Putin's Ridiculous Crusade: How To Sabotage An Empire
The word "Putin" appears destined to become a synonym for "folly" in any decent thesaurus. His war is a case study in imperial failure. The Ukraine War is literally killing off the ruscist state.
Well, Trump is in office again, but the Ukraine War didn’t end at a snap of his greasy fingers any more than Joe Biden saved Kyiv. And despite prominent American political leaders labeling Trump a fascist threat to democracy and the Constitution, he survived to take office. So much for all the hot air about the impending end of democracy in America, at least if such a situation mandates an exceptionally strong response, as you’d think it would.
Of course, if the worst ever did come to pass, would media types or partisan leaders ever even admit it? When the history of the USA suggests a high probability of some level of national divorce? That would end their little charade for good. They could no longer profit from the epic con that has betrayed the sacrifices of so many American veterans.
Now begins a fascinating test: will America’s federal and state institutions step up to put the Executive Branch back in its place, relegating it to the role the Founders intended? Or will America’s Vichy “opposition” take every excuse to let Trump and his buddies do as they please? After all, by default they expect to have some hack of their own in office come 2028 who can abuse power the same way.
It’s a pretty dismal situation, but hey - at least American leaders aren’t Putin. They’re mostly blind fools or rank opportunists, but their power depends on legions of followers desperate for hope, not the false stability of a totalitarian regime. Nor is the collapse of America’s version of world empire in the same league as the calamity approaching the ruscist state.
While it calls itself a federation, russia is a classic empire, a wealthy core living off the spoils seized from the vulnerable periphery - ideally foreigners, but if not them, internal minorities. It must always find new victims. Lacking them, the thing turns inward and consumes itself. This is why Putin’s war won’t end until he suffers total, undeniable defeat on the ground in Ukraine.
A fantastic overview of imperial collapse by Yurii Bohdanov describes the range of possible futures. Lacking any concrete material identity, a simple imperial construct built up around linguistic affiliation like russia can’t last. You may as well try to rejoin all the English-speaking countries around the world into a New British Empire. Maybe that could have worked if the late Queen Elizabeth II had transferred her consciousness into an immortal robot body, but her successor is rather too reminiscent of Joe Biden to stand a chance of pulling it off. And let’s be honest - half of the late Queen’s appeal as a global leader was her lack of formal power; the rest was that in older age she came off to Americans as a kindly grandmother.
The Soviet Union survived the Great Patriotic War not because of ideology, but because Soviet citizens soon gained ample evidence of the genocidal intent of the Nazi invasion. This was repelled as much in spite of Moscow’s management as a result of any genius on the part of Stalin or his generals, Zhukov included. And without Lend-lease trucks, the Red Army would have stalled out long before reaching Berlin. It’s pure tragic irony that Putin lays claim to a legacy that exists solely in the collective imagination of a generation that wasn’t alive to experience the truth.
The science section of this week’s post delve a bit into the natural self-destruction of the ruscist empire. Victory in Ukraine will almost certainly result in fragmentation of the thing, which is why Joe Biden fought tooth and nail to prevent Ukraine from ever amassing the combat power required to repel the orc assault.
More on how Biden desecrated his responsibilities as leader of the free world in the geopolitics section - and after that warning to history, Biden’s omnishambles of an administration can finally be consigned to the rubbish bin. He will not be remembered well, if much at all - not even a Bob Woodward production can obscure the bitter truth. Biden was a rank political hack who failed to live up to a unique moment and squandered a once-in-a-century opportunity. He was done for the moment he tried to pretend he had the moxie to be FDR 2.0 instead of merely a pale imitation of Jimmy Carter. So much was sacrificed to that vain coward’s dream of stumbling through a second term that it’s plain criminal he can’t be prosecuted.
But before the matters of the high and mighty a look at what’s happened on the fronts in Ukraine this past week. The dynamics have not shifted much, nor are they likely to for a few months. To alter the present trajectory, Ukraine has to work out how to fully staff its infantry battalions by summer.
Quick note - once again this post won’t fall within Gmail’s limits for displaying the entire post in the Gmail client. Apologies if this is a problem, but I have grown frustrated with trying to mash together everything that deserves to be addressed in some weeks. I’ve mainly been using the limit to force myself to keep the total word count in check, but what’s actually happened is that I wind up eliminating images which my approach to analyzing developments make really helpful in getting certain points across.
I’ve decided, for now, to keep the raw text within the limit, but include all the images I want and more links to useful content. Hope that’s not a problem. Oh, and if anyone ever wondered, any image I make is released under a creative commons license - as it’s already a derivative of other published work, anyone can use my version as they please so long as the original is credited. I include a watermark (when I remember) to make it clear that I’m modifying someone else’s base map, usually DeepState, Ukraine Daily Update, Geoconfirmed, Ukraine Control Map, or Liveuamap. I don’t care about attribution, just that it’s easy to trace the lineage of a visual product.
2025, Week 3: Overview of the Fronts
Moscow’s winter campaign continues to plod on, offering no real surprises. On most fronts Ukraine is holding remarkably well considering serious infantry shortages. The one exception is the space between Velyka Novosilka and Pokrovsk, where the Khortysia Operational Group (I think that’s still the one) continues to struggle. It’s useful to compare how Ukrainian defensive operations in Kursk and this region are unfolding.
I feel obligated to call out this excellent deep review by Ukrainska Pravda that came out yesterday. When I read it this morning, my first thought was finally!
