One major point I think is under-discussed is what this means for nuclear proliferation.
Ukraine used to possess nuclear weapons, but agreed to give them up in exchange for promises of protection from the US and Russia.
With this plus the fall of Gaddafi in Libya a while back, it's hard to see a result that isn't 'everyone wants to get nuclear weapons ASAP, and no-one wants to give them up.' If promises of protection in exchange for nonproliferation aren't upheld, there's very little incentive for nonproliferation.
Apparently, in one important sense this isn't true: they physically possessed the weapons, but not the capacity to do anything with them.
[I have no personal knowledge on this - just something I bumped into today, but it seems credible]
[EDIT: the point about non-upholding of protection agreements stands; I just wanted to clarify what "possess nuclear weapons" meant in this context]
Apparently, in one important sense this isn't true: they physically possessed the weapons, but not the capacity to do anything with them.
That's an important point.
However, I believe that a highly industrialized nation with modern nuclear weapons (but without the launch codes) would have had the capacity to do something with them. Using the weapons grade material (not only the fissible material, also the electronics etc) and using the weapons as prototypes for designing warheads should have had the potential to greatly accelerate a nuclear weapons program.
So, in a way this case is quite similar to Gaddafi's - not giving up a functional nuclear arsenal (only South Africa has done that up to now, and I don't think there will be a second case any time soon) but giving up the potential for a nuclear weapons program.
The most interesting thing out of this is Russia's threat to pull out of New START in retaliation for US sanctions, as well as Biden's decision to cut off arms control talks. Pulling out all the stops on the US-Russia nuclear competition is dangerous enough already, but this will most likely kick off a renewed all-out three-way nuclear arms race, which is of course less strategically stable than the bilateral nuclear dynamic during the Cold War. China is already expanding its nuclear arsenal to parity, which if New START were still in effect, would've been 1500 deployed warheads (incidentally today the first silo field seems to have finished construction ahead of schedule). The US had hoped to rope China into its bilateral arms control agreements with Russia; well, now there'd be nothing left to rope into.
Metaculus had only a 8% chance of "Russian Troops in Kyiv in 2022" as late as Feb 11. (It's now at 97%.) Why did everyone do so badly on this prediction?
Speaking from ignorance: this prediction failure seems (from my ignorant perspective) similar to forecasting failures in Brexit and in the Trump 2016 election, in that it’s a case where some force whose motives are unlike Western academia/elites was surprising to them/us. If so, the moral might be to study the perspectives, motives, and capabilities of forces outside the Western elite on their own terms / by cobbling together an inside view from primary sources, rather than looking via Western experts/media (though this is much harder).
To what extent are there people who visibly made good predictions here beforehand? It seems worth compiling them. I appreciate cmessinger’s comment.
Even the honest-to-god financial markets did badly on this prediction. The moment Russia started invading, MOEX and oil prices had wild shocks, as if something unexpected had happened, even though we already had abundant ahead-of-time warnings about their attack from U.S. intelligence. My suspicion is that everyone, including market analysts, expected Russia to simply annex the seperatist eastern terrority of Donbas. They expected the war to end quickly and with little bloodshed, and for the Ukrainian government to capitulate. The presumption was that they'd be fighting over a small separatist province, and it would have made sense - Putin gets what he wants, which is to look powerful, and he can come back again in 5-10 years for another piece.
Instead, Putin has chosen to do something insane - he is forcing his armed forces to attack and at least temporarily occupy the entirety of Ukraine, including Kyiv, Lziz, and Odessa. These are centers of the Ukrainian resistance that nobody, not even a brainwashed Russian populace, could possibly believe are secretly interested in unification. Maybe he underestimated the response or maybe he doesn't care, but now western countries are thinkin...
I saw people discussing forecasting success of this on twitter and people were saying that the intelligence agencies actually called this right. Does anyone know an easy link to what those agencies were saying?
Context: https://twitter.com/ClayGraubard/status/1496699988801433602?s=20&t=mQ8sAzMRppI8Pr44O38M3w
https://twitter.com/ClayGraubard/status/1496866236973658112?s=20&t=mQ8sAzMRppI8Pr44O38M3w
My baseline assumption for this is that everyone always does badly on these kinds of predictions. This frequently includes highly trained defense analysts with access to privileged information sources.
