Putin has called up 300K Russian reservists. These are people who had military service, but unlike the National Guard in the US or other similar reserve forces they do not attend regular training.
I’m seeing both reports of Russian men fleeing the country and of volunteers not in the call-up reporting. Bear in mind that Russia has somewhat more than 2 million reservists, this is a little over one-seventh of the men they can call up. The quality of these forces will be low, but they aren’t raw recruits.
Russia’s primary liability in the war is that they’ve been fight about about 1:3 odds. This will make it so they’re fight at about 5:6 or thereabouts (it’s a little unclear how many many both sides have right now.) The recent loss happened because Russia didn’t have enough money to hold lines, so Ukraine was able to punch through, and Russia also didn’t have enough mobile reserves to counter-attack. These facts are indisputable at this point.
Even low training troops can hold ground. It is a military maxim that the main difference low training (as opposed to no training makes is in the ability to move. Low training troops tend to fight well enough, but they can’t move under fire. This is why Ukraine sends its raw conscripts to die in trenches under artillery bombardment and why western “volunteers” appear to have been the spearhead of the recent counter-offensive.
So the effect of this should be to make it much harder for any Ukrainian counter-offensives to work. They are less likely to break through, and with trained troops not being used to hold ground, there will both be more men in reserve forces to stop any counter-attacks and more trained men for Russia’s own offensives.
Russia will have to go to partial war footing to keep these men supplied, which is something Putin was trying to avoid, and there will be more death-notices to families who though their men’s time in the military was over. Russia has the world’s second largest arms industry after the US, so don’t expect that they can’t supply their forces, though there may be “last 100 mile” challenges. High end computer chips are not needed for most of what the Russian military will want (and which can be built on this time scale) and China can supply a great deal of what Russia needs even without sending arms.
The West will now need to decide whether to partially move to a war economy and whether to send even more high-end equipment to Ukraine (which will have to, in many cases, be operated by “volunteers” if it is to be fully effective. However, ramp-up times for a lot of what the West has been sending are long, and in many cases will take a year or two to go into effect, so how much can be done is unclear.
That said, one possibility is to simply play for time and do the ramp up. Keep Russian advances slow, make sure there is no negotiated settlement and try and use the Western material advantage to offset Russia’s manpower advantage. Give it a couple years and a ton of material can flood into Ukraine, more than Russia can keep up with unless China decides to fully support them.
(This is a simulation of how the NATO analysts and officers who are actually running the Ukrainian strategy are probably thinking.)
We’ll see how this plays out, but the Russians were never as bad as Western propaganda claimed and the Ukrainians never supermen. Ukraine had a 3:1 manpower advantage and was still losing ground. They had two wins: Kiev and the recent counter-offensive, but have still lost about 20% of the country. And bear in mind that most Ukrainian troops are now barely trained conscripts, they aren’t any better and maybe slightly worse than the Russian reservists.
So, the West will have to send more gear, but there’s only so much they can send and ramping up production of the fancy stuff will take longer than it takes for Russia to get these new troops to the front. That means that Russia needs to make gains during that gap and end the war before the Western production advantage can come to bear.
This winter will be key: ground will be hard, many rivers are likely to be frozen and both armies will be able to move swiftly. If Russia wants to win the war by taking enough ground to force a peace, they need to do much of it in this winter.
StewartM
Now on top of Europe suffering due to a dearth of Russian oil and gas, the West is going to go to a partial war footing while trying to tackle the inflation beast at the same time? How’s that going to work out?
Keith in Modesto
Thanks for your perspective on the Ukrainian conflict, Ian. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if NATO officials are running the Ukrainian operations, and NATO is supplying military equipment and ‘volunteers’, hasn’t this conflict turned into a war between NATO and Russia, at least as far as Russia is concerned? I don’t remember hearing any declaration of war from the United States, but maybe I missed it. If neither Russia nor the United States are willing to back down, what can keep this from escalating into a generalized hot war (i.e., not just over Ukrainian territory)?
Ian Welsh
Well, it’s a proxy war. Not quite as much of a proxy war as Korea was (where Russian pilots were flying many of the Korean planes), but still a proxy war. However, yes, many Russians do think they are at war against NATO and not without reason.
KT Chong
Russia will still likely to win the Ukraine War. Win or lose, Russia has just committed a demographic suicide. Like China, Russia’s biggest problem is its demographics and shrinking population. Unlike China, Russia has not enough young men, (while China has too many men and not enough women.) By throwing young men at Ukraine, most of whom will return in body bags or not at all, Russia is accelerating its demographic collapse.