It’s essentially a brief summary of my own overview for this week, though I had nothing to do with it. Not being a journalist, I don’t mind being “scooped” and very mych appreciate seeing analysis that attempts to offer a holistic assessment of the situation. I write this blog in the hope of in some tiny way helping Ukraine actually win this war - or at least suffer fewer casualties during the fight. That’s the sort of thing science is supposed to be used for, and I studied a fair few relevant fields in a systematic way for a long time. Integrating the insights in a way readers can understand is a challenge, but it needs to be done. There’s worse policy analysis out there, that’s for sure.
My assessment going back to 2021 has been that lack of a truly scientific understanding of the Ukraine conflict is one of the root causes of the entire tragedy spiraling out of control. More people have to be able to comprehend the reality of violent conflict in its totality to identify solutions that can actually stick. Most media outlets and writers publish to build an audience by any means necessary; this is the business, I get it. But by my nature I prefer to harness business potential to achieve public policy objectives - not to claim any moral high ground, but because everyone can benefit when systems they depend on are as stable and fair as possible.
Change is inevitable and healthy, but comes and goes in its own time. Between moments of change come - hopefully - longer periods of at least relative stability. In a global sense, one of these has recently ended thanks to egregious leadership failures. Now is when people have to take hard stands on principle and endure the consequences.
Coming back to the Ukraine War specifically, it’s always important to remember that there’s no single story to be told about the thing. Every soldier’s experience is their own, and each sector tells its own tales. On some fronts, Ukraine’s forces beat the odds time and again. Others see disorganization lead to ongoing losses of territory and people.
This is why I have always broken these weekly overviews up by front. Though the contours shift, overall the pattern remains the same: different commands in different places wage distinct fights, though all remain linked at higher levels by scarce shared resources that Kyiv must carefully decide where to commit. This choice drives ground-level choices that express in the relative rate of enemy advances.
Moscow launches between one and two hundred separate ground attacks every day, ranging in size from a single assault team to an entire mechanized battalion. These are spread across a couple thousand kilometers of front, with certain areas receiving greater attention. Everywhere Ukraine is inflicting intense damage. However, the balance of combat power - a function both of raw resources and how well they are used on a given front - leads to starkly different rates of territorial loss. In most places, it’s actually zero.
Northern Theater
In Kharkiv, both sides continue to probe and raid between Lyptsi and Vovchansk, but the lines aren’t shifting much. Several Ukrainian officers responsible for organizing the defense of this area back in May of 2024 have been arrested, allegedly for failing to hold the orcs back at the border.
I frankly doubt that this was possible or wise, as defensive fortifications are never impenetrable, especially when waves of glide bombs can rain down with little notice. Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv last spring still didn’t have proper air defenses because of insufficient allied supplies nor could they fire at ruscist logistics centers over the international border thanks to the Biden Administration. It’s terrible that Vovchansk was annihilated - the place, like so much of Ukraine, looked a lot like towns in Oregon, so I strongly sympathize - but I sincerely doubt that holding the orcs at the border at the cost of potentially thousands of lives was worth it, even to preserve the town once mostly evacuated.
Fortifications are important, but only a means to an end. To function, they must always be present in depth, which in this war means several belts to a depth of twenty kilometers. A 5-10km buffer along the border, in which Vovchansk tragically lies, is always going to be vulnerable to a determined orc wave. The Ukrainian officers under investigation might well be corrupt or inept, but I doubt very much that the fighting in Kharkiv could have gone much better.
One of the many reasons why the Kursk Campaign made so much sense and had such a tremendous strategic impact was that it hit the orcs where they were weak instead of trying to match their strength directly. Putin is so terrified of any visible defeat that there was little chance of him encouraging Ukrainian troops to push too far towards Kursk before launching a proper counteroffensive. This allowed the Ukrainian command team here to seize a perimeter that could be defended, while sending advance teams to engage ruscist reinforcements as they arrived, before they could properly mass and prepare.
As far as the situation in Kursk goes, needless to say Ukraine was not ejected by Trump’s inauguration, contrary to Putin’s supposed orders. I have to hand it to the grouping responsible for the Kursk front - I had forecast the lines to be much closer to Sudzha by now. Ukraine swiftly withdrawing after Trump’s inauguration to make a show of being open to honest negotiations is possible, but less likely than if the writing was on the wall for Free Kursk.
Over the past week it seems that the pace of orc attacks in Kursk has dropped off somewhat, potentially a result of extreme casualties suffered by the North Korean contingent. At least a third out of a reported twelve thousand or so have been killed or at the very least badly injured, which in conventional terms suggests the North Korean division is close to combat-ineffective. Doesn’t mean the survivors won’t be shoved back in for another round, though.
Reportedly, as soldiers they’re a lot more professional and disciplined than the average orc. They’re apparently surprisingly good at shooting down drones, though the tactic of using one member of a fire team as bait is mostly a bust. Drone operators simply look for and target the nearby shooters - even fiber-optic drones are still a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than a soldier. And North Korea’s commanders are apparently blazing idiots, thankfully. Given the skill of the average South Korean real time strategy game player on the server I used to log into years ago, I have to assume that they haven’t developed a working knockoff up in the North.
This is probably an obscure reference to most, but when you’re playing StarCraft against a Terran (Ukraine), the least effective Zerg (russia/North Korea) tactic is usually sending in wave after wave of cheap units. An unprepared Protoss (NATO) player will go down to this, but a Terran covers all available choke points with bunkered up marines backed by siege tanks and spider mines that do a huge amount of area damage. I also liked to keep a cloaked special ops gal around who can call in a nuke (wipes out most of the screen) as backup. Never expected real life to imitate video games, but here we are - and to take down a proper Terran defense, the Zerg need a lot of air support. Proper combined arms warfare. Difficult when glide bomb strike sorties remain way down.
