Great Power contentions

[Montmorency]

Entirely agreed.

Russia fears the single market, and most particularly the possibility that its economic 'near abroad' will be annexed away behind a regulatory curtain.

It's ability to maintain its own economic independence - from both china and the west - is entirely dependent on keeping hold of a zone of satellite nations that it can trade into: Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine(!!!), the 'stans.

NATO is irrititating, but it can never be an aggressive threat to a nuclear armed nation.

As this Twitter thread said it, "Moscow's worst nightmare isn't hypersonic missiles in Ukraine -- it's the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism."

See also from this week:

EU countries support plan for world-first carbon border tariff

European Union countries on Tuesday backed the bloc's plan to impose a world-first carbon dioxide emissions tariff on imports of polluting goods, although the finer details will need to be worked out in upcoming negotiations.

The EU wants to introduce CO2 emissions costs from 2026 on imports of steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium and electricity -- a move aimed at protecting European industry from being undercut by cheaper goods made in countries with weaker environmental rules.

A three-year transition phase for the levy would begin in 2023, so EU countries and the European parliament are racing to negotiate and approve the rules this year. Finance ministers from EU countries on Tuesday agreed on their negotiating position.

And your evidence is? Was there a statement from any high ranking Russian official that it would last a few days?
They may have hoped it would be quick and easy. They may have underestimated Ukraine's ability to resist, but they weren't banking on it.
They're not going "oh my God, it's been longer than 10 days, what are we going to do now????". They were prepared for this, and they will not back down.

Sarmatian, don't think I'm being mean to you when I insist that you can't rely on a prior favorable image of the Russian government/military to guide your judgement in a developing situation. Very few analysts envisioned the war developing the way it has, in part because of how highly they rated Russian capabilities. But good analysts change their opinions with new facts.

The evidence has been laid out throughout the thread, including the immediately preceding posts. That the Russians did not expect strong resistance on the ground, or did not expect resistance to be effective, is overwhelmingly indicated at this point. There are the captured timetables for one, and the state media essay published on Feb. 26 proclaiming the dawn of a new world order and the resolution of the "Ukrainian question", in which Ukraine had been "returned" to Russia (the essay was immediately retracted upon publication).

On the ground, troops and officers were not informed of the operation prior to D0, and were not allowed to organize their assets appropriately, as Putin concealed his intent from almost everyone (except Western intelligence). Russian forces were rushed from the border into Ukrainian cities without support or combined arms tactics, and without securing their lines of communication. Their units were not provisioned for determined combat and its expenditure of basic resources such as fuel and ammo, to the point that widespread hunger and equipment abandonment was observed days into the invasion, continuing even after all this time. Some tankers, lacking reactive armor for their vehicles, improvised birds' nests on their cupolas in an attempt to defend against AT rockets. Their air force - an estimated quarter of all Russian combat frames were allocated to the theater - has, as of a week ago, been running half as many sorties as aircraft on hand on paper, leaving air supremacy elusive. Issues of missing or unmaintained equipment have been widespread to the point of helping paralyze operations. Whatever materiel they stockpiled at the staging areas has run low enough that Russian cities near the border are being requisitioned for civilian food, trucks, and other supplies for the war effort. Days into the war, Putin asked Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Syria to supplement the effort with manpower; Russian international deployments in the Caucasus and elsewhere have been drawn down to reinforce the war effort. Irregular Ukrainian forces, whether small units, special forces, or militias, continue to strike at Russian supply columns and depots with regularity. The invaders still have not sorted out the lack of coordination between units and axes and combat arms, nor discovered an efficient way to resupply the frontlines's daily activities while stockpiling supplies for a new offensive. Russian forces are so overstretched and disorganized that besieged Ukrainian formations out of Mykolaiv and Kharkiv have been able to prosecute successful deep counteroffensives. In the past days, Russian forces near Kyiv and elsewhere were first observed entrenching and fortifying their positions - an acknowledgement of the transition to more static battle.