Peter Zeihan: Russia is doomed to collapse like its Soviet predecessor, and it’s already underway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Y_hUuCR54
The beginning of Russia’s end, Putin knelt down on his knees and licked China’s boots at the summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0RNa6BXpV4
Also, from earlier — In September, (and we are still in September,) Ukraine has captured more (abandoned and working) arms from Russia than what the NATO has supplied to Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion. Most likely Russia will still win the war; either win or loss, this is the end of Russia as a regional power if Russia does not just straight-out collapse : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n2yryVIidw
KT Chong
The point is:
From the POV of the West, (i.e., the US and NATO,) it’s not about defending Ukraine or helping Ukraine to regain lost territories from Russia. It’s about using Ukraine to bleed Russia, to kill off Russian men en mass, to hasten Russia’s demographic and population collapse that is already underway, to ensure that Russia will never be able to fight another war or project its power outside Russia again.
In that case, the West is already winning.
mago
The “ “ are doing heavy lifting here.
anon y'mouse
solution: chinese men marry russian women and all get dual citizenship, including offspring.
the only problem is selling that idea to both parties, since i’m sure there are some ethnic preferences (or prejudices) to overcome.
Carborundum
Successfully attacking at 1:3 waging modern warfare, particularly when you have the initiative, is not that big a deal. Since the RMA, norms have become very different, at least when speaking of force on force conflict involving top tier forces.
Really this comes down to skills, which 300K of supplementary (i.e., non-drilling) reserve are not going to possess any time soon (IIRC, they’re also cannibalizing their cadre and assembling them into operational units) . Add to that persistent logistical weakness and a strategic concept that sounds a lot better as PR than military reality and this has goat rope written all over it.
Mark Pontin
Ian W: *’Keep Russian advances slow, make sure there is no negotiated settlement and try and use the Western material advantage to offset Russia’s manpower advantage … That means that Russia needs to … end the war before the Western production advantage can come to bear. “*
What Western production advantage, Ian? Because it’s actually not clear if the West is capable of ramping up weapons production to the extent necessary. Have you seen this analysis from the Royal United Services Institute in June, especially the conclusion under ‘Flawed Assumptions’.
The Return of Industrial Warfare
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/return-industrial-warfare
Additionally, Russia has technological military superiority over US-NATO, though this isn’t acknowledged in the West. Arguably, it looks like Russia has achieved a minor RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs.
The most commonly referenced figure in discussions of RMA theory was/is Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment from 1973-2015 —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_policy_strategist)
For background, Marshall’s most recognized innovation was to call in the 1980s for the same ‘smart’ computerized guidance systems developed for nuclear weapons to be installed in non-nuclear battlefield ordnance, with the results seen in the ‘smart’ weapons first showcased in the 1990 Gulf War in Iraq. In the 21st century, in his last years before he was forced from power, Marshall argued that “foundational weapons of the armed services — the tank, the aircraft carrier and short-range fighter jets — are doomed to obsolescence because of advances in missile technology. That has made him an unbeloved figure among some U.S. generals and admirals, who view him as an unrealistic radical and a threat to conventional military strategy.”
See: – https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-weighs-future-of-its-inscrutable-nonagenarian-futurist-andrew-marshall/2013/10/27/f9bda426-3cac-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html
Marshall was right. How can the US and NATO implement a ‘no-fly zone,’ for instance, when with any of a large range of non-ICBM missile types that travel at speeds of up to 10 mach (and in one case 26 mach) and may have ranges of 1,700 miles, the Russians can target immensely-expensive manned planes whose pilots will black out if 4-6g speeds are maintained for more than a few seconds?
In 2022 in the Ukraine, we’re seeing a war in which manned aircraft — and tanks on the battlefield, increasingly — no longer constitute offensive assets, but slow-moving, vastly expensive targets (along with the highly-trained crews necessary to man these high-ticket weapons platforms) much as aircraft carriers are already recognized to be.