I don't think this answers the question. 8% is an awfully strong prediction. Your meta-point is public info. People who honor your meta-point could make a killing in markets as badly miscalibrated as this one. That would make it profitable for people to correct the markets.
So the question stands:
WTF?
Know any good source on why Putin wants to invade Ukraine? I have yet to hear a theory which sounds like how the real world works, and absent that it's hard to guess how anything will play out past the next month-or-so.
Current thoughts on Russian military objectives, based on comment threads here and my own general models...
My working theory is that Putin could be worried about some kind of internal threat to himself and his power.
He's betting a lot on his image of strong, dangerous leader to keep afloat. However the Russian constant propaganda that keeps up that image was starting to be more and more known and ineffective.
Europe also has been trying to get rid of Russian influence through gas for a while, and would likely have managed in a few more years. Then they'd be free to be less accepting of his anti-human rights antics.
Ukraine joining Nato would have made him look extremely weak, and it would have made it easier to make him look weak in the future.
Once his strong image faded he might have been worried of reforming forces within Russia to manage oust him out of office with an actual election and mass wide protests if the ball got rolling enough, or he might be worried about someone taking a more direct approach to eliminate him (he killed enough people to be extremely worried about being murdered, I think).
So this is his extreme move to deny weakness. Better to be seen as the tyrant who's willing to do anything if provoked, than the ex-strong leader who can be taken out of office.
That definitely matches my models of things-Putin-would-say on the topic, independent of his actual motivations.
For what it's worth, I wrote a Twitter thread which attempted to piece together a partial theory.
"The Russian public really likes this invasion" is definitely one of the higher-prior hypotheses, good to know that it lines up with the data.
Assuming that is the main driver, the obvious next line of thought is that a few years down the line Russia will likely be in the same sort of quagmire occupation that the US was in with Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian public opinion will turn strongly against, and Russia will have to back out and Putin will lose a lot of popularity. Presumably this possibility is obvious to Putin (I have no impression that he's an idiot), so either he's making very aggressive short-term-over-long-term political tradeoffs, or for some reason he thinks an occupation of Ukraine won't be an obvious giant mess. Some possibilities:
I'm from Russia. The issue of war splits our society. Young people and intellectuals are mostly against the war, anti-war rallies were held today in most major cities of Russia. But the older generation (conservatives) mostly support the war, some even speak out for the complete annexation of Ukraine (this is hardly possible in reality).
Written with the help of an online translator, my English is very bad, there may be mistakes.
Thank you for your input. The readership here skews hard toward Europe/America. I appreciate your addition of a voice from Ukraine/Russia.
By the way, your online translator works great.
The link here was posted in the chat of the translation group of Yudkovsky's articles about AI. Your post was interesting.
In Russia, extremely many are dissatisfied with the collapse of the USSR and the deprivation of Russia's superpower status, therefore they support the return of the former territories or at least political influence on them. In 2014, I also fervently supported the return of Crimea, where almost the entire population is Russian, although I hated Putin. But this was followed by a protracted economic crisis, a drop in household incomes, so now support for Putin's actions is less than at that time.
Opinions of few people from Kyrgyzstan, middle age+
Nobody understands why this invasion started (this seem to be true for Russians too), did not want Russia to invade, scared and disheartened by war. Many have relatives in Ukraine. But! Suspect some unknown reasons for this to happen, probably intel on NATO deployment (Invasion seems rushed, but I'd consider it weak evidence - numbers of alternative explanations.)
Also a bit of clarification on 2014 popularity: it was invasion semantically but casualties extremely low, while right now we are looking at rivers of blood. Wonder how Russian population reacting.
In addition to Konstantin words. Many conservators in Russia honestly believe that USA/NATO want to destroy Russia and to seize Russian resources. They don't think that Ukraine and Ukrainians are the agents. They believe that Ukrainians are the pawns of the West. They think that Russian army are saving Ukrainian people from NATO agents and crazy Ukrainian nationalists.
A decline to accept the agency of opponents is very common for Kremlin propaganda and Kremlin supporters.
Putin himself? His explicitly stated ambition is to reclaim all of the former USSR. Why should we not believe it? Ukraine is the first step. Why should we not expect more of the same?
Putin has also threatened "consequences greater than any you have faced in history" if the West intervenes. What can this mean but nuclear weapons?
