Various Ukraine topics
Seeing it coming
People had been worried about a Russian attack on Ukraine for a long time. I'd worried that it was imminent a year ago with the last big massing of Russian troops on Ukraine's borders. And with the massing this year I was more than just worried. Going back to my predictions on this Metaculus question I was putting an invasion at even odds a month before the invasion but from the 13th of February until the invasion launched on the 23rd rapidly became convinced that the invasion was actually going to happen. But while I can brag about being ahead of the curve in terms of predicting that there would be an invasion I was terribly wrong about how it would proceed and on the night of the 23rd I was afraid that the multiple axes of incursion and forward air drops would throw the defenses into confusion and rout. Oops.
Looking back at information from before the 23rd that still stands up well this report[pdf] from the Royal United Services Institute really stands out. It outlines a case for why Russia might be about to attack Ukraine, it's potential war objectives.
One bit was particularly chilling in retrospect
As the 9th Directorate expanded its activities, however, counterintelligence operations have begun to highlight what and who it is targeting, and the results are alarming. The surveys being conducted were more concerned with Ukrainian attitudes towards particular local figures and politicians than their sentiment towards Russia, and through Russia’s extensive penetration of Ukraine’s local government it became apparent that the 9th Directorate was more focused on building a detailed local map of personnel it controlled, could influence or prevail upon in running occupation local governments in the event of a Russian seizure of the country. This also involved identifying lists of persons most hostile to Russia who might organise resistance to Russian forces.
Many of the murders that happened in Bucha were arbitrary violence but many more seem to have been targeted at particular people who were identified in advance, probably in the way described in the report.
Another piece from before the conflict that I recently came across this translation from all the way back on February 7th of a Russian general's warning that a war with Ukraine would be far tougher than Russia anticipated, that they were determined and that while the West might not intervene they'd send large amount of equipment. It seems almost prescient and I wish I'd come across it earlier.
Trustworthiness
It seems like generally the information coming out of Ukraine has been a lot better than the information coming out of Russia and that makes sense. Not from a good guys/bad guys perspective, I think fighting for one's countries life does give you moral license to lie your head off if it's required. But fundamentally Russia wants inaction on the part of rest of the world. Confusion, uncertainty, and doubt serve that. Multiple contradictory narratives that appeal to different audience work just fine there as well as throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Ukraine needs active help. To get that it needs clarity and agreement on what's happening and what the stakes are. That means getting narratives to converge and since the truth is entangled in hard to see ways lying too much will tend to create confusion. That doesn't mean the Ukrainians won't keep mum about anything embarrassing, I expect they absolutely will about things like their casualties or failing to "confirm or deny" that some Russian oil depos exploded through their efforts. Certainly lots of spin too. And maybe the occasional outright lie too if it's important and won't be caught. But in general by my judgement they have to avoid any sort of flagrant lying for strategic reasons. And when we compare things like their estimates of Russian tank losses to open source intelligence it looks pretty good.
What next?
How can things actually end?
It seems like there's no way Zelenskyy can accept a peace treaty that gives Ukrainian land to Russia especially after promising a referendum on any such treaty. Can Putin afford a humiliating defeat? That's a bit of Kremlinology I'm just not going to pretend to have any firm opinion on but many people seem to think the answer is no. So what happens then?
The Ukrainian public will get tired of war eventually and settle for a bad peace but by "eventually" I'm thinking more years of fighting than months of fighting. I don't think every democratic states will keep bankrolling them as long as they need to keep fighting but I think that plenty will.
How long can Russia keep fighting? They lost a huge amount of military material in the abortive assault on Kyiv but when they're not failing at blitzkrieg they can probably keep their losses down. I have very little sense of how much Moscow can keep a lid on public opinion if sanctions continue and the war stagnates.
Bret Devereaux (highly recommended!) wrote a post on Maoist theory on how to win a war when outgunned by retreating, attacking the enemies supply lines, then counter attacking. That is how they ended up winning and Ukraine succeeded at that around Kyiv but there will have to be more cycles of Russian over extension to let counter attacks take back all of Ukraine and after Bucha I don't think the Ukrainians will deliberately let them overextend that way so easily.
But with sanctions continuing and Ukraine training up their conscripts and training on new NATO provided weapons systems I think Ukraine is probably going to win by default eventually if nothing changes.
Escalation?
So far Russia has had a pattern of escalating from political pressure to energy sabotage to invasion as each strategy fails to work. If they try to escalate again how might that look?
They could start a full mobilization and put many more troops into the field. Given how much they've been limited by logistics I'm not sure if that would actually help but the battalion tactical group formations Russia has been using are supposed to be bulked out by additional manpower and that could be reservists. This might be very dangerous in terms of Russian public opinion, though.
In theory they could start using weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine. Chemical weapons are mostly not that useful against a modern military though they could be used in terror attacks. In theory Russia could use a chemical weapon in a city and claim it was the Ukrainians to give countries supporting them an excuse to keep doing so. But given that Russia is already shelling Ukrainian cities into rubble I'm not sure any small gains in pressure would be worth the international blowblack.
On the other end of the scale Russia could start nuking Ukrainian cities one by one and promise that the nukes will continue until Ukraine surrenders. This would be a mirror of the US strategy at the end of WWII. However, I don't think this would be something either Russia-friendly countries like China or the Russian public would accept as legitimate and I'm not even sure Putin could successfully order the launch without being stopped.
Then there's attacking the rest of the world supplying arms in non-military ways. Russia has been conducting cyber attacks on Ukraine for a while now but I haven't heard tell of any on the rest of the world in contexts not related to the fighting. Is this due to preemptive US malware removal? Or maybe fear that the US would hit back harder?
Russia has been trying but failing to cut off Ukraine's internet. There was a cyberattack on one satellite internet company that was pretty successful and since SpaceX delivered a bunch of Starlink terminals to Ukraine they've been trying to jam those, though apparently without much success. One thing that got the space community up in arms this last winter was a test of one of Russia's anti-sattelite missiles that generated a bunch of debris in low Earth orbit. It's possible they could start trying to shoot down Starlink satellites passing overhead. I'm pretty sure that SpaceX has more satellites than Russia has missiles but it's still a useful threat. And, with debris, a way of inflicting generalized economic damage on the rest of the world without a direct attack.
I don't think anything on this list would be a good idea, even from the standpoint of callous self-interest, but Russia has been doing many things that don't seem to me like good ideas recently so that means I can't rule any of this out.
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