To some extent these same constraints apply to the Russians too. While they knocked out the Ukrainian air force in the first three weeks of the war and at least a third of Ukraine’s air defense detection capability, from April onwards US-NATO satellites overhead and AWACS flying on Ukraine’s borders have been functioning as Ukraine’s air defense net work and feeding their surveillance to US-NATO C&C centers in Kiev and elsewhere in non-Russian occupied terrain. Additionally, Russia has been fighting a proxy war too, using as infantry mostly Lugansk and Donetsk militia, while moving around regular Russian Army artillery and missiles and air defense detection/electronic weapons capability as needed. So they’ve been sparing in their use of conventional air power, given Ukrainian-NATO-US missile capability.
All that’s about to change. Historically, the Russians were the first to use rockets on the battlefield with the Katyushas deployed against the Nazis in WWII; they were the first to send a satellite and a man into orbit on top of rocket launchers; they developed the Sunburn/Moskit carrier killer by the early 1970s; Russian launchers carried US astronauts to the ISS in the years when the US launch industry died with the shuttle program; and Russians rockets have overwhelming operational preponderance now —
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311401/russia-missiles-range/
This summer, meanwhile, Americans have been flocking to see Tom Cruise’s Maverick: Top Gun, and many in DC seem to believe that that movie’s fantasy is some kind of vaguely realistic representation of US military power. It seems to me a situation comparable to the ignorance of reality of the WWI generals (re. the machine gun) and the French aristocracy (re. the long bow) before Agincourt .
Mark Pontin
It’s also worth paying attention to what Putin actually said, rather than the Western MSM’s focus on playing up the general threat of Putin escalating to nuclear weapons.
This was: “Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose (NATO symbol) can turn around.”
There’s a specific threat implied in that phrasing, which gives Putin and Russia another rung up the escalation ladder before actual use of nuclear weapons. To whit: –
[1] The Kiev regime’s shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, its lies about that, and the subsequent refusal of the IAEA and the UN to acknowledge those Ukrainian lies have hardened Russian attitudes towards the EU and the West .
[2] There are fifteen nuclear reactors located across four power plants in Ukraine, nine of which remain in the Kiev regime’s territory.
[3] When the coming referendums are done, the territories of Donetz and Lugansk will become officially Russian. The US-NATO will then continue its proxy war and push the Kiev regime to attack those regions, though they will then be Russia by Russian lights. At that point, the Russians will treat that as an act of war, conclude the special military operation, and commence the war proper on Ukraine.
[4] They can then do what they’ve been technically capable of doing from the beginning and what the USA canonically does when it invades a country: target and take out with missile and air strikes both the enemy’s C&C centers — currently occupied to some greater or lesser extent by the US-NATO personnel actually directing this war — and the country’s civil infrastructure of water, railroads, communications, specific bridges and roads, and its power plants and transmission lines.
[5] Among those power plants are the nine nuclear reactors. And the targeting of those could be done on days when the wind is specifically blowing east to west, towards Europe.
[6] Not only that. Here’s a map of those reactors’ locations.
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/INTERACTIVE-Nuclear-power-plants-Ukraine.jpg?resize=770%2C513
Presumably, those reactors are built to Soviet specs and, like Zaporizhzhia, are built to standards whereby conventional attack by shelling or an aircraft crashing into them won’t crack their containment vessels (Although spent fuel pools are far more vulnerable.) A Kinzhal hypersonic missile — or a barrage of them — very likely will.
An exclusion zone created at South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, a.k.a the Pivdennoukrainsk Nuclear Power Plant, in Mykolaiv oblast, about 350 kms south of Kiev, would have the effect of focusing a few minds in the US, NATO, and the EU.
Furthermore, the Russians sent a warning three days ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/world/europe/ukraine-nuclear-plant-missile.html
Willy
I suspect that Ukraine can continue to get their aid which profits western corporations for a great many years. Hell, how long in Iraq/Afghanistan and with western body counts even? Russia will get aid from who, Iran and North Korea?
And we haven’t even gotten to the occupation phase yet. Troop and citizenry motivation is always major, as anybody who’s observed poor little third world countries outlasting superpowers knows.
I’d hoped for a Crimea and Donbass agreement, but I’ve even seen polls where even a large majority of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine don’t want to be part of Russia. Putin has one helluva PR job ahead of him. Maybe he can start by promising to turn all Soviet era Rossiya hotel style monstrosities into cool little urban parks, complete with fancy memorials for all the dead. Be nice if Europe learned how to quit sucking off the Russian energy bear tit too.
