As I understand it, Russia still perceives itself as a superpower in a decades-long cold war against USA. The fall of Soviet Union was a temporary setback, but now they are back in the game.
From Russian perspective, there are currently only two (or maybe three -- I have no idea how Russia perceives China) agents on this planet. Everyone else is an NPC. Some states are "NPCs owned by USA". Some states are "NPCs owned by Russia". Other NPCs are neutral and passive. But there are only two (or three, if also China) player characters who have actual agency, and everything that happens on this planet should be interpreted as a military move made by one of them. Any other interpretation means falling for someone's propaganda, hook, line, and sinker. From Russian perspective, explaining things from any other perspective makes you either a liar (which is a good thing, considering the alternative), or an idiot (if you actually believe what you say).
If you do not grok this perspective, you simply do not understand what Russians actually mean by the things they are saying, e.g. when Putin makes a speech to the Russian public. I am not commenting here on what Putin actually believes -- I have n...
I would like to comment on Budapest Memorandum technicality. You probably already know this since you conceded Russia has a point, but other readers may not. The following is trying to be a neutral summary.
In 1994, in return for Belarus and Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons and joining NPT, US promised to "refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind".
In 2013, US sanctioned Belarus. Belarus notified US that US broke Budapest Memorandum. US replied it didn't (what?), because sanctions are for human rights, and not designed to subordinate etc.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea.
I am not sure what US was thinking in 2013. If US thought Budapest Memorandum was at all valuable, they should have paused and thought twice about it. Given their frankly absurd reply, I think they didn't consider it valuable.
I live in South Korea, so my specialty (I am not at all special in South Korea, but that immediately makes me an expert in the global internet) is North Korea. US and North Korea reached an agreement called Agreed Framework (done in Geneva, so better...
I agree. I wouldn't trust USA to keep their promises after something disappears from the news headlines.
I have no idea -- is this a specifically American problem, or a problem of democracies in general? Because in democracy, the person expected to fulfill the promise is often not the person who made the promise; often it is actually their opponent. Solving a problem by making a promise gives you political points, keeping a promise made by your opponent does not. Do other democracies have a better track record?
You should think about making this a top-level post. Having talked to a few of my pro-Russian friends/acquaintances (mostly Russians and Serbians), I cannot stress how on point this analysis is. I experienced what you describe here very well, the fact that they "breathe" a different model of the world.
I also noticed that they all fall prey to the same failure mode (related to the Fallacy of Grey):
Thank you for your kind words!
However, I will respect the social norm of not posting political content, because I think that it is a good norm in general. It may be tempting to make an exception for a good cause, but it rarely stops with one exception, and I would rather not contribute to making LW a place where political content is posted regularly. The quality of the political content would inevitably decrease, because at first people would be aware that they are breaking a norm, so they would try hard and be careful, but later they would be not. Also, it would attract new people who only come here for the political debate, and that would be bad.
(I posted this here as a response to an already existing article, and as an answer to tailcalled's question: "does Putin not consider Germany part of 'The West'? If not Germany, then who, beyond the US?")
If anyone wants to have a political debate at some other place, like ACX or DSL or whatever, feel free to copy or reference my comment, I don't mind.
Politics is generally a huge Grey area. No one is flawless. That doesn't make everything the same. But it provides enough arguments for all sides. Also, different people are differently impac...
I do not post on other platforms (besides a very infrequent blog on Java game development). My commenting online is mostly Less Wrong and ACX, occasionally Hacker News.
I actually do not think I have much useful to say on the topic other than what I already wrote here; this was a dump of everything that was on my mind. Could generate some more text about what pro-Russian people in my country actually believe (a mixture of Putin admiration and conspiracy theories about our local politicians), but at the end you would see that this comment was the 20% of the text that provided 80% of the value.
One more thing that comes to my mind is this: Imagine how a paranoid antisemitic person thinks about Jews. Remove the religious things like circumcision or cooking matzos from blood of Christian children, and only keep the non-religious ones like ruling the world from shadows, only caring about profit, manipulating the world's finance, being untrustworthy and generally immoral. Replace the world "Jew" with "American". Add an army, used exclusively to kill innocent people across the world, especially recently in former Yugoslavia; motivated by greed, power, oil. -- The result is a good approximat...
"Objection against "out of desperation". How is it desperation to lose something that you didn't own yesterday, just tried to take from someone and failed. (Yes, I am sure that Russia will spin it as desperation, but it is not.)"
I would make a comment here:
Losing a couple of provinces in Ukraine that just become part of the Russian Federation recently should not make "Russia" desperate. However, I believe we have a principal-agent problem here:
Russia can afford to lose this war, but the current Russian leadership does not. I think they believe there is a good chance that they would be removed by a coup or a revolution if they loose face due to military defeat.