Back in the real world, Ukrainian forces are still holding the lines around Malaya Loknya and preventing the orcs from collapsing the western flank in the lowlands west of Sudzha. The situation is still pretty dicey to the west, and Ukraine has slowly been pushed back from both sides of the main highway leading into Sudzha from the northwest. There have been no further reports of advances to the northeast, but Ukraine hasn’t been forced back here, either. And a series of confirmed local Ukrainian counterattacks secured Makhnovka, keeping the enemy from Sudzha’s southeastern flank.
Overall, the situation remains surprisingly stable in Kursk. Ukraine’s performance has exceeded expectations.
Eastern Theater
On the Velyka Novosilka front, however, Ukrainian forces have fallen short. Not by much, with the defense of Kurakhove going on much longer than looked possible in late November, but the difference is notable.
Between the orc push southwest of Pokrovsk and the drive on Velyka Novosilka, Ukrainian forces have been covering a roughly 80km front; almost the same as Kursk, if you count the flanks of the incursion. Yet where a similarly sized Ukrainian force has stood incredibly firm in the enemy’s homeland, in Donbas Velyka Novosilka, which has stood since 2022 and served as a staging ground for the most successful branch of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in 2023, will soon fall.
There are many important qualitative differences between the two fronts, including the presence of a lot more modern equipment in the brigades assigned to Kursk. In southern Donbas, the front is still just fifty kilometers from Donetsk, a city even larger than Kursk and basically a military fortress at this point. Ukraine has fewer opportunities to detect and attack orc forces moving to attack than is the case in Kursk. This explains much of the difference in the rate of orc progress.
But there’s no getting around the fact that the Ukrainian command grouping responsible for this region is at least partly dysfunctional. The situation appears to be improving now that the defense of Pokrovsk and the fighting further south are distinct in an operational sense. But Ukraine still has too few troops to hold the lines as they stand, and lack of reserves sufficient to mount sustained counterattacks has doomed the defense of Velyka Novosilka.
It’s not over yet and the defense could theoretically be salvaged, but both hard roads into town have been cut. The town itself sits on low ground at the base of a ridge. making it difficult to directly defend, even if the confluence of several tributaries of the Mokri Yali river make a direct attack difficult to sustain. But Ukrainian forces are now virtually cut off and may have to exfiltrate (sneak out) across the river to the north.
Trouble is, Velyka Novosilka’s fall isn’t the only or even biggest concern on this front. Ukraine is still somewhat inexplicably holding a pocket around Dachne, between Kurakhove and the Ulakly-Andriivka-Kostyantynopil triangle. At the same time, the northern jaws of the orc push down from the north threatens to outflank the whole area in a few weeks.
This is not a strategic crisis, provided that I’m right and Syrskyi’s plan has always been to accept being pushed back from the Donetsk suburbs towards the border of Donetsk province. The cost of holding a line through Vuhledar and Marinka was bound to be high. A better strategy, from an energy management perspective, is to conduct a planned fighting retreat until the enemy has serious trouble materially sustaining the front. Nothing in this sector has strategic value in and of itself; if Moscow deploys scarce resources to take it, better this chunk of Ukraine than a lot of others.
The Vovcha front, as it looks like I’d better start calling this one now, boasts what looks to be a useful defensive barrier where the river makes another southward turn through some fairly dense woods at Ivanivka, about 35km behind the current front. Unless Ukraine reinforces and counterattacks very soon, it’s likely better to initiate the withdrawal even as defensive positions are being constructed here. Reallocate brigades to Pokrovsk or the reserve, bleed the orcs during a retreat lasting about a month.
What concerns me about the pattern of Ukrainian behavior on this front is that leaders somewhere between Kyiv and the battlegroup level are not being honest about how long positions can be held. Part of the problem is that Ukraine’s military leadership is in a trap where giving up any ground draws public allegations of incompetence from certain ambitious usual suspects, but clinging to every patch of dirt gives Putin exactly what he wants: a slugging match that drains both sides at least roughly equally.
The trap forms for understandable reasons. In a democracy, the public must demand accountability from leaders at all times. Lack of education in military science allows media entrepreneurs to misrepresent the thing, passing off myths and bluffs as established fact. Far too much of what passes for history these days does the same thing. Simplistic explanations crowd out systemic ones because the former are easier to describe. The muckraking style of journalism, while entertaining, more often than not wears this flaw on its sleeve as if that’s somehow commendable.
All this makes it difficult properly identify what is going wrong on this front and how to fix the problems. That something is off is clear, though. Ukrainian forces defending Velyka Novosilka have not yet managed an effective counterattack to reliably secure at least one logistics route into town. With the outlying suburbs gone and vehicle routes out cut off, the fact that the town is still being held at all raises questions. 110th Mechanized Brigade and formations attached to it were also responsible for much of the defense of Avdiivka, and while most personnel escaped the cauldron, several groups of soldiers in exposed positions were left behind. Some, too wounded to move, were executed by the orcs.
Allow this kind of thing to happen too often, and you’ll find fewer and fewer teams willing to hold vulnerable positions at all. In the case of the Vovcha front, Ukraine may be in a worst-of-both-worlds posture where it has just enough troops to avoid falling back quickly, but not enough to stabilize the line for any length of time. If so, lives are being wasted because certain officers don’t want to report to Syrskyi that they’re falling back. Obviously, this is not good for either morale or scientific allocation of resources.
Moving north to Pokrovsk, all in all Ukrainian lines are holding surprisingly well against heavy pressure - the most intense of anywhere over the past week, it appears. Moscow is still trying to work around the flanks, but only making progress on the western side.
