If Russia's current strategy does not work, it would be idiotic for it to keep its current strategy, so it will adapt.
This gave me an interesting thought. Either Putin thinks retreating is deadly for him or not. If he does he will keep sending more forces to be steadily destroyed. If he doesn't retaking Crimea wouldn't trigger nuclear response by default as he will hope to conquer it again later.
I'm so confused. So the endgame you would like is that Russia nukes Ukraine, but Ukraine keeps fighting Russia (who has nukes, and is willing to use them). Does this keep going until there is no Ukranian left to fight, at which point the US just sends drones to Ukraine to keep fighting? Are Ukranians more willing to die for their country than Japan was in 1945?
As I said in the comment above the perfect endgame is Putin no longer in power. But the price is artificially prolonging the conflict or increased nuclear risk in Ukraine. Which is why I said prolonging the conflict looks like a better option.
As for Ukrainians there are reasons to believe they're much more willing to die than Japanese in 1945. Anecdotes first. I asked a Ukrainian yesterday what should Ukraine do if nuked. She said obviously keep fighting. I know more than one person who donated significant amounts of money to the army. A vibe I'm getting from many is victory at any cost. Ironically once I had difficulty convincing one Ukrainian why NATO can't be more involved.
Polls say that only around 10% of Ukrainians think that Ukraine should hold peace talks with Russia. Even after conventional rocket showers 80+% say that Ukraine should keep fighting. Also Ukraine would in a different situation than Japan. If Putin orders a nuclear strike it would mean Ukraine is otherwise winning. So morale would be super-high among Ukrainians. Unlike losing Japan in 1945.
Another thing to consider is that the first use of nuclear weapons was a shock to everyone. Many Ukrainians understand the fact that they can be nuked. Though about 2/3 (according to another poll) still don't believe Russia is capable of actually ordering a nuclear strike.
If you think about it Mariupol could be even worse than a nuclear explosion. Tens of thousands dead but waiting for their fate for many weeks without much water and food, hiding from bombs, seeing familiar faces lying dead on the streets, constantly being in terror. This didn't stop Ukrainians.
There is a lesswrong post that describes a subtle way Russia destroys lives of its own people. Ukrainians understand it too well now and some are just plainly saying that they would rather die than live under Russian rule.
Seeing a mushroom cloud can easily change public opinion but it's far from obvious that Ukraine would just give up.
So Putin "wins", and therefore decides to nuke Europe to celebrate?
Well, the obvious historical analogy is there. And if you plot size (by some appropriate metric) of the wars Putin was involved in so far my guess is there would be something resembling an exponential curve.
In December 2021 Putin openly demanded that NATO returns all former Soviet republics to Russia. The legalese was very thinly veiled (removing all NATO forces from those countries). The implied threat was "or else I invade Ukraine". NATO hadn't budged. Putin went on to invade Ukraine. If one takes Putin's words seriously one should treat this as an open declaration of his plans to get all former Soviet republics under his rule.
Sure, it's biased. The point mostly was that my personal experience confirms the reasons why the polls cited in the original post are even more biased.
The idea that Putin would just accept Crimea as being Ukrainian without planning another attack to take it back seems strange to me.
He won't. I don't even know if retaking Crimea is a wise strategy. Ukrainian military may well decide to not proceed to Crimea because of nuclear risk. My point was that any attempt at peace without Putin giving up something of value would play directly into his hands.
If Putin "doesn't care that much" about sanctions, isn't it pretty stupid that the West is shooting themselves in the foot, and the developing world in the face, by still applying heavy sanctions?
Sanctions turned out to be pretty underwhelming. And surely, one can easily see that the portfolio of sanctions could be much more effective. Personally I think some sanctions are needed but much better thought through.
Maybe not, but better than not trying at all.
If you mean something like we tell Putin "If you do the referendum with the UN supervision and allow pro-Ukrainian people in Crimea to freely and publicly debate with pro-Russian people, then we would recognize Crimea as Russian if and only if after long debates people in Crimea still decide to be in Russia". Then yeah, sure. Everybody would laugh themselves to death. But at least there's no downside. On the other hand, if you mean something like stopping fighting after Putin promises to do a fair referendum you would just significantly increase chances of Ukraine ceasing to exist.
