secret.
But no one knew whether, for example, the Afghan National Army would collapse last year. The CIA could not discover that secret, because it was not information known secretly to anyone in the first place. Whether the ANA would collapse was a mystery, not a secret to be discovered by an espionage agency.
I'm curious what are the qualifications for being a "pundit". Seems to me it's a self-styled designation of a bunch of middle-aged white guys with opinions. They all seem to be intelligent enough, but why are their opinions important enough to pay attention to? What is their "skin in the game"? They don't seem to face any real consequences for being right or wrong, and they have precious little influence on actual events.
Markets are volatile since the Ukraine invasion. Where do you guys think a rationalist should invest money right now? Are there opportunities to be found?
VTS and chill. Trying to chase opportunities based on the latest news cycle is rarely worth it. You'll probably lose money relative to buy-and-hold, and you'll definitely feel like a fool when you do.
Set up a monthly automatic payment into a low-cost broad-based passive equity tracker, preferably into whatever your country has set up to be tax-advantages. That is, the same advice I would ever give, assuming you're not looking to retire.
Also for the avoidance of doubt nothing I say is tax, investing, accounting, relationship, or any other kind of advice.
If we're talking about predicting Ukraine, I would like to register a prediction of my own. I'm no expert on warmaking, foreign relations, politicians' psychology, nations' sociology, etc., and I can't say my assumptions have been always on point. Still, the things I did get right (most of which I cannot prove I did, hence this post to secure bragging rights in case things do continue to conform to my current priors) make me believe I have stumbled on an unique combination of (admittedly simple) insights that nobody else seems to be having. Here's the full story:
1. During the Afghanistan withdrawal, I stumbled (on r/themotte, I believe) on the claim that Biden is reliably, ideologically anti-war. This was later corroborated by reports of him more or less banning the US miliary from performing artillery and drone strikes. So, unlike most leftists, once the Ukraine conflict started, I've been assuming his administration to be making a good-will attempt at preventing it, and therefore the intelligence reports they published to be accurate, with the larger propaganda offensive aimed solely at exposing Russia's plans and intimidating them into calling them off. This has proven to be spectacularly correct.
2. I have also correctly assumed that Putin cannot act alone. One thing that really caught my eye was China publicly and explicitly asked Russia not to invade during their upcoming important vanity event. It made me confidently predict to my peers that the Olympics won't be interrupted, but in retrospect the period of calm that did transpire should have also alerted me to the important corollary that, all along, they knew and admitted what's coming right after them. (Obviously, China does not support Russia, and it's even less likely to support it now that the rest of the world united against it, but it does continue to politely stand aside, as it, assumedly, promised Putin to do.) I've had all the right info, I just wishful-thought it away.
3. Once the fighting started, I had little hope for any but the most token of sanctions to materialize. Europe needs that gas, I assumed. How wrong I was...
4. As a Polish citizen witnessing a large wave of post-2014 Ukrainian migration, I knew something that the Russians (and the likes of Richard Hanania) apparently missed. With each passing year, Ukrainians were becoming more and more aligned with the west. The millions of them who live and work in Poland and other Central European states kept sending back home stories of a better life - one which is apparently possible even in a country extremely similar to their own, separated only by 30 years of recent history. Surely, Ukrainians had little respect for their own failing government and its oligarchic caste of rulers, but their recent electoral choices (Klitschko! Zelenskyy!) should have made it perfectly clear they're symbolically pining for change and hope. (I was still worried the Ukrainian society will fold, Crimea-style, under intimidation by sheer superior military power, but that fear was unfounded. Hope isn't taken away so easily.)
So, my predictions are:
1. Russian invasion has already failed. The Ukrainians will continue to resist (99%). Not push back (90% on Ukraine never being able to go on a military counteroffensive or preventing subsequent territorial losses), Russia still has superior military power. But tie it up in a bloody, prolonged struggle against a motivated army and unrelenting underground resistance. Russia will not invade another country (90%), in large part because it will not be able to open another front while Ukraine keeps draining its blood and resources.
2. Putin has also lost the diplomatic and propaganda fight. The whole world turned against him, his own country slowly turns against him, and nobody is willing to come to his rescue. (So far, that's not a prediction, it's a statement of fact.) Russia will continue to be further and further isolated until it gets rid of him, one way of another, most likely sacrificing him to give itself a way out of the war and economic collapse (80%). After he's ousted, Russia's peace offer will be accepted, with only minor concessions (70%). Conditional on the above, Crimea and Donbass return to Ukraine, with no other border changes happening (90%). The only question is - how quickly does this happen. (I don't feel qualified to guess.)
3. The US will continue pushing against the invasion, while firmly refusing to take any miliary action (90%). Neither Ukraine nor any other country will get admitted to NATO during (99%) or immediately after the war (80%), though Ukraine might get fast-tracked to European Union during (20%) or after the war (70%).
4. Here's the crazy part. And I do mean crazy, I can't believe I'm typing this, I feel silly typing this. But, to my knowledge, nobody else is, and I'm increasingly convinced it's true, and someone needs to be typing this, so it might as well be me.
See, the leftists are correct. (No, wiseguys, that's not the silly part, let me finish.) They were correct all along and are being proven more and more correct with each passing day. It's just that they're so invested in fighting old fights and personal vendettas against The Man that none of them noticed yet. They're correct about the need for diplomacy over war, for deescalation and respect for other countries' self-determination. They just didn't notice the US foreign relations team has been actually acting out those wishes, to an unprecedented success, recovering all legitimacy by correctly warning about the war, slowly lobbying and building up the network of support that eventually made the current sanitary cordon against Russia possible. And they're correct about the liberal establishment being a hivemind of dangerous, greedy, corrupt warmongers intent on escalating the conflict as far as possible, up to and including a direct war with Russia and the resulting nuclear holocaust. They just didn't notice that the hivemind is all talk and no power, and the man who actually calls the shots is above that bullshit and has already proven himself to be willing to go against it if necessary.
Essentially, the entire world peace hinges on one person, and that person is Joe Biden. If something happens to him, the US reverts to its old, ugly, imperialist self and pushes Russia into a corner from which it can only continue to fight back (just as the leftists predicted).
Let me say this again. Joe Biden. Proving the great man theory true right before our eyes. Joe fucking Biden. An accidental hero. Who would have imagined this a mere year ago? (Not me, certainly.) In one of the recent open threads here, someone proposed a scenario where his visible dementia is actually so advanced that he's waking up every day discovering anew that his lifelong dream of becoming the president has finally come true. It's part of my headcanon now, but I've made it even better. I imagine him sitting at his desk every day, unable to recall the chain of events that led to the current problem he's presented with, much less able to plan and strategize. Forced to make choices using the only tools his brain has left - plain honesty and deeply held moral (in particular - pacifist) beliefs.
And somehow, it's working.
Can you give a specific prediction for 4)?
