Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Barrister]

Ukrainian government says 550 Canadians already serving in their international brigade.  Sources in Canada say at least 1,000 have volunteered.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/exclusive-so-many-canadian-fighters-in-ukraine-they-have-their-own-battalion-source-says

[The Brain]

If Ukraine is forced to make peace on condition of not joining NATO they can just join NATO anyway. What's Russia gonna do? Invade Ukraine?

[mongers]

If I was Ukrainian, my worry about formalising neutrality would be that it is impossible to trust Russia. Being formally neutral would just set Ukraine up for either to Putin to find a new excuse a few years down the line, or for one of his successors to come crashing in at some point.

In that scenario the only logical position would be for Ukraine to be armed with nuclear weapons to deter Putin, which I'd support them getting.

[Berkut]

I am also very concerned about the idea of recognizing those "breakaway" regions as Russian.

That sets a dangerous precedent for more of Ukarine finding itself suddenly majority "Russian" not to mention the Baltics.

[Barrister]

It's like saying that Japan attacking the USA was not rational. OK. Yeah, it was not in the context of "Should Japan go to war with the United States over control over the Pacific Asian sphere?". The rational answer is obviously "Well, no. There is no way that is going to work".

Russia attacking Ukraine is rational the same way Japan attacking Pearl Harbour was rational.  They were calculated high-risk, high-reward moves when time was running out.

In 1941 Japan had been under sanctions for awhile and was running out of resources.  So Japan took the risk of attacking the east indies and hitting the US fleet.  They gambled.

Attacking Ukraine was a gamble by Putin.  He knew there was a risk of something like this happening, but he felt the odds were low and the upside was huge.

Being willing to take risks doesn't make him not rational though.

Coming back to nukes and chemical weapons.  Obviously there are risks to using both, but could Putin see the reward as outweighing the risks?  I think the answer is no to nukes, and maybe to chemical weapons.


(short of direct NATO attacks on Russia)

[Berkut]

It's like saying that Japan attacking the USA was not rational. OK. Yeah, it was not in the context of "Should Japan go to war with the United States over control over the Pacific Asian sphere?". The rational answer is obviously "Well, no. There is no way that is going to work".

Russia attacking Ukraine is rational the same way Japan attacking Pearl Harbour was rational.  They were calculated high-risk, high-reward moves when time was running out.

In 1941 Japan had been under sanctions for awhile and was running out of resources.  So Japan took the risk of attacking the east indies and hitting the US fleet.  They gambled.

Attacking Ukraine was a gamble by Putin.  He knew there was a risk of something like this happening, but he felt the odds were low and the upside was huge.

Being willing to take risks doesn't make him not rational though.

Coming back to nukes and chemical weapons.  Obviously there are risks to using both, but could Putin see the reward as outweighing the risks?  I think the answer is no to nukes, and maybe to chemical weapons.


(short of direct NATO attacks on Russia)

I actually disagree on Japan on the even of Pearl Harbor. That was not a high risk gamble, that was just plain stupid.

I don't think anyone who was being rational, even in Japan, had any illusions about how it would end. It was not a bunch of rational actors taking a chance on the hopes of pulling an inside straight. Rather it was a *system* that was no longer capable of making rational (even risky but rational) decisions. Nobody with actual power had the ability to step back, not matter how irrational stepping forward was, so they just kept on stepping forward.

This is what I mean by statements of the form "We should not worry about 'X' because the people making decisions would never be so irrational as to choose 'X'!"

There are just too many examples of people choosing to do stuff that everyone thought was totally irrational BEFORE they chose it, and then post hoc came up with all the reasons why it turned out to be "rational" after all (if just risky!).

We literally just went through this, with people stating that this was all a bluff by Putin, because actually invading would just be, well, stupid and does not make any sense. They were right. It was stupid, and did not make any sense. There are people in this very thread making *exactly* the same argument you are making right now.

It did not magically go from "That makes no damn sense!" to "Oh, that makes sense, it is was just a gamble!" because it actually happened.

[Berkut]

And I will point out that weeks ago, when in fact we were having exactly this discussion about how irrational actually attacking Ukraine would be, I argued that irrational or not, these kinds of things have a momentum of their own once they get started, and often end in chaos and destruction because nobody can figure out how to stop once you start. In that case, it was how to stop the saber rattling and bluffing and threats.