Russia has taken at least as many casualties in 3 weeks as it did in 10 years of Afghanistan. Of the 3500 tanks in Russian active service, around 10% have been lost in the course of the invasion to date.

Just for a start. I'm not even including more speculative incidents like Western intelligence assessing that Putin has begun purging his siloviki, and has asked China to supply him with food and other basics that one would think any "great power" (let alone superpower) could self-provision. Or other items I've posted in this thread alone that I missed in the roundup.

Now, it's possible that all of the above does reflect Putin's best and considered preparation, that the Russian military's competence in all domains of conventional war just happens to be at or below the level of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Army, with that lack of ability producing the results we observe - but that just brings us right back to the issue of underpreparation. If Putin could not rationally guarantee the superiority of his own force at peak capacity over that of his opponent's at the time of decision, he was acting with lack of preparation by that fact at a minimum.

Saddam Hussein too thought he had prepared a quick seizure, a question of days, of Khuzestan beyond the Shatt al-Arab. He calculated that the young Iranian regime was too disorganized and unpopular to resist, that the concentrated Arabic-speaking plurality of the border province would joyfully rise to greet him as a liberator - but he was wrong. Hussein was unprepared for war with Iran. At least he could replace his lost equipment with imports, and suffered from no shortage of young men...

The only evidence for Russian foresight that I am aware of is the government's effort to expand conscription between late 2021 and the immediate prelude to the war.

Why do you think the Russian military has been so ineffective against Ukraine when all of Russia's worst enemies, including the US, expected so much more? Why is there a consensus among both Western and Third World or independent analysts that Russia is horribly underperforming? Even Caspian Report characterizes this war as "the biggest strategic blunder of Putin's life", and he assumes Russia can still overwhelm the Ukranian army. There is no such thing as preparing to underperform. Any branching plan should predict and account for inadequacy, not permit it. If your answer ever veers in the direction of assuming that Putin must have intended the decimation of the RF Armed Forces, stop immediately and reconsider.

This all demands an answer, not a glib reliance on the sobriety and wisdom of a totalitarian government (who as a historical matter tend to fail miserably at warmaking). I expect more than "Trust the plan." Is that unfair?


A few links on the matter to flesh out the case:

A 2017 analysis that predicted all the flaws the Russian military is manifesting today.
Reports of severe challenges of discipline and provisioning among Russian soldiers assembled in Belarus prior to the invasion.
How the defense routed a Russian BTG at the Battle of Voznosensk (nearly eliminating the threat to Mykolaiv and Odessa).
Visual explainer of Russian performance

Now, if the Russian are deliberately targetting civilians, how many civilians do you think they would have been able to kill so far, considering they have effectively encircled several major cities, with total population in the millions. You mentioned "total war" tactics. Do you know how many civilians died in total war situations, when a major city was within artillery range?

Civilians in WW2 overwhelmingly died from starvation, disease, or organized mass murder and execution, not day-to-day fighting, even bombing. But they were still dying from combat and bombing, and both sides were targeting them.

The reporting indicates that the Russians have been escalating their conduct against civilians day by day - the first week actually did somewhat conform to your interpretation - so we should expect to see casualties increasing over time for one thing.

There are also countervailing factors. The first is that the country has been largely depopulated around the frontlines, with the large cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol excepted. They're still densely-populated on top of being the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the war so far. Overall though, going by the latest UN estimate of 10 million refugees/internally-displaced (out of 38 million sans the occupied territories), much of the less-dense East must be a proverbial ghost town. Moreover, Ukrainian cities, whether as Cold War remnant or a product of the past decade's militarization, are densely built with bomb shelters or equivalent. Even when people remain in the battle zone, they are often going to be spending at least nights in a relatively-safe space. As an example, the Drama Theater in Mariupol that was leveled the other day happened to house a bomb shelter, which hopefully mitigated the human damage of the bombing.

But all in all, even a tally of ten thousand civilian deaths nationally up to now really ought not stretch the imagination.

I have seen similar exaggerations in the past.