I think the past 6 months of the conflict supports this view:
The Russian Armed Forces have been inefficiently throwing hard-to replace weaponry and manpower trying to conquer the rest of Donbass, while pretending this was the plan all along. It is a relatively worthless region(large portion of the population having fled, majority of industrial infrastructure having been/would be destroyed), and replacing lost equipment and professional personnel (especially officers and special operation units) will take many years, making Rus...
(I'm Russian)
Quite likely, they never heard about Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
I think this is false. It's more likely that average arguing-in-Internet Russian tells you that Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was lesser evil after Munich Agreement.
I assume that most of them get some introductory lesson at school, but only a few achieve fluency.
English is a mandatory subject for all 11 years in all schools, but yes, fluency is uncommon.
I suspect that communication with foreigners is probably quite rare for most Russians.
True.
So, I guess, if you spend all your life in Russia, and if your information about Russia and its relative position in the world mostly comes from government-approved TV channels and news... then it is quite easy to assume that Russia is a superpower in all possible dimensions! Only its military is merely the second strongest in the world, otherwise you couldn't explain why you still haven't defeated USA.
Mostly true, I think.
Interesting summary and interpretation of a speech outlining Putin's intentions, "The End of Western Hegemony is INEVITABLE":
...This is a reproduction of my live Twitter summary/translation of Vladimir Putin's speech:
I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.
Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends most of his speech discussing the West. His primary complaint isn't NATO expansion, which gets only a cursory mention. The West is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonise other nations, like Russia.
The West uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. To collect what he calls the "hegemon's tax". To this end the West destabilises countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty.
It is this "avarice" and desire to preserve its power that is the reason for the "hybrid war" the collective West is "waging on Russia". They want us to be a "colony".
He's not saying things to express some coherent worldview. Germany could be an enemy on May 9th or a victim of US colonialism another day. People's right to self-determination is important when we want to occupy Crimea, but inside Russia separatism is a crime. Whichever argument best proves that Russia's good and West is bad.
ISW has an extensive analysis https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/special-report-assessing-putin%E2%80%99s-implicit-nuclear-threats-after-annexation Here is the last paragraph:
...Russian nuclear use would therefore be a massive gamble for limited gains that would not achieve Putin’s stated war aims. At best, Russian nuclear use would freeze the front lines in their current positions and enable the Kremlin to preserve its currently occupied territory in Ukraine. Russian nuclear use would not enable Russian offensives to capture the entirety of Ukraine (the Kremlin’s original objective for their February 2022 invasion). Russian military doctrine calls for the Russian Armed Forces to be able to effectively fight on a nuclear battlefield, and the “correct” doctrinal use of tactical nuclear weapons would involve tactical nuclear strikes to punch holes in Ukrainian lines, enabling Russian mechanized units to conduct an immediate attack through the targeted area and drive deep into Ukrainian rear areas.[9] The degraded, hodgepodge Russian forces currently operating in Ukraine cannot currently conduct effective offensive operations even in a non-nuclear environment. They w
Russia gets nothing from burning bridges. They profit from selling their oil and there are a lot of plausible scenarios where it allows them leverage to negotiate the lifting of sanctions in the winter if the gas runs out in Germany. The only thing Russia could benefit from is if it weakens cooperation between the US and Germany and the rest of the EU.
One interesting aspect of Russia's response is that they are saying:
"The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved onto sabotage," Putin said. "It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines."
If it would be a propaganda move, I would have expected them to have a story about how the US did it prepared and not be as vague about who did it.
When I look at the situation, I find Poland a plausible actor as well. It's interesting that Radoslaw Sikorski who's a Polish MEP thanked the US for it. The timing of Poland opening its pipeline with Norway and them imposing more sanctions on Gasprom makes them seem like a plausible actor to me.
The United States profits from the attack as long as it doesn't damage its relationship with Germany and other EU countries.
Russia gains nothing by burning bridges if you model Russia as a single actor, which can just choose not to turn the oil back on. Putin, however, has a strong motivation to burn bridges: it sets his preferred policy in stone, and removes a possible incentive to coup him. With the pipeline functional, there's always the chance that a faction of the Russian government tries to remove him from office with the goal of picking up the money he's leaving in the ground and spreading it among Team Defectors. Now that the pipeline is disabled, even if Putin were out of office, there'd probably no good way forward for his replacement but to continue the war, which means less motivation for disgruntled insiders to move against him.
He need not think a coup is likely, of course. He just needs to think that, as the war drags on, the pipeline's existence will hurt him more than it helps him, which seems quite sensible.