And I was right. None of this makes any fucking sense, even from Putins perspective, except as a bunch of steps, each of which is in and of themselves not terribly irrational, but leads to a completely ridiculous and irrational outcome (invasion of Ukraine).

[Barrister]

I wasn't posting here in the lead up so you'll just have to trust me that I always thought it possible Russia would invade.  I mean US intelligence was telling us exactly that for weeks.

[DGuller]

I'm not even convinced that Ukraine War was a bluff that Putin was trapped into acting on.  From the first US warning I thought that it was an actual war planned on, and that accepting diplomatic capitulation to prevent the war was a palatable compromise for Putin rather than the main goal.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Japan attacking Pearl Harbor isn't quite as irrational as it is made out to be. Time and time again in its ascent, Imperial Japan had come to an inflection point with a larger power largely perceived to be able to handle Japan, and both times the other power had largely gone down like a paper tiger. First Tsarist Russia, and later Imperial China, now most foreign observers thought China's military was less modernized and lower quality than Japan's, but it was massively larger and Japan was not credibly assumed to just be able to whip China's ass. Instead, they did. The Chinese had serious morale problems too.

Japan's decision makers at some level probably understood the basic math of large-scale war with the United States; they simply gambled that America would fold like Russia and China mostly had previously. [Part of Japan's mistake was also not understanding that they may have had China on its heels but it was nowhere near knocked out, and was eventually going to come back with such manpower it was going to be in a real unwinnable land war regardless of what the U.S. did.] Japan's perception was also that a pliant United States would secure all their wins in China, by turning back on the oil spigot and ending American lease aid for the Chinese.

[The Brain]

Putin was aiming for war against Ukraine. He expected the war to end in a clear Russian victory within 48h. It didn't, because Russia is a dysfunctional hellhole.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the West, rightly or wrongly, chose to engage with Russia. This strategy was obviously a failure. Hopefully the West will establish a cordon sanitaire around Russia and let it stew in its own suck. A generation from now bleeding heart young'uns in the West will likely relax this, and the Russian cycle of violence will erupt again. That's their mistake to make.

[grumbler]

I actually disagree on Japan on the even of Pearl Harbor. That was not a high risk gamble, that was just plain stupid.

I don't think anyone who was being rational, even in Japan, had any illusions about how it would end. It was not a bunch of rational actors taking a chance on the hopes of pulling an inside straight. Rather it was a *system* that was no longer capable of making rational (even risky but rational) decisions. Nobody with actual power had the ability to step back, not matter how irrational stepping forward was, so they just kept on stepping forward.

Yes.  It was a shame-based culture that demanded that one show no weakness before peers.  Everyone wanted someone else to have the courage to reveal that the emperor had no clothes.  The government ran a war exercise in the Spring of 1941 that conclusively showed that Japan would start on the road to defeat on the day war began.

The exact same thing happened during the conferences on surrender, except that some of the leaders without power to make the decision to surrender were vocal in their desire to accept surrender.  Those with the power knew that fighting on risked the very survival of the Japanese as a people, but couldn't bring themselves to make what they thought would be a sacrifice of personal honor.

"Rational" had nothing to do with either decision.  One could make the argument that rationalization, not rationality, drives most human behavior.

[FunkMonk]

This invasion was completely rational from Putin's point of view. Putin has been racking up all the Ws since the invasion of Georgia and the West has by and large ignored his provocations and failed to meaningfully retaliate. We showed we were weak and divided and that we wouldn't do shit. He likely calculated that the West would barely lift a finger after he swooped into Kyiv with VDV and forced a Ukrainian capitulation within hours of hostilities commencing. His main error was in thinking Ukraine would surrender quickly.

[Sheilbh]

I'm not even convinced that Ukraine War was a bluff that Putin was trapped into acting on.  From the first US warning I thought that it was an actual war planned on, and that accepting diplomatic capitulation to prevent the war was a palatable compromise for Putin rather than the main goal.

It is entirely his choice - and I think it was his personally not a regime decision. My take as I've said before is that his assumptions were wrong and he profoundly miscalculated. But that's not necessarily the same as irrational.

[The Brain]

I don't think Putin is irrational. He's just Russian.