If he goes after the Baltic states next, merely being members of NATO will not protect them. What will protect them is NATO actually going to war with Russia over them, despite Putin's threats.
Check Dugin's The Foundations of Geopolitics. I've posted some translated excerpts here on fb
Also: when it comes to world-modelling, you may disagree with Dugin on his view of geopolitics, but that's not really important for the explanation. It's enough that Putin's actions make sense in Putin's models. Given that the book has been highly predictive of Putin's foreign policy over the past 20 years, it seems that the simplest explanation is that Putin is at least partially thinking in those terms. In Dugin's model of geopolitics, invasion is necessary and has long-term goals.
I like a lot of things about this article - it is a high-effort piece, and the graphics are helpful and relevant. That being said, the author is relying on a bunch of conventional-wisdoms that turn out to be false and as a result, the article essentially raises the defense-in-depth point without having any persuasive power.
A central confusion is rivers, which the article treats as a dealbreaker for commerce to and from Siberia but as not existing for military purposes or commerce with Europe. Rivers are major physical obstacles to cross, and often a major transport advantage to follow, so they are extremely militarily important.
Sidenote: there is a close link between commerce and military activity, on account of both requiring the movement of stuff from A to B. Given no other information, ease-of-invasion should be ranked according to the volume of commerce between two locations.
There are several outright historical errors, such as cavalry being obsolete with the appearance of gunpowder because of guns stopping charges.
The point about different ethnicities is raised without being connected to anything else, and then the claim is made that this requires authoritarian government beca...
One aim I could imagine having in Putin's shoes, that seems better achieved by slow telegraphing of war over Ukraine followed by actual war (vs by a frozen conflict), is gathering information about how the West is likely to respond to any other such wars/similar he might be tempted by.
(I know nothing of geopolitics, so please don't update from my thinking so. I got this idea from this essay)
A lot of people keep saying that Putin feels afraid of NATO. I really dislike this meme. Russia has been an imperial aggressor in Eastern Europe(and beyond) for centuries. The belt of countries from the Baltic to the black sea have been the Russian Empire's victims again and again since the 1700s through to the fall of the USSR.
Now that Eastern European countries are joining a defensive alliance suddenly Putin feels threatened?
Why? He has nukes. The end. No one is ever invading Russia. It is just impossible. NATO is not going to invade Russia.
All NATO membership does is make Eastern European countries expensive or impossible to bully. This is what really bothers Putin.
There is nothing an abuser hates more than when their victims can protect themselves. He is not afraid of NATO invading Russia, an absurd idea that again would NEVER happen, because it takes more than the whims of one crazy dictator to trigger a NATO attack.
Putin is afraid that the people he views as his rightful prey and subjects are now able to defend themselves. That's it. He's a predator and he wants his subjects vulnerable.
Don't give him the benefit of the doubt by taking the BS rhetoric about NATO encroachment seriously. As if NATO was bribing and invading countries one by one to get them to join the way he does geopolitics. Pure projection by a psychopath.
I looked up the source of Putin's claims that NATO promised not to expand, and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Putin cites the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990, during negotations about NATO deployment in Germany. Here is the quote in context:
Our strategy and our Alliance are exclusively defensive. [...] This will also be true of a united Germany in NATO. The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees. Moreover we could conceive of a transitional period during which a reduced number of Soviet forces could remain stationed in the present-day GDR. This will meet Soviet concerns about not changing the overall East-West strategic balance.
It is clear that he is speaking about not deploying NATO troops on the territory of former GDR, not about a broader commitment to not enlarge NATO. Gorbachev himself confirms that "the topic of NATO expansion was not discussed at all". So this is just another lie of Putin.
So what's the end state Putin wants to achieve through invading Ukraine? If Ukraine becomes part of Russia, then Russia will be bordering with NATO states.
The Ukrainian government will fight a total war to defend its sovereignty.
Counterprediction: The Ukrainian government will fold without a (significant) fight.
One point of data re the expected impact of sanctions: the Moscow stock exchange is down 50% (!), which presumably means investors expect very serious consequences for the Russian economy, likely due to sanctions.
Yeah, that data point was extremely surprising to me. On the surface, it seems to imply at least one of three things:
I'd have considered all three of these quite improbable beforehand.
