I don’t think this is the right way to think about it. What really needs to be avoided is raising the stakes of the conflict to an existential level for Russia (or its regime). That doesn’t necessarily equate to letting Putin save face or making a bunch of concessions to appease him. If you really accept that logic, you’re basically acceding to nuclear blackmail. There’s really not any evidence or reason to believe that losing the war in Ukraine will topple Putin’s regime. He can just say Russia won and have all the propaganda networks repeat the lie.
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there are ways to de-escalate let him claim a victory without actually giving him anything. The eastern portions were already under de facto russian control, this would basically return things to the status quo before the invasion except Russia has suffered a huge economic blow, and would not necessarily get out from under sanctions either. Putin will have paid a high price and gained nothing, and be more contained. He’s strengthened NATO when he thought this boodoggle would weaken it. He’s gotten europe to seriously begin disengaging from Russian oil imports (this will take time but it seems the ball is rolling and isn’t going to be stopped). This isn’t a win in any way for putin other than he can say “we secured the buffer zone we needed.”
Great thread. Hopefully this guy knows what he’s talking about and not just pulling things out of his butt. It sure sounds like it.
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1515343018471006212?t=0LuHxAPrLUenM5wcmvOgSw&s=19
Added today on Wikipedia.
save face? fuck that. he’s close to losing grip on the country, and his life. if the west holds their line, those two things are surely valuable enough, and also the only plausible off-ramps.
Putin is not close to losing his grip on power. The war is popular in Russia.
so popular close to a million russians left the country.
i tend to interpret the levada center polls critically. as explained by the FBK crew, russia is essentially under wartime law already. any public opinion collected in a poll is done under threat of persecution
Liberal Russians leaving is feature not bug
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As I understand it, there is close to a 90% non-response rate, so the 70% that support the war are of those that responded. That changes things pretty drastically, as I imagine if true that it introduces a significant self-selection sample bias. Even a 50% non-response rate would probably introduce such a large bias that it would be impossible to correct for it using statistical methods.
In other words: news at 11, you can’t rely on polls in totalitarian regimes, ldo.
what you think of “liberal” russians might not actually fit the label. they are leaving and switching rhetoric about the regime to survive in the west.
those types of outcomes are what increase the chances that nuclear weapons get used
outcomes where putin is secure are outcomes where he is extremely disincentivized from releasing nuclear weapons.
outcomes where his personal power, much less freedom/life are seriously at stake are where those disincentives are extremely reduced.
if you think you have a plan that would eliminate putin without removing his disincentives to use nuclear weapons, there’s probably a nobel prize in it for you
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Is it though? You just want to concentrate all the crazies and stupids in a country with a fuckton of nukes.
What the hell is going on that Russia is losing generals? I know next to nothing about war or the military, but I assumed generals don’t come anywhere close to the actual field of battle?
Some of it is poor communication security which the Ukrainians can hack and use to target them. Some of it is apparently a top heavy command structure.
The buffer zone they think they need isn’t in Ukraine, it’s in Poland. There isn’t an offramp here that isn’t an existential threat to Ukraine, and an open invitation to war with Nato countries in 5 or 10 years.
A lot of it also is that the Russian military is a lot more centralized in carrying out day to day operations. In the American military, units are given big picture goals in their orders but are granted a degree of autonomy in how to carry them out in response to changing conditions around them. Russian troops expect to be told precisely where to go when and then what to do there, or else they may just hang out with their thumbs in their asses. So when communicating is a challenge, they need top brass to be closer.
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Find me an off-ramp where Ukraine gets Crimea back.
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Nor is Ukraine going to tolerate their countrymen being butchered in captured territory. It is not simply a question of how much territory they would cede, but how much genocide against their people they would accept. I don’t see them allowing for offramps at this point.