I give 60% odds it was them. I am mostly impressed/surprised that a state actor (if it was a state actor) managed to do this without being publicly fingered by another intelligence agency. An insistence that this operation to be kept mostly secret even internally, among his own higher ups, could explain a lack of CIA/MI6/etc. informants or an unwillingness by western nations to give clues to those high level informants' existence.
(Meta: writing this in separate comment to enable voting / agreement / discussion separately)
If you want to make the case for tactical nuclear deployment not happening (which I hope is the likely outcome), I want to see a model of how you see things developing differently
I'll list a few possible timelines. I don't think any of these is particularly likely, but they are plausible, and together with many other similar courses of events they account for significant chunks of probability mass.
I'm less concerned. Russian nuclear doctrine lists the circumstances under which Russia would launch its nukes.
a) ICBMS are launched against Russia.
b) WMDs are deployed against Russia or its allies.
c) Russia's ability to retaliate with nukes is threatened.
d) Russia's state faces an existential threat.
Nothing about the Ukraine war meets any of the above criteria.
I don't expect Putin to use your interpretation of "d" instead of his own interpretation of it which he is publicly advertising whenever he has a big public speech on the topic.
From the latest speech:
> In the 80s they had another crisis they solved by "plundering our country". Now they want to solve their problems by "breaking Russia".
This directly references an existential threat.
From the speech a week ago:
> The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia, which must be divided into numerous regions that would be at deadly feud with each other.
Same.
Also, consider nuclear false flags—the frame for them, including in these same speeches, was created and maintained throughout the entire year.
I know almost nothing about military, so please someone explain to me: what exactly does it mean for something to "be a doctrine"?
Does it mean "this is what the future military leaders are taught at a university"? Or is it rather some kind of precommitment? (Made by whom? To whom? What are the consequences if it is not followed?) Or is it like generating common knowledge for all military leaders: "these are the rules you have to follow, and you have to punish anyone who breaks these rules or tries to encourage breaking these rules"?
Russia's state faces an existential threat.
The implication is that attacks on the territories it is annexing are interpretable as an existential threat.
Metacomment on speculations on who might have sabotaged NordStream.
It seems like people here mostly implicitly treat possible state actors as coherent, unified agents. But maybe it wasn't any particular state acting as a whole but rather some small group within that state that decided to do it on their own. Even if they considered it likely to be identified after the fact, the subgroup may have judged the sabotage to be in the interest of the whole nation or maybe that particular subgroup.
(I don't know how much fragmentation of that sort there is in any given country but I think it's at least plausible)
I’d be willing to take a bet that the U.S. will not respond with nuclear retaliation against Russia, regardless of what Russia or any of its governmental actors do, for a 1 year period. If you believe there’s any chance.
OK, why is this downvoted? In general, a bet is either a reasonable statement, or an offer of free money.
If your problem with this bet is that it would be impossible to successfully collect the money in the case you win, this is a known problem with a known solution. The player who bets on "not the end of the world" sends some money to the player who bets on "the end of the world", and later [conditional on this not being the end of the world, implicitly] the second player sends more money back to the first player.
One motive I have heard various media give for Russian sabotaging Nord Stream, is that it would be a way out of their gas-delivery contract. If they simply stopped sending gas for no reason, they would have to pay a fine. This is also why they previous claimed that Nord Stream I was broken.
In order to determine if this is a credible motive, I would need to know:
I haven’t seen any media give even an order of magnitude for question 1. Does anyone know that? At the very least, I would think the fine should be bigger than the value of the released gas for this to be a realistic motive.
On Nord Stream sabotage:
That leaves us with Russia and Germany. I don't see what Germany could gain from this. I don't see what Russia could gain from this either, but then Russia has developed a habit of doing things despite having nothing to gain from them. Also, I see some reasons why Russia could think this is a good idea (implicitly threatening the West by demonstrating willingness to use grey-zone warfare against their critical infrastructure, to try to get them to back down).
So possibly Russia. (Low confidence.)
Epistemic status: proof by lack of imagination.
Computer hacking has always been in a separate category from "exploding things", geopolitically. You may disagree with that distinction, but it's relevant in the calculus.
Nitpicks:
"U.S. airships were nearby days before."
Airships? Do you mean warships?
"Russia has conscripted 300,000 men."
Source? I've heard that they publicly said they'd do 300,000 but actually gave themselves authority to do 1.2M. Also, neither of those tells us how many they've actually got so far.
Yes, in updating my family on today's news I told them that P(WW3) increased in non-trivial ways today - based on mostly similar observations.
There is also a bit more to your point #2 - not only the West does not consider this annexation legitimate, but it also makes any scenario where the fighting stops with Russia maintaining control over these territories less acceptable to the West (and Ukraine), so the path to any pieceful resolution of the conflict just became that much narrower. And that in turn leaves more avenues open for things to escalate.