Hm. The first one in 3) is relevant, obviously. Otherwise: 70% chance of an agressive escalation by the US administration (defined as either directly involving its military, plans for NATO expansion, or opportunistically pushing demands irrelevant to the current conflict) shortly after Biden stands down, 80% if he stands down before his term ends. 20% chance of credible reports of Biden's cognitive problems during his presidency surfacing after it's over, sub-5% but non-negligible chance of him standing down because of them. (I was overblowing them for storytelling effect, but in my defense, it does make for a great story.) 50% chance of common knowledge circa a decade from now crediting Biden personally for his positive contribution to resolving the Ukrainian conflict, sub-1% chance of any lesson being learned from it by public-facing punditry.
Biden has never been anti-war. He just doesn't like Russians, or possibly anybody east of Paris. He was all in favor of bombing the fuck out of the Serbs, for example, and was a strong early supporter of the war in Afghanistan.
"My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance."
It would seem that only people who expected little resistance to a Russian invasion expected the Russians to launch one. After all, the more resistance you expect, the more reluctant you will be to invade. So it looks like no one who expected strong resistance ALSO thought Putin to expect little resistance.
If WW3 happens (and it doesn't miraculously avoid including anybody who has nukes), nobody will be left to collect their wins from the prediction market. So there is no point making predictions on that market.
I am skeptical of the "nuclear war will kill everyone on Earth" narrative. I don't think it was true in the 1980s when nuclear weapons were at their peak, and I don't think it's true now either.
I agree that "wipe out everyone" is unlikely.
But "society disrupted enough that you cannot reasonably collect on a wager made in the before-times" is another matter.
I'm sure you've read this article, it was shared widely before the invasion:
https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/01/moscows-compellence-strategy/
I re-read it again, and it holds up surprisingly well in retrospect.
I question whether the invasion has really "gone poorly" from the Russian point of view, so far. Obviously they haven't achieved the best case scenario, but are probably still well within range of what they expected. You don't bring 150,000 men to an invasion if you're not expecting to meet any resistance.
I remember the 2003 invasion of Iraq and how the media narratives played out in that case. The non-Fox media all wanted the invasion to be a huge embarrassment for George Bush, and the sequence of narratives that got reported was eerily similar to the current invasion. In the first week, the invasion was meeting "stronger than expected resistance". In the second week, the invasion was "bogged down" as things slowed down outside the capital. And in the third week, whoops, forget everything we said earlier, it's a complete walkover now.
The fact that the narrative is the same doesn't mean that the facts on the ground will be the same, there will always be massive differences that seem obvious and significant in retrospect. Still, I think the media narrative is likely to play out in roughly the same way regardless of the facts on the ground.
I feel like in the last couple of days media coverage has already switched from feel good stories of Ukrainian resistance to cold factual statements on Russian progresses.
> Luttwak is exactly the sort of guy who I expect to know how many troops it takes to invade a country, but I’m not sure why he should be an expert in Putin’s psychology and maybe he was so reliant on his military expertise that he made a (false) assumption of Putin’s rationality in order to be able to carelessly jump from “I know a lot about military strategy” to “I can predict what Putin will do”.
In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef quotes one of the superforecasters as identifying this as the bias responsible for one of their forecasting mistakes. The forecaster made their prediction based "what would I do if I were Shinzo Abe", not "what is Shinzo Abe going to do."
Good piece. Just one niggle (there's always one isn't there). To describe Matt Taibi and Glenn Greenwald as leftists was true probably, oh maybe circa 2010? To assert that they represent the left today goes beyond outlierdom , it's a truly surprising proposition. Taibi throwing his lot in with GOP types and switching sides in the culture wars? Greenwald being interviewed on Fox by his chum Tucker Carlson? They've left the left. Anyway try the Kyiv Independent for some non-Western punditry by Ukrainian military types.
Would you consider David French to still be a conservative?
I live in the UK so admit I had to google that guy. (Greenwald is familiar to us over here as an ex-Guardian writer before he fell out with the crew at the Intercept. ) What's Mr French been saying in his columns/blog/whatever to indicate a shift from conservatism?
I don't know why so many pundits missed the mark so badly on Ukrainian resistance. I was over there just a few months ago and some Ukrainians have been angling for a fight with Putin for years. I think that the pundits just bought too much into Putin's propaganda that Ukraine is an artificial polity, but that was always wrong. Ukrainian nationalism goes back centuries. The argument that Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks gets causation wrong; Lenin had to create the Ukrainian SSR to appease Ukrainians who declared independence multiple times during the revolution. They were no different than the Baltic states in that regard.
It's true that there's a bit of a difference between Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians and Ukrainian speaking western Ukrainians in that the easterners are more pro-Russian than the westerners, but neither of them were fans of Putin's occupations in Crimea or Donbas. Given that Zelenskyy was and is genuinely popular among Ukrainians all over the country there really isn't much room for that division to help Putin here. Once he invaded without provocation even folks who were on the fence about Putin are pretty strongly against him now.
It's worth pointing out that Putin's demands with regard to Donbas were always structured in such a way that he would have a say in Ukrainian internal politics if people gave into them, so Ukrainians have always kind of known that Putin was acting in bad faith.
Many pundits missed the mark because they are Americans and don´t know sh*t about Ukraine. That is pretty simple imho
I mean, of course this is correct but it's such an avoidable problem.
Noted shit-stirer Vaush got it 100%; but also might have been memeing so you decide I guess.
Luttawak made a sub-point which I think adds a lot to how and why he was accurate on how 'difficult' it would be for Russia to take over Ukraine quickly or in large areas.
Luttawak said in his tweet that Russia does not want the Ukrainian people to hate them, at least any more than will happen due to the invasion and large scale death. So yea, Russia is going to raise its porcupine hackles of nuclear retaliation and take whatever time it needs to get to Kyiv and accomplish whatever other goals they think are necessary.
If it takes 2 months instead of 1 week, then that's ok with Russia and if they can avoid a decade of rebuilding shit they blew up for a 'quick victory' they don't really need or care about, then it makes more sense for them to go 'slowly'.
Not to mention a longer war over a few months will kill off more of Ukraine's willing fighters, reducing their capacity for any future insurrection/guerrilla tactics. So if anything, Russia has every incentive to take a bit more time and 'absorb' more losses in order to more truly defeat Ukraine rather than simply take it over. Can Russia not learn from the French resistance in WW2 after it fell to Germany too quickly and left a sizeable and well organised resistance of former soldiers gone underground?
In my view, too much of the commentary is fixated on the specifics of this event or Putin's mindset or calls to reestablish the former USSR...and not enough attention has gone into the how/why/etc. of strategy when forming empires. The West has been out of the habit of doing this since the decolonisation waves of the 1950s and 1960s and isn't' thinking clearly enough about how they used to act in the 1850s when they took over and held territory to expand their empire directly rather than using puppet dictators and corporations and finance/banks as the West has done for decades in their neo-colonialism....Russia's doing 'regular' colonialism.
This is a fairly important point in terms of how to view this war and when comparing it to other wars which had disparate goals. The 'return' of Russia's former territory full of people who speak their language in many cases and share their blood is the kind of thing that has to be done in a certain way in order for the propaganda to 'ring true'.
Russia seeks to rule and retain Ukraine in the long term, while the US's attacks on other nations or nato expansions have not had this goal in recent decades. The US left rubble and dictators in the wake of all the democracies which the US has crushed since the ascension/coup of the military-industrial-intelligence complex after FDR died.