Even a long dragged out war doesn't stop Russia from showing up again, with more firepower, in the future.
But that's the whole point. A dragged out war steadily destroys Russian firepower and manpower. At the same time every Ukrainian child hit by a rocket makes the US send more firepower to Ukraine. Which acts as a counterbalance to the fundamental asymmetry between Russia and Ukraine. If you stop the fighting Russia will stop losing its army and Ukraine will get much less military aid.
But saying "I hope everything keeps going like it is going" is magical thinking - the war will end, and I think it makes more sense to reason about the end-state than to pretend it can keep going like this forever.
Let's consider some strategies the US can use.
Just support Ukraine. At some point Ukraine probably goes "too far" and nukes may be used in Ukraine. At this point the US can either engage directly, continue support Ukraine or negotiate some kind of a deal for Ukraine. The first may start WW3. A deal would mean Putin wins. Continuing to support Ukraine would mean millions more dead. But it would be contained to Ukraine and Russia. And let's say Putin would have payed his cost for invading Ukraine. If Ukraine doesn't accept defeat after being nuked it would be the best deterrent to future uses of nuclear weapons since they don't achieve the desired outcome of quick victory.
Calibrate military aid to make sure neither Ukraine nor Russia win. In theory you can prolong the war until either Putin dies or internal politics in Russia destabilizes after a couple million coffins are sent back from Ukraine. The obvious problem is that you can't control how the war works precisely. Maybe you can ask Ukrainians to slow down a bit from time to time.
Make a peace deal. Putin repeats after a couple of years and wins.
As I said before if Putin wins chances of WW3 become too high.
Optimal strategies are either steady support no matter what (including nukes) or calibrated aid. I'm really anxious because I think the current policy is steady support but with direct engagement in case of nukes. I'm also afraid that fans of a peace deal prevail and we'll still get a WW3, just a bit later.
I mean we can talk about unrealistic scenarios. You could easily solve the whole crisis by admitting Ukraine to NATO overnight with a condition that it recognizes 5 already annexed regions as Russian. But then again, unrealistic.
Putin already showed willingness to increase number of people fighting. Russia lacks time to train them. Given enough time it would train them much better. There's no major obstacles to an another round of mobilization. Also number of active soldiers in Russian army is more than a million. Only ~200K of them were used in the invasion. Russian economy is going strong (just -3% this year according to IMF). Only ~5% of Russian GDP is spent on military this year. Usually it spent around 4% of its GDP. You know, looking at those numbers I start to question even more where this whole narrative of "Russia is losing, don't corner Putin" is coming from.
In comparison Ukraine lost more than a third of its GDP and spends almost half of the remaining part on the military.
(a) There's nothing valuable Putin would willingly give in exchange for repealing sanctions. He doesn't care that much. And potential marginal increase in Putin's support doesn't matter either. The goal of sanctions is not to incentivize regime change. The goal is to make it a bit more difficult for him to wage the war.
Asylum and financial rewards for defecting Russian soldiers were announced by Ukraine in the beginning of the invasion. But I don't know how well it works in practice.
(b) Putin will never allow an election or a referendum that he doesn't control.
(c) Russian constitution now says Donetsk and Luhansk are parts of Russia.
(d) This is something that may end up as the solution the US chooses, maybe after the next presidential election. The problem is it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Which is how Ukraine will protect itself against the next much bigger invasion. The amount of military equipment Ukraine currently receives is inadequate for the next invasion. So if you want to ask Ukraine to stop its counteroffensive without allowing Putin to do what he wants you would need to give Ukraine much more equipment. Hundreds of billions dollar worth of weapons. Instead of $40+B it received so far. But then what is there to stop Ukraine from retaking Crimea anyway.
That's why I say that the best we can hope for is that the war goes on without any side having a decisive victory. That way Russian army will hopefully lose soldiers and equipment as fast as they are mobilized and Ukraine can protect itself with just around $50B worth of weapons per year.
The idea that if Ukraine only manages to retake all its former territory that means it's safe from future attacks from Russia is faulty especially if there's a lot of resistance in Crimea to Ukrainian rule.
The idea that if Ukraine make a peace deal with Russia means it's safe from future attacks from Russia is even more faulty. In fact Ukraine made a peace deal with Russia in 2015. And I'm not even talking about Budapest Memorandum.