Despite orc troops reaching a key intersection along the T-0405 highway linking Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka last week, they haven’t managed to dig in so far. The tough Skala battalion, recently enlarged into a regiment, joined 15th Offensive Guard “Kara-Dag” brigade here. I get the sense that a regiment in Ukrainian terms is essentially what I term a battlegroup, a self-contained formation with battalion-sized combat and support groupings. Hopefully they can hold the line, because there is a risk of Ukraine having to withdraw from the northern outskirts of Avdiivka towards Kostyantynivka if Moscow makes a lot more progress.
The western jaw that the orcs are trying to extend around Pokrovsk is more of a threat, making slow but steady progress. Kotlyne has fallen and Udachne is under direct attack, so the T-0406 highway is totally cut, and ruscist forces are in striking distance of the more critical E-50 trunk as well as a major rail line leading back to Dnipro. The situation could worsen substantially by the middle of February.
However, all isn’t exactly rosy from the orc frame of reference. They’re presently pushing north over the Solona river along a ten kilometer front, with the western flank growing more vulnerable the farther north the orcs get. I have a hard time believing that a substantial counterattack to relieve Pokrosk wouldn’t be ordered if the situation deteriorates much further. Ukrainian troops are already nibbling at the edge of the ruscist western flank south of the Solona.
The loss of Pokrovsk would be close to catastrophic at this stage of the war, allowing Moscow to push north and threaten Ukraine-held urban Donbas from the west. But it does not look imminent or even likely at this point. The root cause of Ukraine’s troubles in southern Donbas appears to be a command structure that lacks the resources to hold the existing line. Whether this is a function of strategy, incompetence, or a mix is impossible to say at this point.
North of Pokrovsk, the Kostyantynivka front is likewise a mixed bag. It is pretty clear that all of Chasiv Yar will finally be lost in the coming weeks after a long and stubborn defense now that its western suburbs have fallen. Toretsk is mostly gone, though the orcs are unlikely to derive much benefit from holding the ruins.
But these two towns are only the outer bastions of Kostyantynivka’s defense, and Moscow’s forces seem to have largely exhausted themselves in the bitter campaigns to seize them. They’re on high ground, which is a problem, but also far enough away that drones will wreak havoc on the orcs as they try to creep into the outlying suburbs. At the prevailing rate of progress, it will be summer before the orcs are even to these. Ukrainian troops have a series of viable fallback positions to work with in both directions, and their lines will condense as they retreat.
To the north the Siversk front is still intact, ruscist attacks coming regularly in one sector or another but none making much headway. Ukraine here very often reverses any gains with a local counterattack. Beyond, on the long stretch from the Siversky Donets river up to the international border beyond Kupiansk, Moscow is still advancing very slowly in three areas.
Terny has fallen after a defense lasting about two years, off and on, and Moscow is expanding a small bridgehead over the Zherebets there. A little more progress was made on the road to Borova, but not much - Third Assault and adjacent brigades have been quietly eviscerating periodic orc pushes. The Kupiansk front is pretty much frozen, except where Moscow is still slowly expanding the bridgehead over the Oskil at Dvorichna. It’s beginning to look permanent, but should still be straightforward to contain.
These grinding tactics do allow for some progress, but come with a serious flaw: rarely do they allow for rapid movement of the sort that can leave large chunks of a defending force surrounded and paralyzed. The gains are rarely worth it. But apparently no matter how many times the history of human conflict teaches this lesson, leaders will find a way to fall into the trap.
Southern Theater
Little new happening on this front, as is standard for the present. I would like to make a futile suggestion to whatever orc commanders decided the incessant attacks on civilians in Kherson is a good idea that this stop now. All that sort of random butchery does, my dudes, is remind the rest of the world of the pressing need to wall off the russian world until the thing consumes itself. Some of us will support hunting you down years after the fact.
Air, Sea, & Strike
Over the past few weeks Ukraine’s strategic strike campaign has really come into its own. Putin’s empire is now routinely struck by waves of up to a hundred drones backed by a smattering of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles. Notably, Putin hasn’t thrown another missile tantrum like the one after the first ATACMS use inside russia, even though the hits keep on coming.
Once more, dictators of the world: public demonstrations like that make you look weak, not strong. Especially when you can only do it maybe once a month and damage is totally superficial anyway.
Having faced the threat of intense bombardment without having adequate defenses through most of the war, Ukraine’s military industry is now largely underground. Enough of what must be centralized and above ground is protected by Patriot batteries that have proven far more effective than back in the Gulf War. Moscow can’t even destroy Ukraine’s Viper fleet on the ground, much less in the sky. Kind of makes a fella wonder about the true danger any NATO aircraft guarding the airspace in western Ukraine would actually be in.
And on the flip side, Moscow’s Goering-esque insistence that all enemy air attacks on the homeland will always be repelled ensures that Moscow’s industry remains vulnerable. You can’t possibly cover all the airspace in a country the size of russia, and Ukraine is set to have the ability to launch a raid using 100+ propeller drones, a few dozen jet drone-missile hybrids, and a handful of traditional ballistic and conventional missiles up to ten times a month in 2025. This is bound to hurt.
Targets include oil facilities, air bases, and even factories. And the damage, even if slight, will add up unless Moscow can improve interception rates in a hurry.
Ukraine is on the cusp of having the ability to attack ruscist military resources at every step of their journey to the front. With shortages there worsening by the day, strategic and operational strike campaigns stand a real chance of leaving entire fronts vulnerable to partial isolation in logistical terms by summer. Another piece of the puzzle of victory falls into place.
Infantry Woes
Taking advantage, however, depends on solving what is presently one of Ukraine’s most serious problems: a dangerous lack of infantry. As powerful as drones are, you still have to have something like three hundred or so infantry battalions at the heart of a 100+ brigade force. Each needs to go to battle with 500-600 personnel who are trained and equipped to hold positions or storm them.