NL
This war is now bigger than Russia. It is a grand war between the West and the East, between America and China, capitalists and administrators, rough-and-tumble laissez faire and stern dirigisme, our way of life vs theirs way of life, us against them. We have at stake our continuous expansion, our quality of life and our superiority. For the East and China, they have at stake rolling back a ~400 year long expansion of what they consider a new type of the barbarian, their expansion and quality of life and their superiority. We enter this war in not the best of shapes. Usually the side with a greater industrial power finds a way to win. But we will see..
Mark Pontin
NL: ‘We have at stake our continuous expansion, our quality of life and our superiority.
Except it’s NOT *our* continuous expansion and *our* superiority, and increasingly no longer *our* quality of life, either, is it?
It’s the West’s ignorant, arrogant elites’ continuous expansion, superiority, and quality of life.
Willy: ‘Be nice if Europe learned how to quit sucking off the Russian energy bear tit too.’
How does Europe do that? Can they do that?
It’s increasingly clear that this is a global resource war — that Russia is the country with the largest territory in the world, sitting on the largest quantity of accessible material resources remaining in the world, especially with the Arctic and East Ukraine added into the mix.
And the capitalist West is looking down the road, and seeing its expansionist model crashing as available global resources run out — unless it can access what’s in Russia.
Except that’s not going to happen. The Russians let down their guard in the 1990s, the Yeltsin era happened, Western corporations and capitalists looted and plundered like there was no tomorrow, and male lifespans dropped as low as 59. The Russians will not let that the West do that to them again.
bruce wilder
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I am constantly reminded of this dictum when trying to follow the War in Ukraine. Just as an example, here is the blogger, “b” at Moon of Alabama:
bolding added by me.
Not to pick on Moon of Alabama particularly, but this cavalier choosing of your own facts seems to be almost universal. Quite a few mainstream media outlets have gone recently with an estimate of Russian casualties of 80,000, attributed rather vaguely to “the Pentagon in August”. Casualties, by convention, include the wounded as well as the killed, and “wounded” can be quite elastic in its practical definition, but even so, 80,000 seems almost ridiculously high — neither side has done anything in this war on a scale that would generate such a large number (and anything on that scale militarily would manifest in something more readily and objectively visible than imaginings). Of course, video evidence of we-are-never-quite-sure-what abounds. Pro-Ukrainian commenters were sure in the recent offensive near Kharkiv that the Russians were abandoning equipment willy nilly while those maybe more Russophile were sure that this was the Ukrainians leveraging a planned Russian withdrawal and the Russians retreated in good order.
With numbers so fluid, lots of commentators feel free to build a narrative out of rhetorical flourishes characterizing the ferocious strength of one participant or the other. (e.g. “NATO-trained” is thrown around a lot without meaning much that is definite and as I have noted before, Ukraine’s armed forces are often characterized as outnumbered by the Russian forces in Ukraine, which is not true in general).
I follow an Australian historian (of ancient Roman military organization! shades of Kagan) on TikTok, who channels an almost perfect neoliberal neocon American line on Ukraine. His performances are dazzling to watch in a perverse way, as he cheerleads for Ukraine to defeat the Russians militarily and rationalizes away all the moral issues of international relations under a rules-based Order where no rules constrain the hegemon.
The choice in the West to aid Ukraine and advise against negotiating with Russia seems to me to be designed to lead to escalation. Russia is not going to lose to Ukraine in isolation. Whether you think that is partly a function of Putin’s supposed fears for his personal safety or not, I really do not see how any Russian leader could back down. Calculating closely on a war of attrition misses the point: Russia will do whatever it takes and every escalation just reinforces the view that this is an existential fight for Russia, never mind Putin.
Some commenters like to speculate on what the Russians will do “if they become desperate”, but I think the invasion itself was a desperate move. The invasion, even on a limited scale held the threat of escalation based on how the West and its Ukrainian client regime responded and so far the response has been to call the Russians’ bluff (which was never an empty bluff). What game do the neocons in the Biden Administration and in the UK think they are playing?
My first reaction to the actual invasion was to judge that Putin had made a terrible mistake. That was based on my not seeing a practical end-game. When people ask if Russia is likely to win the war, I wonder what situation the Russians are capable of forcing that would lead a rump-Ukraine to credibly promise de-militarized neutrality or the “Collective West” to unwind financial and economic sanctions? The “best” I can conceive of Russia achieving would be a bitter pill from a Russian perspective and I wonder that Putin would embrace it.
Ian Welsh
I don’t mention casualty figures for just this reason: I don’t know.