Russia would bomb the fuck out of Ukraine, but they are not trying to win a war at all costs as quickly as possible. This is a massively asymmetrical war in terms of military power and Russia wants to take over Ukraine in the most intact state possible while eliminating as much resistance as possible.
This will slow the Russians down in terms of how quickly they can move and how much territory they can hold as they do not seek to create as much rubble and dead bodies as they possibly can for a paper victory alongside an enormous rebuilding cost they cannot afford.
The US erred/chose this way in Iraq with a very quick take over using brutal bombing methods followed up by decades of corrupt 'rebuilding efforts to line the pockets of military contractors. But it is also true that there was a LOT of rebuilding that needed to happen due to the reckless and violent way the US took over Iraq with far less regard than Russia will likely use, as they seek to take over an intact as possible Ukraine. Though with a brand new war I may be proven wrong if Russian patience wears thin at some point, Russia will not let this drag out without Kyiv for more than 4-6 months in my estimation, but 2-3 could readily happen or they take Kyiv and drag out the war in other cities for a bit to crush any future rebellion by dangling hope or desperation in front of an ongoing invasion/war.
Though of course, it is much easier for me to say this now, I made no predictions ahead of time and am now forecasting and describing based on a lot of information and perspectives the people in the article obviously didn't have.
But I'd say that Russia is 'slow playing' this war on purpose. And all the calls about a 'weak Russia' or 'overly strong Ukrainian resistance' are simply more things Putin will prove the western pundits wrong on over time. I think what people leave out or forget is that Putin is doing exactly what he wants and knew the obvious limitations of what could and could not be achieved with his troop numbers and what sanctions he'd face...
The West was telling him for a month or two before the invasion what sanctions they'd deploy and what they thought about the invasion happening, so Putin as an actor in the prediction markets had a huge advantage to act in ways which would surprise everyone.
Why would so many get this invasion so wrong and yet be so confident that Putin and Russia's military is experiencing a Ukrainian resistance surprise? His own intelligence operations and monitoring of Ukraine along with a quasi-civil war / quasi-invasion in Donbas area for 8 years....just somehow might have given Putin a solid idea of what resistance their would be.
Obviously reality is different and there will be things that do and don't go as predicted in any war, but the headlines of 'Russian invasion behind schedule' - reports Western governments....seems really silly. As if they have a copy of his itinerary like it was a travel package. It is just western propaganda to find a thousand ways to make Russia look bad when they say the invasion is going 'slowly'.
This take doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems pretty clear that Putin was hoping for a quick victory. He was already scheduling peace talks before his army reach Kyiv and was rebuffed by the Ukrainians. That sort of move only makes sense if Putin was expecting immediate capitulation, and when that didn't happen he found out he didn't have a real war-plan.
This whole theory that the invasion is happening slowly because Putin is afraid of killing civilians would also be a lot more compelling if there weren't so many stories of Russian forces shelling civilian areas. Or of Russian troops running out gas and abandoning their vehicles. This just wasn't well planned and Putin is having to get his act together. He was hoping for a lightning victory like in Crimea or South Ossetia but he miscalculated and it didn't work.
You're being a bit unfair to Hanania and Karlin. They were right about the much larger question of whether Russia will invade. Strength of Ukrainian resistance is a minor question in comparison. We're only in the sixth day of the war and the assessment of the Ukrainian resistance may change in the coming days. Lot of the stories about the resistance are surely propaganda (Ghost of Kiev, anyone?), I won't put too much stock in them. I believe Hanania and Karlin both deserve B+ or even A-.
I mean, invasion started on Thursday, today is Wednesday, so Karlin's prediction, with 90 % confidence, that Ukrainian resistence is not going to last more than a week, might technically still come true, but it is quite unlikely.
And Hanania's "Once you’re the kind of people who can't inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal", deducing low popular resistence to invaders from low birthrate, is less quantitative and thus less suspectible to falsification, but from what we see about Ukrainian resistence so far, it might imho be counted as already disproven.
Btw. Hanania follows his prediction of low resistence with another prediction, that Taiwan will fold to China in the case of an invasion. I think that Ukrainian events should obviously strenghten our confidence that Chinese conquest of Taiwan would be no cakewalk, low fertility of Taiwanese nothwithstanding.
Heard it claimed that the reason Ukrainians thought invasion was unlikely was because their intelligence was from the Russian military, where things were kept tightly under wraps, troops massing at the border were told that it was a military exercise. Whereas USG signals intelligence was out of the kremlin where the invasion was discussed.
Could explain why both the Ukrainians, and people going off of their judgements, read this so wrong.
From my Ukranian friends who have fled Kyev and are currently hiding out in the countryside:
"Here is a link to operational news from Ukraine, distribute it in America, let everyone know about Putler's attacks in Ukraine.
invite.viber.com/?g2=AQAWz4SlOONejk7O3GfzWu%2FnBdXEi%2BJ6kFOqKneY6Xfmx3v...
Thank you all for your support.
Glory to Ukraine!!! Glory to heroes!!!"
I’ve got to be missing something important here because I don’t understand the endgame.
Everyone has their own information, expertise, heuristics and hunches but the plain truth is no one knows how this plays out.
We assign greater weight to the market that essentially makes the best guess and over time somehow certain predictions markets can more reliably show us the future? A certain group of predictor are more reliable than an individual? I can sort of see that but I’m not confident it will work out that way.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated in Sarajevo and kinda sorta because of this Europe and a good chunk of West Asia and North Africa are at war and millions die.
Historians are still teasing out what happened and why. One person’s case of food poisoning at critical juncture could have sent events in a different direction. Millions more dead or millions less.
Hanania’s “very intelligent friend” comes off sounding like an idiot. I wonder if his “I can understand the reaction, but…” is charity taken way too far.
Here's one thought that's been bothering me about grading prediction markets. For the sake of argument, consider this (admittedly contrived) scenario: Putin, on January 1st of this year, decided to himself that on the morning of February 24th he's going to flip a coin, and invade Ukraine if and only if it's heads. A theoretically optimal prediction market, that had access to Putin's thoughts and desires, would place odds of invasion firmly at 50% (well, a bit less, accounting for accidental death and all that) all the way up until February 24th, where it would either shoot up to 99% or decay to something lower. There's many things in the world that are like this--for instance, in a betting market about the high in NYC reaching 35 degrees a year from now, if you see the odds at 90%, you'd probably sell as much as you can, since the "optimal" knowledge we have right now is probably closer to 50%. If a year from now, it turned out that some third-rate prediction market had said--for the past year!--that NYC had a 95% chance of having a high over 35 degrees, you'd likely attribute that to it being a bad market, rather than being particularly prophetic. Similarly, to what extent can we attribute the success of markets that were giving high odds to Russia invading Ukraine months ago to the quality of the markets and the forecasters themselves?
You can't grade any predictor on the basis of a single prediction, you have to do it over a bunch of different predictions.
I won't claim this was a solid prediction, or that I should get much credit for it, but on February 18th I wrote about the impending invasion, and suggested that there would be strong Ukrainian resistance: https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1494828037958946817
I regret not putting probabilities on anything.