When one's position relies on numerous actors on the ground being publicity-seeking liars with the exception of the invading armies who happen to have extensive track records of civilian-targeting and war crimes, one rightfully won't get traction. I can't think of any instances in history in which denial of atrocities has been vindicated. It puts me in mind of the people who claim that reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes are presumptively fabrications by malicious terrorists and credulous media outlets. The mere insinuation of exaggeration is also beside the point when we have physical conditions against which to judge claims; this doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Most of all, I'm taking into account cui bono.

This entire invasion, and indeed most war, is an insoluble question of cui bono. But war is not rational, and any benefits are usually more emotional than anything.

In the end, I'm not saying I'm absolutely certain that the numbers are exaggerated, I'm just saying I'm sceptical.

One Ukrainian think tank, about a week ago, released an estimate for Russian casualties of 45000, including the "demoralized." One can compare such a figure to various facts, starting with other available estimates - there skepticism is justified.

Skepticism at the claim of a few thousand civilian deaths over three weeks of a conflict involving half a million combatants, hundreds of aircraft, over a thousand guided missiles, and thousands of artillery pieces fighting block-by-block through large cities is entirely unreasonable and demands rigorous justification. So too does an orientation that discounts the statements or recordings of dozens of eyewitness reporters, civilians, and government officials across many locations and times, that they are being attacked.

You can't treat this in the same way you would treat a claim by the Ukrainian government that all Ukrainians are ready to fight to the death for the motherland, or a Russian government claim that civilians are lining up in the streets to thank and cheer advancing columns.

Your information is coming from the western and Ukrainian media and government officials, neither of which are independent, unbiased observers.

Like the report in Syria about Russians shelling a hospital. When you trace that back through several reports, you get to a report by MSF in French that says that a shell hit a different building further away, and the blast caused some windows to open and glass to break in the hospital.

The problem lies with your own bias. Russia, the state aggressor, routinely makes provably-false claims, from battlefield fakes and over-successful updates up to cynical planetary conspiracies; normal people on the ground have no such track record in war, period. The evidence for many specific Russian war crimes in Syria is unassailable. The pernicious desire to take the Russian government's (or their allies') word for everything on probity, but immediately dismiss anything said against them regardless of source or corroboration as intrinsically tainted, does not merit debating. Beginning from a pro-Russian stance is not neutrality or objectivity, and there is no neutral or objective way to compile and assess all available claims and conclude otherwise.

It's honestly shameful, intellectually and morally. It's even worse than automatically dismissing the long history of American war crimes and criminal wars as the raving of a freedom-hating Communist, since those people are likely not straying from their asserted values when they BS.

I am talking about a more recent demand, by Biden, for OPEC to increase production which was rebuffed. You can see the date on the article.

You claimed that Putin formed a secret agreement with the Saudis and/or OPEC to prevent production rises but didn't present evidence that there was either an agreement or that production rises have been prevented.

Don't be this way:

I would disagree there. Even though early protests appear to have been spontaneous, US and NATO quickly jumped in and ended up even setting up the government of Ukraine. Do you think that Russians needed the recording of Victoria Nuland to know that?

That is, as we say, fake news.

And you accuse me of engaging in hypotheticals? NATO enlargement was real and verifiable. Russian opposition to it has been real and verifiable. Russian warnings have been real and verifiable.

Russian rhetoric and justifications for war in Ukraine have been verifiable too, in terms of their having been promulgated. The issue is "Anglo-Saxon" interference in the Russian sphere of influence (the perception is that the EU is driven by Anglo-Saxon interests as well). Russian security is not the stake here. The Putin regime's worldview, and indeed its own survival, is on the contrary deeply implicated.

I'm just explaining why Russia felt this was necessary. I also think the Ukraine's neutrality is the fastest and safest way to end the crisis and return to some semblance of normalcy for the foreseeable future.