5b - yes, 2020 amendments to the constitution of Russian Federation included adding the following paragraph to article 67:
2.1. Российская Федерация обеспечивает защиту своего суверенитета и территориальной целостности. Действия (за исключением делимитации, демаркации, редемаркации государственной границы Российской Федерации с сопредельными государствами), направленные на отчуждение части территории Российской Федерации, а также призывы к таким действиям не допускаются.
Rough translation (I am a native Russian speaker born in Moscow leaving in US): 2.1. Russian Federation unsures the protection of its sovereignty and territorial integri...
Kamil Kazani proposed that Putin may be planning to use nukes as a face-saving gesture (in the eyes of Russian public opinion, not yours, you don't matter to him no matter how absurd you think he's being), since it's not humiliating to lose to a retaliatory strike from powerful America, but losing to "inferior" Ukraine certainly is.
Thoughts on this?
- Russian military doctrine allows the usage of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory.
This is ~false. See: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TkLk2xoeE9Hrx5Ziw/nuclear-attack-risk-implications-for-personal-decision?commentId=ukEznwTnD78wFdZip#ukEznwTnD78wFdZip
"Putin has stated he is not bluffing"
I think this is very weak evidence of anything. Would you expect him to instead say that he was bluffing?
FYI I've personally updated that I should at least be on standby for leaving the Bay Area. I've got a few days of supplies packed and and thinking through my trigger-action plans for leaving in a hurry if things seem to be escalating. It's plausible I should leave before things escalate further, but leaving is pretty expensive and I'm not sure what to do.
Thanks Dony for writing this up.
The scenarios I think are most likely (my guess of order of likelihood):
1 - Russia / Ukraine peace deal, involving Ukraine officially ceding Crimea and maybe some/all of these other annexations to Russia in exchange for an end to hostilities/maybe something else. (Russia would say no, but it would be hilarious for Ukraine to ask for the gift of an independent, Russian-made, nuclear deterrent in exchange for the territory. "In 1990's we gave up our nukes for a piece of paper you gave us guaranteeing our territory. the paper did not work, so this time you wi...
The mobilisation in Russia is seemingly an expensive bet. In the short term, he annoys draftees/prospective draftees, deprives the Russian economy of their labour and loses a bunch of working age men from the country. In the medium run, I think having relatives involved is more likely to push ambivalent families to an anti war position than the reverse.
So if it’s a costly bet, then what is it a costly bet on? Seemingly, it is not a bet on the prospect of using nuclear weapons to force Ukraine to negotiate on favourable terms with shock and awe - it’s possi...
Biden threatened earlier in 2022 to block Nord Stream 2:
See some (very opinionated) discussion and a bit more info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwHH1RJxx1g
Your model assumes Russia cannot sustain a conventional war, and will have to escalate. Assume that Russia and the BRICS+ can sustain and certainly outspend the EU, if not the paper dollar just yet. As the world moves to a commodities-basket based currency, it is the US petrodollar that is in much greater danger, and historically a much greater cause for concern regarding escalation.
What's extra weird about Nordstream situation is that apparently one of the two NS-2 pipelines survived and can still be put into operation after inspection while a few months earlier (May 2022?) Gazprom announced that half of the natural gas supply earmarked for NS-2 will be redirected to domestic uses.
If Russia were to nuke Ukraine with a tactical nuke, they will put the US into a position of being forced to respond.
If we go all the way up the escalation ladder to a full nuclear exchange, it's essentially impossible for Russia to win.
So they probably will need to either not escalate, or plan to deescalate at an intermediate point, e.g. if there's an exchange of tac nukes or a tac nuke is exchanged for a nasty conventional strike, Russia may intend to stop the escalation at that point.
Russia has much more reason to bark about nukes than to bite. The bite might happen but I don't see a strong reason for it.
Epistemic status: trying to summarize the news and predict, post is under revision, too lazy to citation everything
I wanted to collect a few observations I've made, as best I understand them. This PBS article does a good job of explaining much of it.
Conclusion: Ukraine will keep attacking the annexed territories in order to take them back until Russia uses a tactical nuke out of desperation, and the U.S. will respond with "catastrophic consequences".
This is obviously uncertain! But the chain of logic forms a coherent enough inside view for me to put a lot of probability on that, and I may start taking bets. I would be curious to see different inside views about what will happen or variations on this one that include facts I should update the post with.
If you want to make the case for tactical nuclear deployment not happening (which I hope is the likely outcome), I want to see a model of how you see things developing differently that has some sort of parts list like I have attempted, not just a vague black box-y sense that nuclear war is too horrible to contemplate and people will naturally successfully manage to try to avoid it at the last minute out of goodness or rationality.