Joe Biden, Jan 19, 2022.
>President Biden said on Wednesday that he now expected President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would order an invasion of Ukraine.
>He added, almost with an air of fatalism: “But I think he will pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it.”
Not precise but overall predicts invasion and that Putin will pay a higher cost than he expects. This is what you want to say to publicly discourage an invasion, whatever the likelyhood, but is also an accurate prediction. And of course Biden is responsible for organizing the sanctions and producing the higher cost, but I think predicting that Europe and other countries would coordinate together as strongly as they did is also a legit prediction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/biden-putin-russia-ukraine.html
All of the "Putin will invade Ukraine" predictors should have their grades lowered in this post. This is because they almost all followed the IC, which means the predicted invasion multiple times before invasion actually happened. If you date-restrict your google search you can find multiple dates that the IC predicted the invasion including at least:
By Feb 14: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/14/russia-could-invade-ukraine-within-next-month-us-intelligence.html
Feb 16: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2022/02/11/putin-could-attack-ukraine-on-feb-16-biden-told-allies-00008344
Feb 21: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia.html
I believe we now have the plans/orders and they came out late Jan with an intended invasion date of Feb 20?
The point being that our intelligence actually knew nothing ahead of time?
"If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world"
No he isn't! This is a mistake everyone has been making for the last five years and I do not understand why. Scott Adams didn't predict a Trump victory, he predicted a Trump *landslide*. He wasn't even a stopped clock being right twice a day, he was critically wrong on the one thing everyone tries to give him credit for!
He also flipped during 2016 and said Trump would lose, I think when the pussy-grab-tapes got released.
I recall that he basically did this after Cruz won Iowa.
Specifically, he said he was "certain" Trump would win with > 60% of the vote.
Exactly! This bugs me so much. Assessing predictions is only hard if you throw away all but one bit of information.
It would be premature to be impressed with Ukraine's resistance after only one week. "blitzkrieg" took 5 weeks to get to Paris, and Ukraine is bigger than France. Metaculus is currently predicting a 65% chance Putin will take Kiev within 5 weeks of the start of the war. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9939/kyiv-to-fall-to-russian-forces-by-april-2022/
I expect it to be slower than the US's capture of baghdad (20 days after the start of the war) but that's not saying much. That's the world's largest superpower stomping on small dictatorship, and it still took three weeks to get a half-assed "victory".
Yeah. But guys predicting that Ukraine will fall like Afghanistan to the Taliban, which includes both Hanania and Karlin, were wrong.
I'm seeing a lot of sane-washing of "no one possibly meant Kyiv would fall in a few days"[1] but a lot of people really did literally expect that and mean that. And if Zelenskyy fled the capital city that could have precipitated the exact collapse of all formal military resistance in taking the capital.
[1] Not saying these are your words
I think it was crazy to predict Kiev would fall in a few days, because from an outside view nothing like that has ever happened in recent history. In Afghanistan the Taliban offensive began on May 1 and Kabul didn't fall until August 15. It took 74 days for the UK to retake the Falklands despite having overwhelming military superiority (the sea journey from UK to Falklands at 20 knots is only 14 days).
The narrative was this:
1. Ukraine knows it cannot beat Russia head-to-head.
2. Ukraine knows it has the best chance to "win" via guerrilla resistance.
3. Ukraine will move as quickly as possible into guerrilla mode and not fight directly.
4. Zelenskyy will leave Kyiv to govern from Western Ukraine.
5. Russians tanks move into Kiev quickly.
It could well be what Russia expected to happen, too. The ability of the Ukrainians to halt the military advance has surprised a lot of people.
Abandoning the capitol city to a foreign conqueror without a fight would be unprecedented afaik. Even when Napoleon found Moscow abandoned before his arrival, in preparation for a Russian plot to burn down their own capitol to hurt Napoleon, this was after a series of victorious battles on Russian soil spanning months.
Not clear that this was part of a Russian plot. It's not even clear the burning was deliberately planned and not just some hooligans setting fires. The mayor of Moscow was credited with the plan but in later years he (strangely) denied that he had ordered it.
I did think that a competent Russian invasion of Ukraine would capture Kyiv in a week. And, well, that obviously didn't happen.
NB. "Capture" is a strong word. It would have taken at least a month or two before the victory parade. But what is going on in Kyiv today does not look like a victory march.
> I'm seeing a lot of sane-washing of "no one possibly meant Kyiv would fall in a few days"[1]
I meant that, thought that, and expected that Kyiv will be taken by Russian special forces (basically, shooting or arresting president of Ukraine).
Clearly, I was wrong.
And in the alternate universe where that did happen, the Internet message boards are full of people saying "of *course* that was going to happen, we all knew it, what idiot could've thought otherwise?!?!!1"
Kyiv is literally next door to Belarus, which was a staging point for Russia. They were under Kyiv the first day, and they barely moved from that time.
50 miles along the Dneiper river through the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Kiev itself is very large -- about 20 miles across and 3 million population.
Scott, you wrote
> My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance. I couldn’t even really find anybody who predicted one correctly and was silent on the other. If you know someone in this category, please let me know so I can give them an appropriate amount of glory.
I think Rob Lee might qualify (at least strongly predicting invasion conditional on collapse of talks, and outlining how Russia had to worry about different levels of casualties based on how extreme the force they commit). On January 18, 2022 he wrote https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/01/moscows-compellence-strategy/
which states:
> A number of recent articles have suggested that the costs of a potential invasion are too high, or that the purpose of a Russian military operation in Ukraine would be to occupy territory. A better explanation of Moscow’s current actions is that they are part of a compellence campaign. If Moscow cannot convince the United States to agree to some of its demands and force Ukraine to make concessions, it may view military force as its last resort to change what it considers an unacceptable status quo. Russian behavior suggests that it believes the costs of inaction would be greater than the costs of a significant military escalation in Ukraine, particularly after reviewing the events in Ukraine over the summer and fall...
> In contrast to the public buildup this spring, Russia has made a concerted effort to obscure its movements this time, moving equipment at night, rotating units between training ranges, and blocking websites used for tracking trains... Russian officials are backing themselves into a corner by committing themselves to a strong response unless they receive concessions. If it does not achieve some of its stated goals, Moscow will suffer a cost to its credibility if it does not escalate...
> The most likely ground offensive option is that the Russian military would focus on destroying Ukrainian military units east of the Dnieper River, inflicting casualties, taking prisoners of war, destroying military equipment, and degrading defense capabilities. This could include a planned withdrawal — a punitive raid —possibly after one or two weeks. It could also involve occupying terrain outside Kyiv and threatening the capital unless Russia’s demands are met. Such an operation would more closely resemble a more aggressive version of Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008 than its annexation of Crimea. By inflicting heavy losses on the Ukrainian military, taking prisoners of war, and degrading Kyiv’s defense capabilities, Russia could potentially alter Zelensky’s incentive structure sufficiently to induce painful concessions. An additional benefit of such an operation is that it would likely be less costly and would not require Russian forces to enter cities, which would increase the risk of civilian casualties and make an insurgency more effective.
