Does anyone know of a reliable source for data on ceasefire violations? I’d also like to know their severity if possible, i.e., fatalities.

IIRC the Russian invasion of Georgia followed an uptick in ceasefire violations between the Georgian military and separatists. The Georgians realized that the separatists had suddenly been replaced with Russian regulars and that was that.

I think this is way too high. I’m at 4%. Russia has mobilized 300k and will probably have another wave in 2023. Conscripts may not be too useful in an offensive but they can sure blunt an assault. Crimea was considered Russian before the invasion. If anything is a nonnegotiable for Russia in this war, it’s Crimea. The best case I can make for Crimea being lost is that Ukraine severs supply lines. But note that if Ukraine invades Crimea they’ll be susceptible to the same supply line vulnerabilities. I expect Ukraine to continue to make progress, bu...

@(EvanHarper) I think that's possible. But after watching the speech, I would be surprised if recognition of the republics allowed Putin to sell a story about securing Russia. He said Ukraine could develop atomic weapons -- it doesn't get more, 'your country is a potential existential threat to mine' than that. What I think is more likely is that this opens the door to sending Russian peacekeepers to the republics to end the "bloodbath" / "genocide". They are attacked (which may not even be staged!) and they must defend themselves by neutralizing the U...

@(nostradamnedus) I see two stories that conform to the relatively nonplussed nature of the Ukrainian leadership. 1. They believe that war is less likely than do the USA or Britain. 2. They think it’s likelier than they are letting on but think it tempts war to say so. I think the second option is reasonable. If Ukraine admitted an invasion was likely, the question becomes, well, what are you doing about it? Then there’s pressure for Ukraine to deploy more of its military to the border. I think this makes war likelier if Russia is looking for pla...

@fewerlacunae in response to this information I updated my prediction from 33% to 26% to be more in line with the Supers.

Do we have a set of questions from GJP and Metaculus so we can compare the performance of the two communities on the same questions? Would help me understand if I updated too much or too little.

This is tough for me, because I think China has every reason to support Russia militarily, but no reason to mention it publicly. If I was China I’d take this opportunity to empty the Wests stocks so they’ll be less keen or able to intervene in Taiwan.

@andreferretti Same. I think this is a case of my brain picking up on the change of risk more than its absolute level. Frogs in pot? I hope not.

There are reports / rumors that US officials think China is considering sending lethal aid. https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/16…

The problem is, even if China supplies lethal aid, it seems they need to publicly acknowledge it for this question to resolve positively.

If this question simplifies to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk then I think it’s too high. It seems plausible that both these cities are part of the same defensive line, and there isn’t much space between them if you look at a map, so surrounding one seems to mean surrounding the other (Russia sure isn’t fighting through both before June). The geography here appears far less favorable than in Bakhmut. Russia has a lot of ground to cover (and maybe two more well defended cities) before reaching Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Sloviansk’s northern edge is full of lakes...

I’d like a question that better tracks the overall progress of the war in Ukraine. One suggestion is to ask “what share of pre-war Ukrainian territory will Russia occupy by 2023 / 2024.” A simple, but probably inadequate way to track this would be to put common maps of the conflict: e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#/media/File%3A2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine.svg Into a tool like this that tells you what share of the photo is what color: http://www.coolphptools.com/color_extract#demo My concerns are: finding...

I wish there was a way that the two Sevastopol 2024 questions could be combined into one, and you could then look at different probabilities based on the different resolution criteria — sort of the like what is the case with many political questions or the self driving car questions. Also, in how many worlds do we seriously expect these to resolve differently conditional on there being a clear yes/ no resolution? I expect very very few. Allowing near duplicates has to spread attention more thinly across the questions. For instance, since this questio...

For me, this question is about Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The only city of 100k+ they captured after the battle of Kyiv was Sieviero-Donetsk, and this might have only been because they were going heavy on the artillery — of which they now seem in relatively shorter supply. It seems clear to me that in the next 6 months Russia will continue to focus on the Donbas. If they make any progress. It be will be there. But it seems exceptionally unlikely they’d encircle both cities (which I think would be necessary). I’m slightly under the community at 7% but thin...

After processing the comments I decided that later Cold War (1960-1990) and post 2014 seems like an appropriate reference class for current tensions. This gives 38 years. So how many of those years would have triggered a resolution to this question? If it’s 5 (air + Khasham — did news report on USSR advisors killing Americans in Vietnam?) then that’d be 13% chance in any given year for combat deaths. I’ll reduce this by 40% because it seems like NATO and Russia are trying to be careful. However this makes me go from 4% —> 8%. P.s. im not sure if all th...

4%. This seems way too high. Would this question have triggered an affirmative "yes" if it had been set for the whole cold war? If it wouldn't then -- which I doubt it would -- then why do we think that the likelihood in the next YEAR is SO much higher? Because Russia has made threats? Yes, but we don't see them acting in a way consistent with them taking big NATO facing risks. They haven't targeted weapon shipments near the border of Poland. There haven't been any deniable acts of sabotage in NATO countries. They haven't used chemical weapons in Av...

@blednotik thanks, silly mistake

@(ugandamaximum) Nice! I was looking for something like this. Roughly averaging these numbers over the cold war I get 3.4 deaths per year for air-to-air combat in non-war related combat and 181 for Korea and Vietnam years. These are probably underestimates because they're just air combat losses for the USA - USSR. It's also worth nothing that the average for 1949 - 1959 is 12.4 and 1960-1990 is 0.3 per year. So the second part of the cold war has considerably fewer incidents. I guess I'd update upwards depending on the degree to which I think cold wa...

The amount of noise about this makes me think this is likelier than it was previously. I assume US thinks it’s likelier and that updates me. Anyone think that’s wrong and the chatter is for other reasons?

https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/162923…

@jpmos note that the average prediction for when Russia will land an offensive outside of claimed oblasts has now shifted to latest possible date (end of April). https://www.metaculus.com/questions/14030/dat…

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/16411648405…

Assuming 1 to 3 (conventional) KIA to injured, that'd imply ~73k KIA. If true, and considering we're 24% of the way through the year, a naive extrapolation would be 150k by end of 2023. But on reflection, I think this heavily depends on Russia undergoing another round of mobilization -- which we don't seem to have any good questions on at the moment.