VietnamVet
Western and Russian Oligarchs have so looted government services that their militaries are no longer functional. This plundering was documented by the collapse of the USA, EU and Russian public health services in the coronavirus pandemic. The last USA military victory was against Imperial Japan. Russia doesn’t have the manpower, equipment and training to conduct maneuver warfare or the ability to hold all of Ukraine it occupies now.
The Russian invasion was provoked by the simple fact the West needs Russia’s cheap energy and has been conducting a regime change campaign to get control of it. The invasion, itself, was a fundamental strategic error that mobilized Ukraine to fight the invaders. So too, is the sanctioning of Russia’s natural gas which will trigger a frozen economic depression in Western Europe this winter.
The simple fact is that there can be no peaceful resolution without the restoration of good government. Vladimir Putin has no choice but to include Donbas regions that vote for annexation under the Russia’s nuclear umbrella. NATO and Ukraine now have a decision. Continue the counteroffensive or stand down. If they continue the regime change campaign, they risk their forces being destroyed by tactical nuclear weapons and igniting an almost certain global nuclear war. Enough of the nuclear forces are still functional to destroy human civilization. Like the Korean War before, the only way to assure peace is to sign an armistice and build a DMZ, a new Iron Wall, to separate East from West.
The era of shortages is upon the West. With good government, resource depletion and climate change can be mitigated to a degree. But Homo Sapiens, our descendants, will be alive.
jrkrideau
@ bruce wilder
, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that Russia was at war with the collective West rather than Ukraine.
Re casualty figures the recent ones that Shoigu has just announce are probably closer to reality than Ukrainian figures though I have seen suggestions that the Russian figures almost certainly do not include the Donbass militias or the Wagner group while the Ukrainian figures probably do not include the battalions such as the Azov Battalion which are technically in the Russian or Ukrainian armed forces.
The Russian Ministry of Defence generally seem to split hairs when giving out information but they do not generally seem to lie though they do make mistakes. The Ukrainian equivalent seems very less reliable.
Jacques Baud discusses casualty rates and information sources in this interview along with a number of other interesting points
jrkrideau
@ Willy
I’ve even seen polls where even a large majority of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine don’t want to be part of Russia.
I’d take them with a bag or two of salt. A minority of ethnic or linguistically Russian Ukrainians very likely do not want to be part of Russia but it looks like a lot of the Donbass Republics’ people would be happy. They have been fighting an 8 year civil war with the Kyiv regime for independence or to join Russia. My guess is that most would like to be part of the Russian Federation as it is a lot richer than Ukraine as a whole or than a small independent Donbass Republic could ever be.
I expect we will see a pretty large “Join Russia” vote in these current referenda which NATO and Kyiv will call a sham just as the did with the Crimean one. However in the Crimea there had been two earlier referenda to live Ukraine back in the 1990’s both of which wend for leaving so I d not believe in a sham Crimea referendum and am very unlikely to believe that these are shams.
I keep hearing that Russia has an GDP about the size of Europe but in terms of Real GDP it is more about the size of Germany’s as the CIA report.
. Putin has one helluva PR job ahead of him.
To whom? The BBC’s Moscow reporter made such a point to Sergai Lavrov regarding the “West”. Lavrov replied, “We don’t care.”
If you check out all the countries that are applying sanctions on Russia, it is basically NATO/EU Australia. NZ, Japan and South Korea. IIRC there is no country in South America or Africa. Heck even Saudi Arabia is not cooperating.
I get the impression that a lot of them just do not care and some consider the whole thing is just more US imperialism.
Mark Pontin
Yeah, casualty figures are impossible to figure out.
Bruce W: When people ask if Russia is likely to win the war, I wonder what situation the Russians are capable of forcing that would lead a rump-Ukraine to credibly promise de-militarized neutrality or the “Collective West” to unwind financial and economic sanctions?
There’s nothing at this point. The Russians can only flatten Ukrainian infrastructure — and maybe whole towns — to whatever point west of the Dnieper River they choose to make semi-uninhabitable — then form a line on one side of the resulting DMZ, presumably at the river. As far as I can tell, they’re as capable of that as the US is, and then some.
Will that then stop the US and the West? No. But there are things the Russians can do — target a nuclear power station with the specific aim of creating a radioactive plume near Kiev on a day when the winds are blowing towards Western Europe, for instance — that would put the fear of God into the heads of the West’s idiot policymakers.
However, this will still be a long-term confrontation and increasingly a war of attrition.