Robert Gates (Director of Central Intelligence (1991-93) & Secretary of Defense (2006-11)) qualifies https://www.ft.com/content/31a6f5b0-402d-4a84-bf3b-8c72a254eb81 Jan 21, 2022
> Putin has overplayed his hand on Ukraine
> Because of Russia’s stunted economy, demographic challenges and other weaknesses at home, Putin has dealt himself a poor hand — but until now he has played it rather skilfully. He has received a great deal of unintended help from the US. Our domestic divisions and near-paralysis in Congress, our perceived withdrawal from the Middle East and, more broadly, from our six-decade-long global leadership role, and ignominious scuttling out of Afghanistan — together these have led many countries to hedge their bets and develop closer economic, political and security ties with both Russia and China...
> Putin’s problem is that, as dictators are wont to do, he has overplayed his hand. His aggressive threats against Ukraine have galvanised Nato and reaffirmed its clarity of purpose. His menacing policies have made Ukrainians even more anti-Russian and driven the country further into the arms of the west. Any Russian military action will result in Ukrainian resistance as well as larger Nato military deployments on Russia’s western border, potential suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and painful economic sanctions.
> Moscow has deployed some 100,000 troops to the borders of Ukraine. What now? Putin finds himself in a situation where Russian success is defined as either a change of government in Kyiv (with the successor aligned with Moscow) or conquest of the country. The 18th-century French diplomat Talleyrand is meant to have said: “You can do anything you like with bayonets except sit on them.” Putin must use those troops soon or face the humiliation of withdrawing them without achieving anything except pushing Ukraine closer to the west. In either case, he has placed himself in a difficult position at home and abroad.
I have to say I feel a little bad about trying to predict the outcome or the occurrence of a war. This isn't like covid, where the virus doesn't much care what you think of its ability to kill this or that many people (although other actors may care). Whether Kyiv stands or falls depends largely on what its defenders think of their chances to resist the invader. Decisions to help, or start a war in the first place, depend on what the predicted outcome is, and have very real consequences.
I'm not saying prediction markets shouldn't cover the war. The media is full of idle speculation in any case, and I think there's a case to be made that it's a good thing somebody's really trying to make good, honest predictions based on the information they have. Still, I feel like there's an ethical discussion worth having about this, and I don't recall seeing it. It doesn't seem to me like prediction aggregators are providing much useful information about this, and maybe that's a good thing, as one argument for why this is okay to do is probably that the forecasting scene isn't big enough to affect anything. If we knew Putin was closely following the Ukraine tournament on Metaculus, how comfortable would we feel making guesstimates about his chances of winning?
What puzzled me about much of "the dialogue" on this topic was just how common it was for people to conflate "predicting an invasion" with "desiring an invasion" – people getting called warmongers for predicting Putin would attack.
Subreddit name is purposely obtuse (actually a news group). This analysis is quite prescient:
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/comments/ssqof3/twilight_on_the_dnieper_context_for_the/
Correctly calls both likelyhood of invasion and likelyhood of strong resistence.
I predicted both of these things, but not really that specifically, because vagueness sounds better. I will add the following for posterity:
Strong resistance continues; in the end, Russia makes a struggle of it but mostly appears to back down; retains Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin's aim is to legitimatize the incorporation of largely-ethnically-Russian areas of Ukraine, in my reading.
There's a guy Youtube randomly recommended to me a while ago called S2 Underground who so far seems to have been right about everything. When I saw Tracey et al. pop up in my email feed I was shocked he was so much further behind than I was just from watching this one Youtube channel. He has big ol' maps I don't understand and uses weather satellites to take pictures of tanks. Maybe more of us should listen to this guy?
https://www.youtube.com/c/S2Underground
A huge amount of your marking down seems to be based on "Ukraine resistance strong" and "Russia weak". I'm not sure these are even close to accurate.
A remarkable aspect of the war that's not being remarked upon enough by the West is how "gentle" it has been. Yes, yes, war is never gentle, but every actually confirmable detail about Russian behavior (as opposed to the usual propaganda) seems to be precision munitions, warning civilians before targeting buildings, and so on. Not only do we not have WW2 type behavior, we're seeing what looks like behavior that's more gentle than America in Iraq or Vietnam.
So this, IMHO, requires everyone to recalibrate in multiple ways.
- it doesn't tell us *anything* about the relative strengths of Russia or Ukraine if Russia is deliberately fighting with both hands and one foot tied behind its back.
- why would Russia behave this way? At the very least it suggests that perhaps their goal is not actually "Smash Ukraine"?
If one were to learn from history (a tough proposition, sure, but hear me out) two lessons that one might learn are
+ fighting no-holds-barred for a territory one ultimately hopes to assimilate is not an especially rational strategy. Resentment about this during the US Civil War is still with us in some form or another 150 years, and that's in the country with the world's shortest attention span. In other words if the goal is sincerely to bring Ukraine back into the fold, the war is being conducted in a way very much as commensurate with that aim as possible.
+ the claim that punishing the civilians of a nation will make that nation weaker and more eager to sue for peace (along with variants like "social order will collapse the instant something unexpected happens, whether bombing or aliens") has been a favorite of the West from WW1 through WW2 to Korea and Vietnam. It has never worked, but remains popular because (a) revenge and (b) it works in the movies.
It looks to me like Putin, learning from history and behaving rationally rather than emotionally, sees there's zero upside and plenty of downside to behaving like Tamerlane or Hitler or even Westmoreland, and is conducting the war appropriately.
One can go even further albeit more speculatively.
Everyone is saying that Russia is losing the propaganda war. But, as the Burmese saying goes, "Don't teach the crocodile where the water is".
Sure, the West is getting the early propaganda wins and memes, winning the Twitter war, but that was always going to be the case given who controls the internet and TV outside Russia. No point in even trying to fight that battle.
So look beyond the *immediate* wins. Russia is both being "gentle" and (as far as I can tell) essentially honest in its claims. Meaning that at some point, after the immediate war calms down, they're in a very good position to tot up
- who behaved what way in this war? (Ukraine, or US in Iraq vs us.)
- who told the truth in this war vs obvious lies and immediately exposed propaganda?
And that's going to be a non-trivial point in their favor in terms of the long (generational or so) game, especially in terms of winning the favor of the incompetent but entitled middle class youth of the West, the ones always looking for a reason to hate the system they live under. Basically an easy way to fire up the equivalent of Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades in 20..30 years as a reaction to "here's how terrible your parents and their system were, and here's all the evidence you need".
I'm not claiming this operation is being done today solely as a way to control the narrative in 25 years! I'm saying that it is being executed by people who understand that actions have cultural consequences long after the immediate physical consequences, and who are tailoring their behavior appropriately.
Now this is all predicated on the assumptions that
- Russia is being "gentle". I think if this were not so we'd have plenty of evidence of that already.
- This pattern will continue. And maybe that will change if the operation takes longer to achieve its ends than planned. But I think it would be a mistake to imagine that Russia always assumed they'd control the country in three days, not when you look at the way they are fighting with what looks like substantial care for minimal damage and casualties.