On the other hand, it could just be a short-term liquidity phenomenon, e.g. there was a bunch of foreign money invested in Moscow's markets which had to exit due to Western sanctions (or expected to need to exit due to Western sanctions). If that's the main driver, then now's a good time to buy for anybody who has access to Moscow's financial markets.
MOEX appears to now be down only 20% from pre-invasion price level. Still significant, though much less so than 50%. This follows a common pattern that I've seen anecdotally about stock prices following bad news: that the price drops precipitously immediately following the news, and then mostly recovers shortly thereafter. I remember seeing this pattern in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, soon after it became mainstream to be concerned about the Coronavirus pandemic, and I think when Trump got elected. Not sure if this is somehow a real counterexample to the efficient market hypothesis, or if I'm overfitting or selectively remembering cases where the pattern holds.
Think it misses the point a bit to say that the EU and UK don't care enough to deploy their own troops in combat roles against Russia. Whether they care enough to do so isn't relevant; Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if NATO troops support the Ukrainian army. So deployment of NATO troops was never on the cards. General assumption seems to be that Ukraine will lose the war relatively quickly.
Sanctions will only make a difference if they are significant enough to harm EU/UK/US as well as Russia. Not sure anyone knows how extensive they will be. A lot depends on German public opinion, I think, given that Germany's close economic links with Russia would mean that Germany would bear a lot of the pain, and that it has previously been more pro-Russian than any other large country. I know nothing about German public opinion, though the website of Bild, Europe's highest circulation newspaper, is interesting this morning.
If sanctions are too weak to make a difference, Putin will have won. He has said that he will keep on trying to recreate the Russian empire, which now includes several NATO states. Listening to what he has said he will do has...
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if NATO troops support the Ukrainian army
How should threats like that be evaluated, given that, (I'm guessing that nuking NATO troops would result in nuclear retaliation?) it would be... hard for Russia to benefit, causally, from initiating an exchange, and given that Putin lies quite frequently, and given that there aren't really any limits to what a nuclear state can get you to go along with if you just take them at their word whenever they threaten this sort of suicidal act; you have to draw a line somewhere, there has to be a limit, where you're willing to disbelieve. What's the limit?
I'm having a lot of difficulty seeing nukes as being are applicable or relevant to war, at least in wars between nuclear states, probably even in a war limited to Russia and Ukraine. What would Russia gain from nuking Ukraine? They damage their prize beyond any plausible savings this would impute for their infantry. So, how can this claim that they'd do it be substantiated?
Last I heard (the information could be outdated), the US has fewer nukes than Russia. This was a choice: There was no military advantage to having more. There is a sense in which the credible signalling of will and strength, could no further be waged, that frontier was saturated, the game of war had to leave it.
What would Russia gain from nuking Ukraine?
He did not threaten to nuke Ukraine. He threated to use nukes against NATO countries if they get directly involved in that conflict. Not a direct quote, but a summary would be "We know we can't win war against NATO, but we still have nuclear weapons - there will be no winners".
You should ignore the news unless it's of historic import. Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes an event of historic import.
To share a datapoint, I looked at the news, felt a bunch of grim emotions that I won't go into, but still couldn't think of a reason not to read about this in like 1-2 years.
I don't think it will directly effect me or anyone I know personally, and the basic argument that "information at-the-time will be subject to extreme pressures of narrative-control" still stands.
(I will check into any hints that this will grow into a war with US or UK involved.)
I think it's extremely useful practice to follow momentous live events, try to figure out what's happening, and make live bets (which you can do for example by trading Russian/European stock indices and commodities). When the event of historic importance happens at your doorstep there will be even more FUD to deal with as you're looking for critical information to make decisions, and even more emotions to control.
I know this sounds kinda morbid, but I often ask myself the following question: what would I have done if I was a rich Jew in Vienna in 1936? This is my personal bar for my own rationality. I think it is quite likely that I will face at least one decision of this magnitude in my life, and my ability to be rational then will outweigh almost everything else I do. I know that life will only give me a few practice sessions for this event, like November 2016 and February 2020. I think it's quite worth taking a couple of days to immerse yourself in the news because it's hard to do right now.
I wrote this quickly. It may contain errors. Please correct them in the comments after reading this post's special commenting guidelines.