In every war since forever, there’s always been a shortage of infantry. Barring a miracle, around 1% will become casualties every day they’re in active offensive operations. Policy solutions to the eternal problem are typically uneven and wind up doing substantial harm to efficiency and effectiveness. Too often, simply shoving bodies into uniform and feeding them into the front has been the default selected by generals and politicians - that’s certainly the case on the orc side. Eventually, this causes an army to decay.
Motivated infantry are priceless, yet the fact that they are the foundation of all combat operations often eludes theorists. Ensuring that any soldier in contact with the enemy always has whatever resource required to win the fight is the magic key to being unbeatable in the field. Never is this possible everywhere, but at times a few military organizations have come pretty close.
Ukraine needs at least 150,000 bodies able to serve in line infantry units to have both enough overall combat power as well as reserves enough to conduct proper rotations. Those who have been fighting for two, three or even more years are now either casualties or experienced enough to train or lead others and must be relieved.
In 2024, Ukraine’s military reboot was supposed to mobilize a couple hundred people to fill out the required numbers. As an interim step, about as many soldiers who had never served at the front, many in rear area roles like supply, would swap out with those who had held back the orc tide so far. An imperfect solution, but the least bad.
Unfortunately, the process has been much delayed because of serious problems with Ukraine’s legacy training infrastructure. Only a portion of the anticipated new soldiers were inducted and trained over summer. It takes time to stand up corps which can manage effective training programs. This helps explain the lack of more offensives after the Kursk campaign began.
However, time is pressing. By summer, Ukraine needs to have fully staffed its infantry units. This means training twenty to thirty thousand soldiers each month. Though the process of finding soldiers who have only served in rear area roles is ongoing and sadly necessary, it has its own consequences.
A scandal over the planned transfer of air force specialists to the infantry forced clarifications to policy and revealed that some Ukrainian commanders interpret orders to find a certain number of bodies to send to infantry units stupidly - or don’t care. In truth, moving bodies between branches is probably a bad idea for the most part. If personnel were willing to risk becoming infantry, they’d have gone into the army in the first place, not the air force or navy. Security personnel exist in both, and there are always voluntary transfers if proper incentives are offered.
Where to get bodies in a situation like this is as much about public ethics as anything else, especially given the ongoing shift towards putting as much risk onto drones as possible. Physical fitness will always be important, but is now secondary to emotional endurance and basic combat skills. I firmly believe that women should be actively recruited to serve in combat roles rather than lower the mobilization age, but ending most student deferments is likely necessary and the least bad option regardless.
Strict terms of service must be adopted right away, though - Syrskyi stopped this from happening last summer, and it made sense then, but time’s up on that play. If allowed to move into drone operations or rear area roles, ideally training new soldiers, I’d bet that most of those who have been fighting for three or even more years would remain in uniform even if allowed to leave. Especially if granted a month off every year. Allowing limited single-year contracts in exchange for honorable service in an infantry battalion of the recruit’s choice should generate a strong pulse of volunteers. It ought to at least mitigate the AWOL problem. People have to be rested - punishing them for running out of energy does little good.
Tragically, even if equipped right, trained properly, and led well, a third of the 150,000 line infantry will still become casualties in 2025 if an all-out counteroffensive is pushed to the limit, as it will probably have to be. A third of those will die or be severely wounded. If waiting for drones to take over all front line jobs were viable, I’d go with that option instead. It doesn’t look like that day will arrive for another decade.
The alternative to this horrific sacrifice is even more casualties, just spread out over a longer period. And a state of permanent war is extremely damaging to a country, so should be avoided at nearly any cost. Just ask russia, which is treading a well-worn path fully aware of how it has ended for Moscow in the past.
Setting Up For The Terminal Shock: Putin’s Self-Inflicted Metabolic Crisis
In ecosystem science, a distinction is often made between fast and slow variables. In this sense, fast means something like cycles quickly. This demands context in a given use, but usually encompasses any environmental factor with a swift onset. Hence the name.
Shocks of various kinds - disasters, economic panics, a celebrity’s fall from public grace - happen all the time. Sometimes things fall apart in an unexpected way, others everything is taken more or less in stride. The specific outcome can range from nil to catastrophic, but regardless of magnitude and consequences the event itself tends to be over and done with. Folks price it in and move on as they can.
People tend worry about fast variables to the exclusion of slow ones. The old frog-in-a-pot metaphor is a great metaphor. Slow variables tend to hit more like a creeping tide: for a long time it looks like everything will remain under control, but eventually the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike needs a nap and it’s Ragnarok for everyone behind.
Systems can rearrange into radically different configurations when shocks from slow and fast variables coincide. The slow increase in average global surface temperatures, which have jumped from about 1C over pre-industrial levels to 1.5C in my lifetime, is only apparent when people realize that weather conditions which used to be a problem once a decade are now annual concerns. The scope of the impact of a slow variable means that a lot of feedback loops can engage, one or more becoming a fast variable at a critical moment.
On the global level, one of the core drivers of inflation is the steady depletion of cheap, easily exploited fuel sources. Under the surface of the explosion of American oil production over the past decade is the harsh fact that it takes substantially more energy to produce a barrel of oil from shale or tar sands deposits than from a traditional reservoir. Oil prices now have a far higher floor than in decades past, barring moments of extreme disruption like the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even prices aren’t historically high, year over year the real cost of energy is rising, and with it the metabolic cost of sustaining the entire world economy.
The irony is that a climate supercharged with substantially more energy (that’s what higher average global temperatures actually means) will itself increasingly generate inflationary impacts. Natural disasters will play their part, as will stress on an inefficient world agriculture system that produces more than enough food calories to sustain well over twelve billion people but wastes a third or even half between farm and plate.