(And yes, yes, I know we'll get the usual crowd telling us just how brutal they have been, blah blah.
Sorry kids, when your comparison points are US Civil War, WW2, Korea, or even Vietnam, this behavior is nothing close to brutal; and insisting that it is does just reveals your ignorance of history.)
> - it doesn't tell us *anything* about the relative strengths of Russia or Ukraine if Russia is deliberately fighting with both hands and one foot tied behind its back.
It depends on what part. Leaving working tanks with fuel that get taken be Ukrainian civilians is sign that something really went wrong (obviously, among 100 000 people all kinds of unusual things can happen and individual case is hard to distinguish from large-scale issues).
The same for large failure rate, inability to delete Ukrainian air force, apparent failure to target stuff (destroying Holocaust/Soviet crime museum instead of TV tower nearby)
> - why would Russia behave this way? At the very least it suggests that perhaps their goal is not actually "Smash Ukraine"?
Yes, nothing indicates so far that they plan genocide like Germans or Soviets during WW II. Though destruction of culture is planned (denying that Ukrainians can exists as nation etc)
> this behavior is nothing close to brutal
For example tanks stopping because people are standing on road. Russians or Germans during WW II would run over them.
Actually, I wonder how WWII would go if everyone had smartphones and every atrocity went viral on twitter within hours.
We haven't had exactly that war yet, but we have had Iran-Iraq, Eritrea-Ethiopia, and the Great African War in the Congo (along with the endless flare-up/calm down around Liberia/Sierra Leone), all of which essentially conducted themselves like WW1 and WW2.
We have had Syria/ISIS in the modern age, but I'm unaware of how well that was covered by locals with cell phones; certainly not enough to make much impression on Twitter, but I have zero feel for the reality of that conflict.
In other words I think it's too early to tell if the difference is the presence of cameras everywhere, or who the combatants are.
> essentially honest in its claims
Hahaha no. Unless you mean some specific subset of claims and discard some?
Shelling residential areas with artillery is being gentle?
The war was gentle in the first three days or so, now it's war crimes all day everyday.
It appears that the "IF this patterns continues" part of the above has now failed.
IMHO Russia's thinking was "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. OK, you've had a week and have refused the easy way".
Here's someone else saying the same sort of thing
https://twitter.com/ClintEhrlich/status/1499282757725212675
Even if this didn't start off as a Ledeen Doctrine, it's seemingly headed for that place, with those consequences...
Interestingly, Donald Kagan gave something of the same analysis for much of the later brutality in the Vietnam War; that once the US was seen to be committed, they believed they could not be seen to be weak. Pointless destruction, just to show that pointless destruction could be imposed anytime anywhere. Oderint dum Metuant.
So if the historical lesson of THIS war going to be "don't even bother with the easy option next time; start at full Genghis just to remind people how things actually work"?
I think your hypothesis fails the test of history. I'm not convinced people remember the brutality of a particular war much past the lifespan of those who actually fought it. Americans do not seethe with resentment towards the Japanese to this day over Bataan or Iwo Jima, and the Japanese are not burning with hatred over Hiroshima or the firebombing of Tokyo. The Vietnamese are actually pretty friendly towards the Americans, Agent Orange and Operation Linebacker notwithstanding. The American North is not bitter about secession, even despite the long rows of graves at Gettysburg.
Contrariwise, the Americans were "gentle" in the sense you specify in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it didn't do a speck of good, if anything we left far *more* resented than when we arrived.
So I think I would look for the reason people nurse grudges in other aspects of the war -- like whether your side won or lost, whether it was over fast or dragged on -- and what happened in the post-war order, like whether there were some separate reason to nurse a grudge, e.g. in the post-bellum American South a resistance to the upending of the social order occasioned by the 13th Amendment, and the vast expansion of Federal authority that came with the 14th -- indeed, the struggle over the scope of the 14th Amendment continues to this day, and has nothing to do with Sherman burning down Atlanta.
What do people think about military casualty estimates thus far? This seems underdiscussed as an important factor in how things go. Russia admits that 500 soldiers have died, Ukraine says they've killed 7,000 Russian soldiers, and the Pentagon estimates each side has lost 1,500 in the first 5 days (https://news.yahoo.com/moscow-says-hundreds-of-russian-troops-killed-thousands-more-injured-in-ukraine-182037954.html). That's about all I know. If the Ukrainian estimate is even in the ball park (or even the Pentagon estimate is right), then in just a couple months this could already be the deadliest war Russia has fought since WW2, right (they lost 15k in Afghanistan)? Will domestic support for the war hold up under that pressure?
It highly depends on how much Kreml can control information flow. In country with over 140 000 people both 150, 1500, 15 000 and 30 000 dead soldiers are not a problem by itself - reaction of population is what is going to matter.
Completely suppressed death of 30 000 (or well blamed on someone) can be a smaller problem than death of 3 of symbolic and well known.
"Russia is closer to Kyiv than America was to Baghdad at this stage of their Iraq invasion, and everyone was impressed with that stage of the American campaign"
This.
It's gobsmacking to me that you and the commenters and seemingly almost everyone else in the Western hemisphere thinks Putin's invasion is going badly and/or that Putin was truly unprepared for this level of resistance.
It took the Americans three *weeks* to take Baghdad, and it took the *bloody German Army* six weeks to take Poland, and those are two of the gold standard examples for fast conventional wars.
I have never in my life seen a stronger example of "you're calling it too soon". These grades, at least the ones on strength of resistance, are coming a month too soon.
Kiev is only about 50 miles from the Russian border and there's not much between it and the border, so Russia had a pretty good head start. It took about 5 weeks for Germany to take France, which should've been close to equal to Germany in manpower and technology. Outperforming WW2 France may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but Russia is in a much stronger relative position and has way fewer geographical barriers. To some extent, you're probably right, but it's not clear to me what the reference point should be. If someone told me prior to the invasion, 'Russia should take Kiev within a week,' it wouldn't have sounded like an implausible claim.
Fair, but I'm not saying it shouldn't be surprising, just that it shouldn't be called so early. This is the first trickle of evidence. There's an irresistible incentive for our side to say it's strong evidence, to encourage more of it into existence. But it's not.
"We are giving the civilians guns and molotov cocktails as the tanks roll up" does not fill me with confidence in the Ukrainian side and it really shouldn't anyone else either.
People were expecting replay of Crimea where there was no real resistance.
I agree, I think they were. People ignore demographics in war prediction. It amazes me.
Kyiv was the center of a 25 year political battle to Westernize Ukraine. It's where you could reliably get a protest crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Western/Euro/Democracy side of Ukrainian politics. It's one of the places that *would* resist in a fight. Since Putin was the guy behind the shadows pushing the Eastern/Slavic/Russian side, he's got to know that from 20 years of experience.
Crimea is far away from the centers of power, geographically disconnected, and has a huge group that self identifies Russian. Note how it hasn't been a hotspot of insurgency or anything these past 8 years.
Popular writers could have known all this and taken it into account, but seem to have mostly not done that.
Lesson for rationalists, and it's an old lesson: popular writers in this topic space aren't very rational.