I think if you believe that the borders of Ukraine don't matter and what matters is nuclear risk, then it's useful to be able to make a peace deal that does not back Putin into a corner where using nuclear weapons is the only thing that might keep him in power.
Borders don't matter in and of themselves. But they matter to Putin. Somewhat. Therefore they can be used as a tool to prevent him from being encouraged to continue his conquest.
I don't see better options. What would you suggest?
It's pretty hard to disincentivise anyone to fight. Ukrainian population wouldn't accept defeat. Putin can't either. Both will fight regardless of whether they see themselves prevailing eventually. It's worth noting that Putin probably cornered himself by formally annexing more territories on purpose.
One would think that maybe we can make some kind of a peace deal. Maybe Ukraine recognizes Crimea as Russian in exchange for stopping hostilities? The problem is it's not the first time. The first time was in 2014. No one responded to the annexation of Crimea. Just a couple of months later Russian agents start a war in Donbass. Then in 2015 there was a peace deal freezing the conflict. Everyone in the West was afraid of supporting Ukraine in retaking Donbass. They thought it might provoke Putin. Which gave him time to prepare for a full scale invasion. If there's another peace deal now Russian army would most likely use the next few years to recruit and train more soldiers and produce more weapons. And boom, a bigger invasion.
It may sound counterintuitive but my intuition says that the best we can hope for is this war never ending without any side having a decisive victory.
One of the underlying assumptions here of course is that letting Russia to just grab land is bad. It's hard to estimate probability of WW3 through the same mechanism as WW2. But probably not low enough to just let Russia do what it wants.
I've talked to a number of people living in Crimea over the years. Some were pro-Russian, some were pro-Ukrainian, some undecided. Here are some observations.
People weren't particularly afraid of Ukraine. But since 2014 literally everyone is afraid to say openly anything that's not supportive of Russia. Fear is everywhere. So much for accurate polling data. Since February 2022 people became much more afraid of Russia. I talked to people who fled Crimea after the announcement of mobilization. They were in panic.
Since 2014 a lot of people left Crimea. Instead a lot of Russians moved to Crimea. People living in Crimea now and Crimean people in 2014 are two completely different sets of people. It feels like one third of people in Crimea are from Russia now.
I know people who were born in Crimea and still were forced to go through a lengthy, complicated and humiliating procedure of proving they are Crimean enough to be allowed to live in Crimea. I know a person who went through an unnecessarily humiliating questioning by Russian FSB for no other reason than going from Crimea to Kyiv.
Now more general thoughts.
One doesn't have to be an expert to see which side caused more death. Mariupol. All war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine pale in comparison to an entire city leveled to the ground. While people were still there.
All that said nothing I said above or you said in your post matters. Nuclear risk and global security matter. I understand why in politics you have to first prove someone's not a good guy before suggesting to stop helping. I did not expect to hear something like this here. I just don't see how the conclusion you're making follows from the statements you make in the post even if all of them are true.
For some reason public discourse in the Western countries gravitates towards either "let's stop helping Ukraine" with weak justifications like "will of the Crimean people" and "Ukrainians aren't saints too" or going all in up to directly fighting Russian army on the ground. I think policy of helping Ukraine but not engaging Russian army directly (basically just sticking to what's already being done) is superior to either extreme.
You just have to twist my words and make such an offensive response, don't you? To restate - the siege of Mariupol didn't stop Ukraine from defending Ukraine.
We're afraid he may start a nuclear war. That's pretty bad already. And he clearly gets worse with time. Yet you want to give him an opportunity to build a bigger army. To eventually give it to a successor who you think will be even worse.
Actions speak. I know Ukrainians who were hiding from military enlistment officers for years in relatively peaceful years. I tried to give them advice how to hide from mobilization during the invasion. But they just stopped hiding.
I shared both strong and weak evidence. I didn't initially think that it's gonna be a debate... If I treated this like a debate I could say something like: "Putin never said that he's gonna use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. On the contrary, he said he's not going to use nukes in Ukraine. Therefore there's nothing to worry about." But I'm not saying it.
Look, the point is Putin lied so many times about not being involved in Ukraine. He lied about not intending to start a full scale invasion. Any proposed solution that relies on him promising to not invade again has very low probability of working.