And it's just so damn sad to think some people believe Russia is mechanistically doomed to be governed by fascist tyrants (even though Putin is the most brutal and aggressive Russian leader in 70 years), let alone that fascist tyrants deserve to be catered to and appeased. But if this is your genuine belief you have dramatically misunderstood both Russia and Putin, to ill. In extremity there is a specific category of Russian nationalist, properly fascist, who believes in national and global rebirth in the competition for world domination between Anglo-Saxon and Eurasian civilizations. What's up is that Putin went all in on this manifesto. National purification and restoration through the reclamation of ancestral living space is the name of the game. There is no doubt that Putin preferred to suppress Ukrainian dissent without firing a shot, but think how perverse it would be to frame Western efforts to integrate Ukraine with Europe as at fault for "provocatively" encouraging Ukraine to reorient from Russia.

Abraham Lincoln had something to say about this in his famous Cooper Union speech:

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication. Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. This, plainly stated, is your language.
[...]
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

I just wish Putin had tried it on Kazakhstan first, so that China would have kicked his ambitions to the curb.

This is blatant disregard of the facts. If you ignore three decades of warnings from Russia, the rhetoric from Kiev and the West, the presence of NATO arms and instructors, then yes, you might construe that it has nothing to do with NATO.

The facts are that Russia at no point attempted to use its extensive political or economic leverage to guarantee a limited guardrail against NATO presence. Never. Every action it took was toward capturing Ukraine geopolitically and geoeconomically. The issue between 2015 and 2021 was not that Ukraine was somehow verging on dragging in NATO against Russia, or vice versa, but that Russia was relentlessly warring against Ukraine and trying to seize even more of its territory. Russia could have secured Ukrainian neutrality any time it wanted. It didn't because Russia, that is to say Putin, wanted more than neutrality.

It's not 2014 anymore. There's just too much evidence on hand, and you're not analyzing any of it to stick with well-worn prewar agitprop. The picture you present is one the Kremlin has long promoted to the West, but it does not fit with their behavior, Ukrainian behavior, or Western behavior.

Your insistence on scapegoating NATO is also logically self-defeating, since if Russia is so inherently warlike and aggressive, it is too dangerous not to proactively contain. Which propagandist's bright idea was it to posit a zero-sum contest between Russia and the West without realizing that someone might not like Russia's side of that equation?

Monroe Doctrine appears to be dead when not needed and is resurrected when it is needed again. Last one to say that it is still alive and well was John Bolton just a few years back.

Russia has never tolerated the level of economic and political independence of its neighbors that ours have with us today. Should we be less tolerant, or Russia more? Which governments are treated as possessing agency?

NATO is primarily a way for US to remain the primary decision maker in Europe. It is a tool of US foreign policy.

It's uncomfortable to hear this when Slovenia, Czechia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark all express willingness to dispatch a humanitarian expeditionary force into Ukraine, with other members on the verge of signing on, and the US role so far has been that of the guy holding his friend back from a bar fight.

Well, then NATO officials should have been encouraging Ukraine. There are examples of NATO countries with disputed territory. Parts of Serbian and Croatian borders are still disputed. Slovenia and Croatia have a dispute about territorial waters.

Why would they have encouraged Ukraine to abandon its annexed territories? After 2014 the US, and most of NATO outside Eastern Europe, had near-zero will to pursue NATO membership for Ukraine, whereas they had significant will, and interest, in stopping Russian annexations from succeeding.

Anyway, since at least the 1990s one of the principles of NATO candidacy has been

States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.

The Baltic countries had to conclude a treaty settling their internecine disputes over the marine shelf, plus claims over other Polish and Russian borders, and guarantee the rights to ethnic Russians, in order to join (e.g. the NATO Madrid Summit). A more proximate example, Romania had to give up its claims on... Bukovina, IIRC. The whole point of NATO is of course to promote close political cooperation between member states, which they cannot do if they're consumed by irredentist jealousy. We can see it's not absolute, given that Spain sometimes acts like it wants to dispute Gibraltar's status, and Turkey and Greece often resent the very existence of one another (there's also the Cyprus backdoor), but these have not interfered with the functioning of the alliance. Indeed, the alliance is goes far to deconflict outbursts along these lines. I don't know anything about Croatia, but I would say the puny area under their claims, the low risk/absence of attendant conflict, and Croatia's willingness to at least work with international legal frameworks to mediate disputes is decisive. On the other hand, that Ukraine was in a de facto state of war with Russia - of all countries - was also decisive in the other direction.

