Some of the comments on the link by James_Miller exactly six months ago provided very specific estimates of how the events might turn out:
James_Miller:
- The odds of Russian intervening militarily = 40%.
- The odds of the Russians losing the conventional battle (perhaps because of NATO intervention) conditional on them entering = 30%.
- The odds of the Russians resorting to nuclear weapons conditional on them losing the conventional battle = 20%.
Me:
"Russians intervening militarily" could be anything from posturing to weapon shipments to a surgical strike to a Czechoslovakia-style tank-roll or Afghanistan invasion. My guess that the odds of the latter is below 5%.
A bet between James_Miller and solipsist:
I will bet you $20 U.S. (mine) vs $100 (yours) that Russian tanks will be involved in combat in the Ukraine within 60 days. So in 60 days I will pay you $20 if I lose the bet, but you pay me $100 if I win.
While it is hard to do any meaningful calibration based on a single event, there must be lessons to learn from it. Given that Russian armored columns are said to capture key Ukrainian towns today, the first part of James_Miller's prediction has come true, even if it took 3 times longer than he estimated.
Note that even the most pessimistic person in that conversation (James) was probably too optimistic. My estimate of 5% appears way too low in retrospect, and I would probably bump it to 50% for a similar event in the future.
Now, given that the first prediction came true, how would one reevaluate the odds of the two further escalations he listed? I still feel that there is no way there will be a "conventional battle" between Russia and NATO, but having just been proven wrong makes me doubt my assumptions. If anything, maybe I should give more weight to what James_Miller (or at least Dan Carlin) has to say on the issue. And if I had any skin in the game, I would probably be even more cautious.
We live in a world where might makes right. This said, I was mentioning the fact that the annexed populations are ethnic Russians presumibly willing to join Russia as evidence for the hypothesis that Putin is probably not going to try and reconquer former Soviet Union.
Yes, I know that Hitler also started by annexing Germanophones and then went for a full scale conquest of all Europe, but I think that Putin is unlikely to pull something like that:
Should Russia attack a NATO/EU country, it would at the very least be financially crippled by loss of trade with Western European countries, the conflict would likely excalate to a full scale conventional war with the US, which would have a very real chance of further excalating to a nuclear war. Putin may not be exactly a nice guy, but, unlike Hitler, he doesn't seem to be crazy.
Also, even if he was crazy, Russia, while not being exactly a paragon of democracy, is not a dictatorship. The people who keep him in power would depose him if they saw him as a threat to their material interests and safety.
> evidence for the hypothesis that Putin is probably not going to Well, that's a load off my mind! For a second there I thought he was rebuilding an empire using completely transparent Soviet-era pretexts in small enough steps that the West is unable to overcome its paralysis. Look, it's very simple. Putin is a predator, and Europe would rather have warm homes in winter than stand on principle. That is their right of course, but let us call a spade a spade. > is not a dictatorship If Putin's Russia is not a dictatorship, there are no dictatorships on Earth.