I don’t see how you can run a useful prediction market for World War III or more specifically a US-Russian nuclear exchange. You should always bet that it won’t happen: if it doesn’t, the market resolves in your favor and you make money; if it does, the market doesn’t resolve the other way or pay out any money because it and your counterparties have been vaporized.
Other events short of a nuclear exchange may allow the market to pay out with meaningfully positive probability, but still have such a high probability of one that they’ll yield distorted odds.
It may make sense if you can buy "yes" while it is low and sell position if it gets higher as other also price in the position.
But overall it suffers from similar issues as betting in dollars that dollar value will collapse.
It depends whether you’re trying to make a prediction or trying to game the market (which involves predictions, but of a different sort.)
By a lot of no and buy a little of yes as a hedge. Of course you have to really believe you’ll be able to spend it or why would you bother?
>My very quick search didn’t find any pundit who successfully predicted both the Russian invasion and the strong Ukranian resistance. I couldn’t even really find anybody who predicted one correctly and was silent on the other (I think Clay Graubard of Global Guessing managed this, but he’s a superforecaster, not a pundit). If you know someone in this category, please let me know so I can give them an appropriate amount of glory.
I don't know what you think a "pundit" is, nowadays, so I'll answer a better question.
Leah McElrath, on Feb 11: https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1492173615110012931
Note that she later corrected her date for the Ukraine Revolution of Dignity, and the relevant Wiki section is entitled, "18–23 February 2014"
Honorable mention, from her retweets: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1495894762053844998
She also retweeted these, which relate to Ukrainian resistance:
https://twitter.com/AnnaMyroniuk/status/1494984395601715201
https://twitter.com/evan_lorenz/status/1494723439973867522
Admittedly, she also posted the following:
>“West plans to arm resistance if Russian forces occupy Ukraine”
>(I’ll note for the record that the tactic used by the West of arming resistance fighters hasn’t been a very successful one in the recent past.)
However, unless I'm very wrong about what she meant by "recent," this actually refers to the consequences of victory.
Here are some more from Leah McElrath, dated January 2020:
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1219693585731391489
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1221316758281293825
Did anyone compare pundit and prediction-market predictions on Ukraine to financial market predictions?
For example, apparently on the 24th Feb credit-default-swaps were priced consistent with a 90% probability of Ukraine not paying their debts back (presumably being insolvent (or not existing)) within five years. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/ukraine-debt-swaps-signal-80-chance-of-default-as-stress-mounts and it looks like CDSs have twice the return today that they had on the 24th https://cbonds.com/indexes/13643/ . I don't really understand how CDS returns could double from a 90% probability -- I guess the price factors in both inflation and the probability of default, but the UAH currency seems to have kept its value (since the 24th). Maybe the doubling isn't a matter of the probability of Ukraine's defeat going up, but a matter of the currency falling if it doesn't get defeated? I don't know. I'm pretty confused.
What’s the value of 99% probability
Vs. 90% when the outcome is all or nothing?
I guess that’s my way of saying I’m not surprised.
Brett Deveraux makes a similar point to yours in https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-war-in-ukraine/ :
"NATO – and especially US intelligence – was remarkably effective at predicting what Putin had planned before he did it, down to predicting the day the assault would begin. NATO intelligence agencies also warned in advance that Russian forces would stage false-flag attacks and shell Ukrainian positions trying to provoke Ukrainians into shooting back and the Russians did exactly that. Frankly, especially after the intelligence failures of the Global War on Terror, I was shocked by the degree to which US intelligence mostly nailed this; it goes to show that while organizations created to spy on the Soviet Union struggle to spy on terrorists and the Taliban, they are very good at spying on the Russian Federation. Frankly the entire thing has been a fairly stunning US intelligence coup and there are a whole lot of analysts and more than a few world leaders who woke up on the 24th owing US intelligence an apology."
What? US intelligence has certainly been good, and some agency like the NSA may have predicted the date behind closed doors, but the best public prediction I saw - which was still slightly less precise - was Leah McElrath on Twitter, as linked above.
BTW, I think she also predicted Putin would besiege a city in Ukraine, due to some trauma of his. However, Twitter's search function sucks and I hate it with a passion.
I thought Michael Koffman was the only A+ out there. (https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/putins-wager-in-russias-standoff-with-the-west/), but then I realised that I couldn't find a single prediction about operational outcomes, so he's a C or B at best.
Lack of technical experience in the US Intelligence Community may be a greater cause of error than bias here. By technical experience, I don't mean journalistic or policy experience, but technical experience creating intelligence products, as a collector, targetter, etc. I observed this with Russia-gate, where based on how we collect intelligence there were significant red-flags about the credibility of the narrative (e.g., when the NSA had lower confidence than the FBI, CIA).
As to the Russian invasion, an understanding of how we collect on Russia, the nature of our relationships with Kremlin insiders, and how the information was communicated (via State Department spox not leaks, etc.) were all critical to the analysis. It was fairly obvious, given those factors, that some of the most senior Kremlin officials were unambiguously communicating to us, for self-serving reasons of course, that the invasion was going forward. That doesn't mean the invasion would go forward, but it is where an analysis should begin.
IMO, any analyst without the technical intel background, who doesn't know what they don't know, will have a tough time separating signal from noise. It would be like trying to predict the outcome of a US election without knowing how the election process works. In sum, the problem is lack of knowledge more than rationality or bias.
The problem with this is that it's a really complex prediction to get both sides (invasion chance and poor military performance) right since there's an apparent contradiction that needs to be resolved.
Since if Russia is likely to display poor military performance then they will probably not invade a successful prediction must incorporate incorrect Russian assessments about the Ukrainian-Russian balance of power. It is very reasonable to assume that the Russian administration knows more about both Russian and Ukrainian military capabilities and plans than you do, so it follows that making a correct prediction here probably requires extremely specialised knowledge or a reasoning procedure that would normally produce the wrong result.
I would also note that prediction markets are likely to handle foreign policy less well than most other things. Deception is a very large part of foreign policy, especially where military options are concerned. Great effort goes into obfuscating the probability, timing and location of military actions using deception, misinformation and deceit.
Registering predictions:
https://truism.substack.com/p/ukraine-predictions?s=w
About two weeks out I was somewhat sure he would invade, but only in the southeastern half. I thought Ukrainian resistance would be too strong to hold more than half the country. But if you asked me if he world have attacked Kyiv I would have said maybe 20%. It really shocked me when he did.
This is a KGB war, not a generals war. It's not going to be pretty.
It seems the direction everybody failed in was prediction Putin's rationality. They either had expert knowledge that Ukraine would put up strong resistance so they assumed Putin wouldn't invade, or they had expert knowledge that Putin was planning to invade and assumed he wouldn't be doing it if it was going to be a disaster. Both directions of assumption are entirely reasonable and could only have been overcome if these sets of experts had taken each other more seriously than Putin's rationality.
Karlin did make this prediction as well though which deserves an F: https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1468659468544139271
I think people who gave the war high probability from the start were actually not good forecasters, but rather they happened to get lucky in this specific case.