One is increasingly reminded of the run-up to WWI and the same blind, arrogant, ignorant stupidity that leaders then showed. There were people then who predicted exactly what a war of attrition between industrial (then) modern states would be like, such as Jean Bloch —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gotlib_Bloch
In fact it was quite clear what the effects of machine gun fire — the industrialization of slaughter — would be, because imperialist Western states had been mowing down indigenous peoples for decades to build their empires. But the military commanders were mostly drawn from the second and third sons of the landed aristocracy in their countries, and believed in the primacy of cavalry charges (horsies!) and the initiative and bravery of individual soldiers.
I bring all this up because it’s very clear that Western civilian policymakers — maybe not the Pentagon — have been huffing their own supply and likewise believe the narrative that the West — specifically, the US — has military technological primacy over the Russians. It does not.
NL
What’s with this harping on narrative all the time… I would imagine pr, psyop and influence operators must be constantly talking about narratives and messaging and the like…
Why waste life on narratives and messaging — life is too short. We may want to produce something meaningful and lasting for the next generations of people to ponder about and not just manipulate our contemporaries into false understanding of the world. Time sweeps false and shallow discourse like we sweep trash off the streets…
Astrid
This is in response to NR’s comments on the open thread. I guess he or she skirted no Ukraine by limiting the comment to Russia, even though it is very much about Western reporting on Ukraine and Russia.
I heard of the exemption for students and the current call up appears to be for reservist with experience in certain specialties. Shouldn’t this information be easily findable on Russian government websites? Why is it citing NYT rather than going directly to the source?
Here’s the thing. I am not a Russia expert, but the “pro-Russian” side has narratives that make sense, cite specific information they bears scrutiny, and whose reporting by and large are supported by turn of events. The “pro-Ukrainian” side doesn’t and includes MSM that has a track record of absolutely lying about everything from Iraq/Libya/Syria to Russiagate to COVID to East Turkistan extremist to… its an empire of lies. True, in the past there were usually some dissension in the major MSM and this time the message control is extreme, so any alternate view is limited to very minor outlets like Consortium News and non-US sources (I read RT, Sputnik, and Tass on their apps or on Telegram, they tend to provide neutral and reasonably well sourced reporting). Any assessment of the situation based on naive faith in that truth can arise anywhere in the MSM is just a garbage in garbage out exercise.
I’ve taken to reading Ian’s takes on Ukraine not for accuracy, but how an otherwise intelligent person who still naively believes in the integrity of the MSM can think. As my husband still thinks like this, though he refuses to talk about it because I am so negative and anyways wasn’t I wrong about the stock market in 2008 and 2020? Hey, I was there myself before Russiagate, COVID, Xinjiang, and SMO blew it up.
Astrid
I think the end game was always making the West accept actual Ukrainian neutrality (backed by non-Western enforcers) or alliance with Russia. Several NATO governments already fell, many more will likely fall by spring, including in the US legislative branch. There’s some reporting that Ukrainian refugees are already wearing out their welcome in Europe as they’re prioritized by the EU governments over welfare of their own citizenry (as in English schools). At some point, some (likely right wing though hopefully also the communists) public figures will brave the “Russian misinformation agent” label and point out that Ukrainian Banderites are not worth deindustrialization and freezing every winter. If Russia can manage Syria, it can manage whatever Ukrainian rump state arises and wait for opportunities to reach a final settlement years down the line.
It doesn’t matter what the abstract size of the GDP is. Russia and China have plenty of food and fuel this winter. India, Iran, and even Pakistan is doing everything it can to secure their share. You can’t eat dollars or Euros or intellectual property, you can only trade it with someone who has those things.
Zelensky recently made clear his State Department masters’ plan for Ukraine. An Israel style ethnostate in the heart of Europe, with no labor protection and private ownership of anything valuable (mostly land and Soviet built infrastructure). Ethnic Russian will be cleansed and their wealth transfered to primarily Jewish oligarchs, just as after the fall of USSR. I hope that the fallout of Ukraine will collapse the EU (it might have worked with the right mechanisms and leadership, but it’s an absolute authoritarian nightmare as currently constituted) and reassessment of their slavish support of US and Israel.
bruce wilder
Jean Bloch is an interesting historical figure and provides a stark contrast that highlights just how stubbornly stupid the ruling and professional classes of the time could be. He was not apparently a particularly imaginative visionary — dying in 1902 he missed the airplane and the motor truck — but he was a hard worker who dug into the technical details to build a foundation for his argument. (I have searched in vain for anyone seeing the need to take such an approach to designing an economic approach to the challenges of climate change and resource depletion in our own time. Teh stupid is abundant though.)