But the climate system plays out on timescales of decades; politics moves much faster, even in dictatorships. Putin’s russian fascist system is setting itself up for an epic disaster when the slow variables of labor force depletion and rising inflation intersect with the ongoing gross failures of strategy and operations that define the Ukraine War.
Despite all pretensions, leaders of countries face harsh restrictions on what they are able to actually do. They face constant tension between all the contradictory promises they make to obtain power. They are not truly free agents: most are better seen as indebted entrepreneurs, even dictators like Putin and Assad. Politicians in democracies can, however, usually “declare bankruptcy” without a victorious rival feeling compelled to ensure that they stay retired.
Democracy transforms a relationship rooted in pure opportunistic violence into a relatively benign engine. People’s policy desires will out: taxes will be collected and spent on what someone decides is in the public interest. Democracy just tends to spread the costs and benefits out, stabilizing the system. Dictatorships exist explicitly to help some groups perpetually avoid tax burdens and reap maximum policy gains. When a democracy starts doing this, it fatally decays.
One of the most perverse truths about the Ukraine War is that it mainly happened because throughout his career Putin kept making bluffs that no one would call for fear of winding up in a spat that might reveal the limits of their own power. For a generation he played foil to western leaders happy to have a seemingly tame enemy who understood the mutual benefit driving the game. But the more they let him get away with in Ukraine, the more convinced Putin became that, if the issue was pressed, they’d cede Ukraine or any other part of the USSR to Moscow’s sphere.
In his diatribe from the summer of 2021, where Putin alleged the effective non-existence of Ukraine as a historic entity, Putin also took care to argue that Ukraine joining NATO would be the same as NATO using a weapon of mass destruction against russia because of how many people lived in Ukraine. It was this specific construction that warned me a war in Ukraine was inevitable thanks to Putin’s perception that the USA was ready to abandon Kyiv.
Joe Biden and his administration did everything they could to reinforce this view. The weapons they provided were suitable only for a guerilla struggle: the implied objective was to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan, a war against an occupier waged with whatever support D.C. thought convenient.
Then Ukrainians fought back with a ferocity none expected, and changed the course of history. Making the classic error of nearly every other dictator in his position, instead of backing away and reconsidering his assumptions Putin doubled down. And he’s kept on doing it since, despite the total lack of evidence his war can ever be won. At best, subjugation of Kyiv would split Ukrainians into camps. An extremist group totally unchained by any allegiance to western values would wage a vicious terror campaign in revenge for all that Moscow has wrought in Ukraine: the Troubles in Ireland on cocaine. That’s what Biden’s policy aimed to have on Europe’s eastern frontier.
To sustain an empire requires maintaining enough power that the many people who would gain from either gutting it or taking over as the ruling dynasty fear the consequences of a failed bid for power. Subordinates in Putin’s system are actively pitted in turf wars, with daddy Vlad sitting back and playing referee as he deems fit.
But the more stress the system is placed under, the more the power of the ruling dynasty is tested. Cracks are invariably found that competitors feel compelled to exploit as they are safely able as a matter of self-protection. There are material impacts on the fragile constellation of interests that surround the dictator. Some groups lose out, and fear of being next undermines whatever trust and cohesion is gained by incorporating the warped, colonized version of Christianity that the russian orthodox church promotes.
I’ve written before how Putin’s idiotic military approach is hollowing out his labor force - well, researchers have uncovered the other half of his effective economic sabotage of his own empire. As it turns out, Moscow’s true military spending is probably about double official levels, with the orcs funding their astonishing waste of combat power by issuing bad credit to russian companies.
The Nazi regime that took over Germany in the 1930s tried a similar scheme. “MEFO bills” created a gigantic separate accounting structure with its own effective currency. In Germany’s case this had the effect of compensating for credit restrictions Germany was under - it didn’t immediately trigger inflation because Germany had slack capacity. However, one of the factors that pushed Hitler into taking the series of gambles that let to open war was an impending economic crisis as military production began to detract from the real economy when the slack was gone.
Moscow didn’t have much to begin with, at least not in terms of productive capital. Leaders always think that the laws of economics will somehow fail to apply to them, but unless they’re blazing idiots they wind up driven by them anyway. Putin’s economy isn’t even as strong as Germany’s was in the late 1930s, relative to the rest of Europe, and he has thrown away more soldiers in three years than Hitler managed from the invasion of Poland in 1939 all the way to Stalingrad in 1942, unless my estimates are way off.
Already the costs of this war are driving double digit inflation in russia, with observing economists warning of far worse to come when the credit bomb goes off. In one of the few smart moves the Biden Administration made, oil sanctions are being further reinforced, squeezing Moscow’s profits while still ensuring that oil supplies to the world economy are not seriously affected. The blowback from a global oil shock would do more harm to Ukraine than no sanctions at all - much of the Global South might not back Ukraine openly, but neutrality serves if Ukraine can import a hundred thousand 155mm shells every month. Other military kit is a possibility as well, with many countries in the Middle East maintaining huge stocks of older, but still useful, gear.
Hell of it is, Putin can only hope to escape the consequences of the economic catastrophe heading his way is by continuing and even expanding the war. As crazy as it sounds, the internal logic that has driven Putin to this point now demands an even bigger, more unwinnable war. Only through looting conquered Ukraine and using it to score a visible triumph over NATO that splits the alliance can Putin possibly project the image of strength that he’ll need to fend off rivals going forward.
