At this rate, Russia will end up with a much higher (nominal!) GDP than the average forecaster here expects, it's expensive and difficult for Russian companies to convert rubles to dollars, meanwhile commodity prices remain high, so ruble continues to rise until and unless the CBR steps in.

Just a quick comment here that I think it will almost certainly happen (85% now).

If it doesn't, it will have literally been the biggest and most expensive military bluff in world history. One which will have accomplished nothing except cratering Russia's international credibility (at this point, NATO will be correct to regard it all bark and no bite) and bleeding out its markets.

This is a pretty meaningless question. Ukrainian KIA substantially more so than Russian (for which at least a systemic social media counting project exists at Media.Zona) are a black box whose contents can only be guessed at by things like looking at war memorials in various cities and comparing them to their respective populations. These methods coupled with other statistical-anecdotal data (e.g. Mylvanov's comments from a couple of months ago that 7% of the KSE's alumnae have died; opinion polls asking whether "close ones" died, in high teens as of a c...

OK, first major piece of "Russia Bull" news since a long time now. Latest Ukraine casualties poll suggests rate of attrition has actually picked up dramatically since last February - "Bakhmut meatgrinder for Ukrainians" trope might not have been purely Z propaganda. https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1674435447748001792 If accurate and can be extrapolated to the current Ukrainian offensive, it suggests its prospects are low and that if Ukraine is interested in another counter-offensive after this one, mobilization would need to get very coercive...

Adjusted back down to near average prediction; Surovikin did a very good job, if an unappreciated one. The Ukrainians are losing too much armor and the alternative of using infantry sappers is extremely costly. The poll I cited earlier suggested losses were always running high and as such are probably running unsustainably high now. At this point probably the best thing the Ukrainians can do is pause the offensive, lick their wounds, and wait for further Western weapons deliveries (and hope the Russians are lulled into a false sense of complacency in t...

Probably a much more interesting question now is whether Putin will be in power EOY 2024. (March 2024 is when the next Presidential elections happen).

FWIW, the LNR comms specialist Murz, consistently one of the best predictors of the conflict from the Russian side, is now thoroughly doompilled, having now resigned himself to what he sees as the basic inevitability of "catastrophe" https://t.me/wehearfromyanina/1976 , with the main hopes laid on merely containing the "most audacious [Ukrainian] tentacles" (so, presumably, hoping that that the pre-22/2/22 territories remain secured, but expressing little confidence in it); and so far as further out perspectives are concerned, is thinking about how to re...

@2e10e122 I think there's a pretty high chance of a war between the US and China, peaking right around the mid-2020s to early 2030s (afterwards, the naval balance of power will shift far too much against the US for it to continue to seriously contemplate containing China).

However, I think it is exceedingly unlikely that 10 million people or even 1 million people will be killed during a predominantly aeronaval war between China and the US, so the consensus estimate of around 15% seems right.

@KnowName

I would strongly agree with this. Let's rerun this question with a more relevant resolution date of, say, 2040.

It's not implausible that this happens in the event of a total defeat and color revolution. However, the main problem facing this scenario is that the actually prosperous regions that can feasibly go it alone have a lot of Russians (e.g. 40% in Tatarstan, which is landlocked to boot, but otherwise is probably the best placed region to be its own independent state), or have very few Russians but are extremely poor and depend on transfers for 80-85% (sic!) of their local budget (this describes DICh, aka Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya; and Tuva), or are jus...

So my original prediction obviously needs to be updated in light of 2022 developments. There's two main scenarios. https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1593276694835740676 (1) In what is the likeliest one (~70%), the frontlines basically freeze now, assuming that Russia can get a war economy going at least to some basic extent. Eventual outcome is a Pyrrhic victory (assumes Russia holds the Crimean Corridor). In this case, Putin wins the elections in 2024 (unhappiness with how the war went dampened by the fact of wartime solidarity itself), a cease...

@Joker Imagine Russia as the Union and Ukraine as the Confederacy. Free population and industrial production ratios are not actually that far off. The South is much more ideologically committed. However, unlike in the historical US Civil War, in this alternate one, the UK and France are financially subsidizing the Confederacy to a practically unlimited extent and supplying it with munitions and materiel through an allied Mexico.

I think there's something of a disjoint between this question (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10745/russian-control-of-new-territory-2024-01-01/) where 52% believe Russia will not control any territories outside Crimea & LDNR on Jan 1, 2024, and this question where 15% believe Russia will not control Sevastopol by that date (recently up from 10%). Logic here: https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1593307981566955522 TLDR, Crimea is more defensible than than the Crimean Corridor, but will be much harder to supply. There also be extreme morale i...

I'll be surprised if there's an Antarctica level human presence on Mars by 2075.

Good question, thanks Emil, will be interested to see how/if Metaculus predictions differ from those of my Twitter followers. https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/13284326…

Updating to community average in light of recent events surrounding Prigozhin's threat of mutiny. Short of this being a hamfisted deception operation (which threatens and demoralizes your own soldiers), there's no way this doesn't reflect badly on Russian combat power.

Thread: https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1654…

Media.Zona currently has 20k: https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng They estimate they get half of Russian KIA. +10k from the LDNR who they do not count. So probably something like 50k now. As such, 50k is basically a certainty, but 100k is largely contingent on a series of disasters for Russia (e.g. a collapse of the southern front in the coming Ukrainian summer offensive, if it happens, and/or a failed large-scale Russian offensive later in the year). Or Media.Zona's estimates are of its own accuracy are very wrong, but I don't think ...

Much depends on the evolution of elite positions. As I have always said, the mass of the population is always an amorphous bloc of NPCs with no deeply held values or convictions of their own, who tend to drift towards elite opinion as relayed through mass media. One illustration of this is that in terms of the trans question (esp. as applied to children), and LGBT (rainbow is de facto second official US flag if their foreign embassies are anything to go by), the US is *relatively* much more "progressive" in its attitudes than on women (e.g. on women <a h...

Updating this to being a coin flip. Large Ukrainian successes on Day 1 of what's widely considered just a diversionary attack in the Bakhmut area is bearish for Russia's prospects and accumulates on the ongoing factional struggle between Wagner and MOD (which I now regard as being preparatory legwork for assign blame to Shoigu/Gerasimov for the failure of the SMO and wash Putin's hands off of it).

@akarlin I wrote a more substantive post on why this is likely at my Substack.