I was predicting something around 50% for RU invasion of UA until the final days, and I went up to 95% after Putin's speech on February 22. I think this was a good forecast, even in hindsight. The primary reason to doubt warnings given by the US government in this case wasn't that they were lying about the concrete intelligence they had but that the genuine intelligence in their possession may have been part of a disinformation campaign on Putin's part to make invasion look more credible.
Putin could've achieved a lot by threatening invasion in a legitimate way: he could hurt the Ukrainian economy in a serious way by making investors skittish about a possible Russian invasion, he could communicate to the West that he's serious about invading if Ukraine being admitted to NATO becomes a real possibility and so on. In my opinion whether Putin was bluffing in this way or whether he actually meant to invade was unclear until the final days before February 24.
As an example of this, consider the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the First Balkan War in 1912:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31577/world-war-i-centennial-austria-hungary-mobilizes-against-russia
Both Austria-Hungary and Russia mobilized the districts on their shared border for war. Just as it is in this case, whether war would truly break out or not was unclear, but in the end the 1912 crisis didn't result in war. The July crisis of 1914, similar in many ways to the crisis over Serbian expansion in 1912, did result in war. It's quite difficult to see a difference between the two cases right until the final days of July 1914, similar to how I think whether Russia would invade Ukraine this time around was unclear until the final days before the invasion.
The more interesting question is whether different actions and briefings from the US and Europe could have changed the course of events. Most people I know, including myself, were of the view that publicly stating Putin would invade ensured it would happen (so our predictions from mid Jan were 80% pus) as he had no way to withdraw (and it wasn't clear there would be material consequences to invading). And the relevant question is what to do now....send troops to Estonia in large numbers, force China to take a side? I honestly don't know what does everyone think?
Russian language military analyst on the Ukraine invasion, Feb 3 2022, English translation. Some excerpts:
>In Russia’s expert community recently a sufficiently powerful opinion has taken root that it won’t even be necessary to put troops on Ukraine’s territory since the armed forces of that country are in a pathetic state.
>Some pundits note that Russia’s powerful fire strike will destroy practically all surveillance and communications systems, artillery and tank formations. Moreover, a number of experts have concluded that even one crushing Russian strike will to be sufficient to finish such a war.
>Let’s start with the last. To assert that no one in Ukraine will defend the regime signifies practically a complete lack of knowledge about the military-political situation and moods of the broad masses in the neighboring state. And the degree of hatred (which, as is well-known, is the most effective fuel for armed conflict) in the neighboring republic toward Moscow is plainly underestimated. No one in Ukraine will meet the Russian army with bread, salt and flowers.
>But even the Russian-speaking population of this part of Ukraine (including also cities like Kharkov, Zaporozhe, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol) didn’t support similar thoughts by a huge majority. The “Novorossiya” project somehow imperceptibly deflated and quietly died.
>Now about “Russia’s powerful fire strike,” by which “practically all surveillance and communications systems, artillery and tank formations of the VSU2” will supposedly be destroyed.
>To this it’s certainly necessary to add that supplies of prospective and highly-accurate weapons in the VS RF5 don’t bear any kind of unlimited character. “Tsirkon” hypersonic missiles still aren’t in the armory. And the quantity of “Kalibrs” (sea-based cruise missiles), “Kinzhals,” Kh-101 (air-launched cruise missiles) and missiles for “Iskanders” in the very best case number in the hundreds (dozens in the case of “Kinzhals”). This arsenal is completely insufficient to wipe a state on the scale of France with a population of more than 40 million from the face of the earth. And Ukraine is characterized by exactly these parameters.
>Sometimes in the Russian expert community it’s asserted (by the followers of Douhet’s doctrine6) that since hypothetical combat operations in Ukraine will be conducted in conditions of full Russian air superiority the war will be extremely brief and will end in the shortest time.
>But it’s somehow forgotten that the armed formations of the Afghan opposition in the conflict of 1979-1989 didn’t have a single aircraft or combat helicopter. And the war in that country stretched out for a full 10 years. Chechen fighters didn’t have a single airplane. And the fight with them continued several years and cost federal forces a great deal of blood and victims.
>And the Armed Forces of Ukraine have some combat aviation. As well as air defense means.
>Now as concerns assertions that western countries won’t send a single soldier to die for Ukraine.
>We have to note that most likely this will be the case. However this hardly excludes in the event of a Russian invasion massive assistance to the VSU from the collective West with the most varied types of arms and military equipment and large volume supplies of all kinds of materiel. In this regard the West has already exhibited an unprecedented consolidated position, which, it seems, was not expected in Moscow.
>One shouldn’t doubt that some reincarnated lend-lease in the form and likeness of the Second World War from the USA and countries of the North Atlantic alliance will begin. Even the flow of volunteers from the West of which there could be very many can’t be excluded.
>And finally, about the protracted hypothetical campaign. In the Russian expert community they say several hours, sometimes even several dozen minutes. Meanwhile somehow they forget we have already been through all this. The phrase “seize the city with one parachute regiment in two hours” is already a classic of the genre.
>Generally, there won’t be any kind of Ukrainian blitzkrieg. Utterances by some experts of the type “The Russian Army will destroy the greater part of VSU sub-units11 in 30-40 minutes,” “Russia is capable of destroying Ukraine in 10 minutes in a full-scale war,” “Russia will destroy Ukraine in eight minutes” don’t have a serious basis.
>And finally, most important. Armed conflict with Ukraine now fundamentally doesn’t meet Russia’s national interests. Therefore it’s best for some overexcited Russian experts to forget their hat-tossing fantasies. And, with the aim of preventing further reputational damage, never again to recall them.
https://russiandefpolicy.com/2022/02/07/mass-fire-strike-on-ukraine/
One person who both predicted the Russian invasion and said that Ukraine could defeat it with the right support was Thomas C. Theiner (@noclador on Twitter).
For what it's worth, had I made any public predictions I would have done quite badly.
1. I thought the US government was exaggerating the probability that Putin would invade Ukraine, partly because of the many previous lies and blunders by the US intelligence community.
2. I thought Russian troops would rapidly take all the big cities in Ukraine, then face a prolonged insurgency wherever they didn't have large concentrations of troops.
3. I thought Putin would once again exploit NATO's internal differences to grab a little more Ukrainian land by bluffing.
I was, clearly, wrong about the above. But I didn't end up with the proverbial egg all over my face because I knew myself not to be an expert in foreign policy and therefore did not make any public posts about Ukraine before the war there had actually started. My expertise is in Virology. And in Virology, in March 2020 I posted that COVID-19 was going to be very very bad in the US because what was then known about the virus was very very bad.
FYI maybe of interest even if he is an insider and not a pundit. Oleksiy Arestovych (an Ukrainian presidential adviser), interview from 18-Mar-2019 mentions "... 99.9% probability of a Russian invasion from 4 directions in 2021-2022" full interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8&t=460s (with time code; H/T
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1504237351941324802)
Regarding Alperovitch'es predictions on the resistance. He wrote the following on Feb 24:
> It's becoming very clear that in the very near future, Russia is going to achieve it's objectives of overthrowing Ukrainian government and establish a puppet regime.
This tweet is now deleted, so see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220316032643/https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1496862856935251969
Clearly he was very wrong.