Something else that the Wagner revolt proved was that most russians won’t fight for Putin. The deal is that he makes them feel good about their mighty invincible country but without bothering them personally. Ukrainian drones routinely buzzing over even the largest cities in the ruscist empire is a potent reminder of the limits to Putin’s power. The longer this war has dragged on, the more corrosive the impact on the bluffs that keep Putin alive. It’s a slow variable all on its own that is trending against Moscow.
The macroeconomy is a uniquely potent slow variable in human affairs because the impacts of economic difficulties tend to be broad and hard to deny. Attempts to do that always leave the system vulnerable to being torn apart by fast variables rearing up at the wrong time - like when social discontent from a botched war emerges amid a credit crunch.
An excellent economic report by Craig Kennedy is a great read if you want to gain a deeper understanding of the metabolic crisis unfolding in the ruscist domain. It’s almost tempting to suggest that Ukraine wait for Putin’s fall to launch an all-out attack. But the risk of the war dragging on or Trump doing something that makes China offer more support to Moscow means that summer of 2025 will be bloody.
The apparent effort by the late Biden Administration to prevent Moscow from collapsing wholesale looks set to be another atrocious failure for a team wholly out of their depth. If it weren’t for Moscow’s visible decline, the descent of D.C. into senescence would be a much bigger problem for the rest of the world. As it presently stands, the worst of the damage has been done.
Geopolitical Brief
North America
Many core assumptions about how the United States federal government functions stand to be reviewed. In scientific terms, most American federal institutions are shot through with maladaptive incentives that leave the majority of Americans without effective political representation. This, overlaid on America’s deep - and too often denied - regional cultural divides - is transforming the USA into an unmanageable mess, hollowed beyond repair.
This process is not fundamentally different to the one that tore apart the Soviet Union and spawned Putin’s malignant russian fascist regime. The United States of America’s most likely futures involve some level of political separation, formal or informal - the latter invariably messier. It is only this, not the false unity that sustains the careers of disgraced hacks like Joe Biden, that can preserve the USA under the Constitution now.
It’s a kind of sick joke that Biden went out trying to pull an Eisenhower, claiming in a dire speech that America is at risk of becoming an oligarchy. Bit late, Joe - and it was you and your generation of leaders that sold the Constitution to the highest bidder. Allies abroad, too. Trump is merely the culmination.
The great thing about Joe Biden finally having no power is that Ukrainians and their allies can openly tell the full, unvarnished truth about how he tried to sell Ukraine to Putin. Between craven surrender and World War Three lies a vast gulf of policy options that were never even considered because they didn’t suit Joe Biden’s vain ambition.
Had that man left office two years ago, as would be demanded of any leader in a real democracy who had screwed things up as badly as he had by late 2022, the USA would likely be in a very different place right now. Biden is the incarnation of the grand rigidity trap that has left America deeply in debt and internally on the brink of separation, partisans encouraged to be afraid of other members of their own community.
Biden’s outgoing message was a particularly loathsome bit of propaganda. A man who choked in front of millions of voters when facing literally the easiest guy on the planet to debate, provided you aren’t a diehard Team Blue stereotype, now insists that it’s on ordinary Americans to stop the oligarchy. Nice rhetoric, coming from a devoted servant of plutocrats, the Senator from Mastercard who helped make it impossible for students to discharge student loans like any other form of debt then sabotaged his own promises to pursue justice. How, you ask? By pursuing student loan relief under pandemic emergency legislation that was bound to be repealed when the worst was over.
It’s this sick sort of gamesmanship - not to mention siding completely with Israel, full stop, regardless of how self-destructive its war became - that led to millions of Biden voters from 2020 staying home (I did vote - for Cornel West). After finally withdrawing from the race only once he was on the verge of ripping his party apart, Biden now wants people to think he’d have somehow taken Trump. Hardly! The data did not lie: he was perceived as a failure by far too many. If Harris had adopted anything resembling a sane strategy instead of the mess foisted on her by the D.C. consultants class, she could have won. It was her ties to him - as well as certain weaknesses as a leader that I admit I failed to predict - that torpedoed her campaign.
No American president in the past century has done more to undermine American interests, democracy, and even the Constitution than Joe Biden - yes, including Trump. Trump is bad enough, but he’s impossible without a party full of Joe Bidens, Nancy Pelosis, and Chuck Schumers pushing the con that they’re magically different even after they quietly adopt many of Trump’s policies.
Gaslight people too long, and eventually the bill comes due. Joe Biden has always been a servant of oligarchs who care for the Constitution only insofar as it can be exploited to entrench their power and enrich their families. They are why the majority of Americans in poll after poll express distrust of every branch of the federal government except the military. Every time people call them on their nonsense they cry populism, with their allies in the media piling on, because there’s nothing scarier for them than not being able to tell everyone else what to believe. To this crowd and their stale brand, merely existing as the opposition in D.C. is sufficient to demand uncritical allegiance from millions no matter what they go along with.
Reality is rarely kind to such delusions in the long run. Just look at Putin’s dying empire for evidence of that. Even if Ukraine’s military fell apart tomorrow and the orcs marched into Kyiv, there would still be so much organic resistance to ruscist rule that Moscow could never maintain control. Eventually Moscow will be pulled into attacking a NATO member on some nonsense pretext about protecting russian-speakers to avert the consequences of actively consuming itself trying to occupy Ukraine. Every failure there would become NATO’s fault until war became impossible to avoid.
Team Trump’s own appeal is mostly rooted in delusion too. A whole lot of Americans have been lied to for a long time about the fundamental strength of the USA. Trump fans don’t seem to see the contradiction in needing to Make America Great Again while also being able to (in their minds) dictate affairs to Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Mexico. And as for abusing the military to perform missions inside the USA - just try to defeat Pentagon inertia when elements of the thing decide to dig in.