I said "NATO countries", not "NATO".

That's a rather profound difference, but the contraction may be revealing. If some actor, the Russian government or otherwise, just doesn't like Western countries as a category (regardless of the existence of NATO as an overlapping category) because they're 'mean to Russia', then screw 'em.

They hated it so much that they have never been in favour of joining NATO. They have became an EU member states, they have developed cooperation with NATO but their refusal to join NATO and allow foreign military bases on its territory has kept them safe.

Finnish refusal to join NATO was not conditional on any love they had for being subordinate to the Soviet Union. Nor did love for the Soviets generate a large and sophisticated military built on mandatory service and trained to fight just one hypothetical adversary.

Finnish strength of arms is what "kept them safe" during the Cold War. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, despite Kekkonen's neutrality policy, the new weakness of Russia, and the very engraving at the 18th-c. Helsinki Sveaborg fortress - "Progeny, stand here on your own foundation, and do not rely on foreign help" - Finland speedily chose to pursue de facto NATO integration and cooperation.

You rely too much on the language of a wife-beater. Should "we" smack your country around a little, or something? You could always choose safety to make it stop. You say it's how the world works, no?

This is the first time there's a bit over 50% support for NATO, in the midst of an ongoing major crisis and unprecedented media hysteria. I am not sure it will last.

I don't believe your track record on media hysteria and geopolitical intuition looks strong (over 60% in the latest polling btw). If Finland does join NATO, please don't lay accountability onto the Finnish people for their treacherous aggresssion towards poor put-upon Russia, or on Western media for tricking them with "hysteria."

As for the numbers, do a count and compare.

You would be displeased if I were to produce an accounting of every war, proxy war, military deployment, and act of political interference that Russia was involved in over 70 years. More awkward should be the realization that for the first time in generations US forces are involved in almost no hostilities anywhere on Earth, whereas Russia is at this very moment the country doing the Hitlerism. Not unimportant details for pacifists to take into account.

In the end, I think this statement is the crux of the issue. The very problem with NATO is that they think they get to decide who counts.

Why does Russia get to decide? I'd much rather NATO decide than any other bodger.

Maybe it's time to stop framing things in terms of national teams or blocs to arbitrarily support and think consequentially. What kind of values are harmed or promoted by a given foreign policy stance? What principles will one use to measure world events? As a leftist and an anti-fascist, it's very obvious to me that calamitous, world-raping reactionaries ought to be destroyed, and I choose my friends according to those values. The question is how to assemble the resources and coalition to secure my priorities. The sole credible option is American and European power.

It is not fair. Unfortunately, it is how the world works.

I hate this handwave so much. It's a normative statement that reflects personal preferences, not an actual description of "how the world works" nor an ethically-just premise. I have preferences too, in which I put much more stock.

I'll leave you with this: Why does every European country occupied by either, or both, Germany or the Soviet Union prefer to be in an alliance with Germany over an alliance with the Soviet rump? Why does Russian militarism produce an environment of instant consensus support for German militarization?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

ONE SIDE IS GOOD GUYS ANTIHEROES
THE OTHER IS BAD GUYS SUPERVILLAINS

It's not brain surgery.

Serbia is a sovereign nation, we have every legal and moral right to decide our own alliances. Realistically? Of course not.

Tangentially, Serbia's relationship with Russia almost comes across like that between Donald Trump and his loyalists. Serbia is part of NATO's Partnership for Peace program and hosts a Russian military base (Nis). (To be clear, I'm not saying Serbia should be prohibited from hosting Russian bases in principle, though wartime would be a different matter.)