Has there ever been a significant build up that has taken this long, this well publicised, by Russia before an invasion? Not for the last 3 or so decades. This doesn’t fit the fast-moving, extreme ambiguity MO of the Russians. If the main objective is to keep NATO out of Ukraine, (which it is https://intelwombat.com/russian-geopolitical-manoeuvres-the-ukrainian-question/) then what benefit is there in allowing NATO time to respond, sending in thousands of anti-armour weapons and giving western trainers time to skill-up the Ukrainians? Russian commande...

Wars aren't just a chess game where you move pawns forward and see what happens. These things are planned out years in advance, with wargaming, planning cycles, multiple levels of veto, military debates, budget constraints and thousands of intelligence reports in support or against the current version of the plan. Russia would need at least 83,000 troops to occupy the eastern half of Ukraine. On a 1:1 deploy / recovery cycle, they would have half of their military tied up in Eastern Ukraine, or preparing to deploy to Ukraine, for the next [insert infin...

@(mumpskin) I actually think you’re wrong about the starting point. The question only exists because of the observation of a military build-up on the border. The analysis is to determine whether this is a bluff or a genuine road to war. As such, the disposition of Putin towards Ukraine is almost the central question. You’re skipping multiple steps by thinking this question is answered by looking at the build up on the border and pattern-matching that to = war. We know that Putin’s motivation is to keep Ukraine out of NATO. We don’t know whether he can ...

@nostradamnedus You're right and I edited it to be less rude. But the message is the same, the media you're reading isn't coming together to tell a coherent story. It reads to me like Western journos who don't quite understand what Russia's overall approach has been for the last 40 years.

When Russia invades, they invade with limited objectives over a narrow front, usually with ambiguous causus belli. This is not that case, so I don't see Russian officers or oligarchs signing off on it. Nobody benefits.

@(mumpskin) do you have a ratio to support that theory? How many Russian military build-ups have been bluffs vs invasions? How many of those invasions looked similar to what we're seeing now? I maintain that Russia does not like to give adversaries a chance to get their story straight. Russia believes in rapid, ambiguous, hybrid war where it's either too late for NATO to react or too ambiguous to work out what's going on before it's too late. That MO does not fit this scenario. If Russia invades it will be pure naked aggression against a sovereign nati...

@(mumpskin) I'm open to every single point you've made, despite emphasising different ideas. But what are you calibrating against? My reference point is that war is very hard, very destructive and very uncertain. As a baseline, Russia does not invade countries in this manner very often. This would be a very very rare case, historically speaking, of Russia initiating a hyper aggressive war that wasn't obscured by some kind of ideological support (Afghanistan in the 80s, Syria in 2014) or to defend ethnic Russians (Crimea 2014 and Georgia 2008). The baseli...

@fewerlacunae always great to have the superforecasters confirm your position. Good find.

@tryingToPredictFuture Honestly, you repost Putin's essay every day. Read Israel's "The Concept" in the lead up to the Yom Kippur War for reasons as to why fixation on a single, strategic, meta assessment is not a good framing for analysis. Yes, it's an important document, but events do not occur because of a single factor. There are a million decisions from tens of thousands of decisionmakers that go into a "yes" for war. Recontextualise that essay from 100% of your evidence to 2% and you'd be closer to accurate forecasting bevahiours.

@(ersatz) A phony invasion should be identical to a genuine invasion. I can't figure out which triggers or warnings would make me fully accept an invasion is happening (this is by design, military personnel don't exactly want you to be able to figure this stuff out) so I'm leaning more heavily on my prior heuristic than I would in most questions. One analytical exercise I do is to write down a blog post to see what I'd say if I woke up tomorrow and the opposite of my prediction had happened. This is what I wrote when I was still at 24% 3 days ago: "I g...

@(tryingToPredictFuture) in what way has Putin ever acted "crazy" in the past? He didn't just suddenly, last year, get nostalgia. He's been in power as president or premier since 1999! What actual trend line has been established over that time? Has he ever courted war or sanctions so carelessly? Your inside view doesn't work. At best Putin could be trying to establish his own legacy with a big war. I think this is possible, but it's possible he would have found a bullet in the back of his head when the oligarchs found out. And in not confident the mili...

@nostradamnedus An unnamed Ukrainian official, whose account is disputed by both the White House and the Ukrainian government? Maintain the outside view baseline and don't over correct with CNN sensationalisations.

A backchannel is not public, which means the outcome of previous public negotiations is not particularly relevant. We've seen this in similar situations, such as the Cuban Missle Crisis, right?

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@KnowName polls don't matter in Russia. The oligarchs decide what happens in national politics and there has never been a reason to dismiss Putin, especially with the Moscow Exchange at all time highs.

The only reason to dismiss him would be an interruption to the trade and economic growth that's occurring right now... you know, like going to war...

@mumpskin I think it's rare for an event to have one foundational reason. Nations and organisations are made up of thousands of tiny decisions and decision makers.

But yes geopolitical defensive considerations are probably a primary consideration, sure.

@RedBox you're telling me that if we ran a different version of reality 100 times, only one of them would result in "no war"?

@nostradamnedus In no way do I see "the White House seems resigned to an invasion".

@ad42astra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunboat_diplomacy

@(IJW) Actually, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan involved 80-100k troops, and caught the West by surprise. And also interestingly, their position was completely undermined by "a few thousand hand held" anti-air launchers. But anti-tank weapons aren't the worst that could have happened: EU or NATO members could easily have deployed tripwire forces into Ukraine in the time this has taken. They could have made ultimatums. I just don't see a wargame like this ever being signed off by Russian military leadership. And the oligarchs don't want embargos, ...

@RedBox People are over correcting for the latest White House releases.

@(SteadyasaRock) "These people then pull out some magical number for how many men it takes one country to militarily occupy X number of people." Clearly a sideswipe at me. I think you're assuming it's an arbitrary and irrelevant number because you've never participated in organising the occupation of a city, or briefing commanders on the resources required to occupy an area. I have, so I know how these things tend to go. There are some things that every single military in every single military operation do when they take over an area in a hostile loca...

@KnowName That's right, which is why I rate the chance of a "technical" resolution as about x4 higher than an "actual" invasion. I can see the UNSC acknowledging minor incursions or some kind of firefight as an invasion, and the chances of a small scale gun battle is substantially higher than a full invasion, right? This question is in some ways measuring the likelihood of the US and a supporter (UK?) overstating an incident on Ukraine's border.