You can fire all the senior officials you like, but it will then take months for the new appointees to figure out how to make the bureaucracy function. Get rid of a bunch of mid-level people or inspire them to resign, and it will take years to put any policy into action. Meanwhile, the way American federal politics have pretty much always worked renders any president a lame duck by halfway through their second term. Usually they lose control of the House. Such narrow control as Team Trump can presently boast is a recipe for deadlock, especially when the name of the game in D.C. is waiting for Trump to be gone.
Oh, and have I mentioned that he’s already backing away from key campaign promises? Tariffs and foreign aid will be reviewed, ensuring that everyone has to come crawling to Trump for his favor. In Middle East and Latin American politics, this sort of thing is called clientelism. It’s what American partisan politics is really all about now.
As for Trump’s Ukraine policy, I forecast a lot of talk about peace that winds up going nowhere. Like most promises made by politicians in D.C.
Europe
It’s Europe that now has Ukraine’s fate in its hands, so the biggest question at the moment is probably what happens in the upcoming German elections. The center-right CDU looks likely to enter a coalition with a couple smaller parties after Scholz’ SDP crashes and burns.
So far, Merkel’s old party is at least saying it will take a harder line on russia. The German center-right may have enjoyed close ties to Moscow in the past, but facing a rising threat on its right flank from the openly pro-Putin AfD - its strongholds not surprisingly former Soviet/Stasi dominated areas - it pays to be tough on Moscow. Interestingly, Germany’s left-leaning Greens are among the most pro-Ukraine folks in Deutschland. A majority in the Bundestag should back military aid, aligning Germany more closely with France, the UK, Poland, and Scandinavia.
A European bloc boasting a roughly $16 trillion economy backs Ukraine, while Moscow’s is a hair over $2 trillion in total. For reference, the USA’s economy is sized around $30 trillion, and China’s $20 trillion.
If Ukraine’s core European supporters spend 2% of their GDP on NATO and another 1% on military aid to Ukraine next year, that $160 billion chunk of change would match all military support allocated over the last three years. It would also match Moscow’s own spending, even including that magic credit line. Hence me not worrying too much about what happens in America.
Middle East
A ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has finally been inked. The question now is whether it can hold - or rather, how violently each side will respond to inevitable incidents.
But the Hezbollah ceasefire is holding too, so fingers crossed. Fingers crossed the Houthis cease their campaign as well. Now that Iran is visibly shifting away from its proxy strategy, it is to be hoped that groups will focus on domestic matters from here on out.
Iran now knows that it must be prepared to inflict existential level damage on Israel for the Mullah regime to assure its own survival. That sets up an exceptionally dangerous showdown which seems likely to absorb much of the Trump administration’s attention over the next year. A bipartisan group of Americans backed by donors still sore about the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979 kicking the USA square in the Vietnam Syndrome are bound and determined to sacrifice American lives in a bid to overthrow the mullah regime.
Will Trump go along with them? Or will the faction that imagines the USA can be restored through a generational ideological struggle with Beijing prevail? Maybe Trump will play them both and actually be dumb enough to attack cartels in Mexico. Hard to say.
Pacific
The fires in Los Angeles are finally coming under control - this time around, as the Santa Ana winds and people liking to live on hillsides are facts of life there - so this part of the world has been fairly quiet. Of course, the West Coast is also to Team Trump what Ukraine is to Moscow, so I expect dumb partisan attacks on California to accelerate. And when the back east types come for California, they’re really coming after the whole West Coast. Most of our policies are similar for cultural reasons. Everyone who isn’t California - including Alaska - just implements them differently. Often less poorly.
We’ll see what crises erupt on the Taiwan, Korea, or South China Sea fronts this year. As weak as Trump’s blundering and the hysteric partisan response to the Capital Riot made America look abroad, everything is so much worse now that the opposition is revealed as rank hypocrites. Trump is certain to be tested as rigorously as Biden was.
Concluding Comments
The United States federal government is in the process of breaking apart to some degree - the question is only how quickly the transition from Postwar America to its new iteration goes. The USA is now just too large and complex for a single federal government in D.C. to govern: most federal activities are already handled on a regional basis as a function of how the bureaucracy evolved. It would be far better to formally align political institutions with lived reality instead of expecting all Americans to conform to a narrow vision of unity that will always be a dangerous illusion.
The Postwar Order that is crumbling today is dying for the same essential reason that Putin’s own regime is doomed to fall. A generation of inept, self-absorbed leaders has actively sacrificed blood and treasure pursuing vain imperial goals. The US War on Terror threw away trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives while shattering America’s reputation abroad, contributing directly to the domestic turmoil that spawned Trump.
Now the USA is set to reap the whirlwind: Trump’s bluster about expanding the USA is classic American CEO behavior right before the wheels fall off the bus. An American leader is never more confident about the future than when they know they’re in deep trouble. With US national debt costing as much to service annually as the inefficient but ever-hungry Pentagon, Trump’s campaign promises - if he actually follows through on the important ones - will exacerbate every problem.
But that doesn’t matter in the world of partisan politics any more than Putin literally burning the Soviet legacy to ash seizing tiny chunks of Ukraine does to Muscovite elites - until the shock comes, and everything changes in the blink of an eye as the rat scramble begins. I don’t know exactly what disaster Trump will lead the USA into, but I’m utterly certain that one is inevitable.
A kind of global metarecession has kicked off, a hard period of degradation and decay where con artists and other looters seize whatever they can grab. Like maggots bursting from a corpse, they also get to have their day in the natural order of things - and then perish in their turn.
Putin is only the worst of the bunch - he’s far from unique. But they all end the same way. And after comes a new spring.