There are good grounds for thinking a technological revolution in warfare is imminent. But, the war in Ukraine between two adversaries loaded down with vast quantities of obsolete weaponry and deploying small numbers of systems of questionable practicality into untrained hands is not revealing that coming revolution so much as incubating it. The Russians military did not come to the war, for example, with capable drones or a mastery of the dense information nets necessary for effective tactical application, but you can bet that conservative resistance has been overcome and attention is focused now in ways that the recent experience in Armenia was not able to do by itself.
different clue
About demograhic collapse . . . If China has a 1.5 billion population now, they could shrink down to 750 million people and still be the second biggest population country on earth. If they can manage the descent path and achieve a soft landing with social and civil cohesion intact, they will be the most powerful surviving country on earth.
The most populous nation on earth will be India, but given its social and civil incoherence and rising unlivability from global heating, the Indian population will crush itself to death like a whale on the beach.
jrkrideau
Stupid cut and paste.
I keep hearing that Russia has an GDP about the size of italy.
Mark Pontin
Bruce W. : “the war in Ukraine between two adversaries loaded down with vast quantities of obsolete weaponry and deploying small numbers of systems of questionable practicality into untrained hands is not revealing that coming revolution so much as incubating it.’
Well put, but the general outlines of a new warfighting paradigm are nonetheless coming into view. God help us.
For instance: Barring some other development that hasn’t yet emerged, blitzkrieg-type advances across battlefields now become near-impossible because they rely on overwhelming airpower to cover and reinforce them.
***
Related to Jean de Bloch and WWI, one of the best, most educational books on history I ever read was THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN published in the 1970s by John Ellis, a British historian of leftist tendencies, and all the better for that. It has the virtue of being very short.
NL
In Ukraine students (and so other categories, like fathers with lots of children and dependents, sick, etc) have been also exempted from mobilization, until now… In response to the Russian partial mobilization, Ukraine seems to have started preparing its own next wave of mobilization. Ukraine officials estimate there are 5.5 million Ukrainians available for the meat grinder, including students. The recent Ukrainian successes were preceded by an extensive call up of civilians. The Russian side claimed people were handed mobilization notices everywhere, including nightclub, during traffic stops and randomly on the street.
From elsewhere, “a little over a week ago, in Ukraine , male students who study at foreign universities were banned from leaving the country. Previously, this was allowed on an exceptional basis, but since September 14, the loophole has been finally closed. All this suggests that a new wave of mobilization is being prepared in Kiev in the near future.”
There is also talk of women being mobilized. Ukraine officials say this is not necessary now… at least until November…
And that’s how the time of the last able body Ukrainian and Russian is coming..
I was watching the other day a video of an Iranian drone strike a target in Odessa. Some claim there is already equipment from China on the battlefield, but this is probably not true. Nonetheless, maybe all this talk about North Korea sending stuff is just misdirection and the true source of the stuff will be China. I am pretty sure China has enough people to relabel everything as North Korean overnight…
bruce wilder
I suppose part of it is the rise and rise of propaganda with each advance of communication tech and scale. And with that the dim realization that humans are storytelling animals who have used stories to scale their eusociality to a global scale capable of consuming the earth as quickly as a swarm of locust can consume 10,000 hectares of grassland.
There has been a brutal shift on the pseudo-left that has left a few refugees from the destruction of blog-istan wondering, what happened? In important ways, some of us here are meditating on why a morally sincere truth-teller like our gracious host was marginalized while others . . .
That brutal shift in story-telling is something I have a hard time describing articulately, but I see it in microcosm in the New York Times and in particular in that paper’s sponsorship of the 1619 Project. Testing and adapting narrative to facts ceased to matter. That shows in NY Times reporting on partisan politics every day. And is now part of the historic record on Russiagate. The last time the editorial leadership seemed capable of embarrassment was the second Iraq War.
The new narrative style seems almost impervious to facts or moral ambiguity. And, the Russian decision to ignore the echo chamber of aligned voices and disinformation in Western mainstream media has amplified the crayola coloring effects for me. Someone like John Mearsheimer has demonstrated the old style. Douglas MacGregor is another voice that reasons somewhat in the old style with regard to Ukraine.