You should ignore the news unless it's of historic import. Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes an event of historic import.
Interstate conflicts are inherently political. Politics is a delicate topic on Less Wrong because political topics tend to trigger tribal impulses. Arguments-as-soldiers are symbiotic with soldiers-as-arguments.
I'm writing about this topic because it's at the intersection of two topics dear to my heart: ① responding to rare events ② operating in a hostile informatic environment.
These are our players (in descending order of importance):
China
China doesn't care what happens to Ukraine. China primarily cares about preserving its trade relationships with Russia and the West. China would prefer not to impose sanctions on Russia because sanctions are expensive.
The United States
The United States prefers that Ukraine remain out of Russian hands, but the United States cares more about the rise of China than Russia's fading empire. The United States just pulled out of Afghanistan. The United States does not want to get bogged down in another land war in Eurasia.
The United States has provided something around $2 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2014. A couple billion dollars isn't nothing, but it's insignificant compared to Russian might.
The United States is not committed to defending Ukraine the way it is committed to defending Taiwan, Japan and NATO members. The United States does not plan to use its own troops to defend Ukraine.
The European Union + Britain
The European Union and Britain are allied with the United States. They would prefer Ukraine to stay out of Russian control but don't care enough to deploy their own troops in combat roles against Russia.
Thus, the European Union's (and Britain's) primary option is sanctions. But the European Union and its allies have already been imposing sanctions on Russia for its actions in Crimea since 2014. Putin has already demonstrated that this level of sanctions will not stop his actions in Ukraine.
Europe (especially Germany) is dependent on energy imports from Russia. Europe ramping up sanctions against Russia would damage the European economy and industry in the short term.
Too little, too late. The European Union does not have the will to stop Russia. Britain, alone, is too weak to act without the European Union. (Except—possibly—by threatening a nuclear attack on Moscow, which they are not going to do to protect a non-NATO state.)
I am making no claims to whether the European Union and Britain should or should not stop Russia from invading Ukraine. It is none of my business. I'm just saying that if you live in Ukraine then you should not count on much more support from the EU than from the US.
Ukraine
The Ukrainian government will fight a total war to defend its sovereignty. It has issued an emergency order allowing its people to buy firearms (they were not, previously, legal to own) but it has not trained its people in guerrilla warfare.
Russia
Putin is committed to invading Ukraine.
The War
There is probably going to be a war. Ukraine is probably going to lose. The question is how much, how quickly and on what terms.
Eastern Ukraine is a flat plain contiguous with Russia. If you just look at troop counts then Ukraine would seem to have a chance against Russia. But Russia has superiority of aircraft and heavy weapons. Russia will conquer Eastern Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces is among the three most capable militaries in the world. The Ukrainian military isn't.
If you live in Ukraine then you might have faith in your government to defend your borders. Don't. Governments consistently lie about how "we will win the war" until days (or hours) before enemy forces march into your city. It happened in World War I. It happened in Nanking in 1937. It happened in Kabul in 2021. It will happen in Ukraine (if it hasn't already).
This is not a criticism of Ukraine in particular. I know little about Ukraine. This is a statement about governments in general, across history. You should expect your government to lie to you and the news to mislead you.
I responded appropriately to COVID because I took extreme measures when everyone in my neighborhoood was acting as if nothing was amiss. You should do the same. Don't be afraid of looking stupid. Be afraid of you and your family dying for stupid reasons.
If you live in Eastern Ukraine, the best time to flee is weeks ago. The second-best time is now. Romania is willing to accept half a million refugees.
Maybe you'd prefer to live under Russian occupation amidst a Ukrainian insurgency and a Russian counter-insurgency than to flee your home. If so that's your choice. But don't just assume everything's going to continue as normal and be okay.
World War III
Three days ago a friend send me a text "It's likely WWIII Eve". I'm not worried about WWIII because the United States, European Union and Britain are not committed to an escalation of direct conflict with Russia the way they were during the Cold War. If their positions change then I will worry.
Commenting Guidelines
In the case of cold strategic analysis, you are actively encouraged to point out anywhere you think I might be wrong. My guidelines about speaking in the positive are temporarily suspended.
But any discussion of justice, morality and which side is "right" will be crushed with an iron fist. Advocating what policies democratic governments (especially Western powers) "should" take is similarly off-limits.