Russo-Ukrainian Conflict--Background & Analysis

[Mike]

There are tons of good sources giving daily updates on the war, e.g. the Military Summary channel on YouTube. The purpose of this thread is to share resources that provide background understanding and historical perspective. My own contributions on this thread will mostly treat the post-Soviet (2013/2014) Maidan protests as t=0, but if you have relevant stuff from deeper history -- Soviet policy, Bandera, Russian empire demographics or whatever -- then feel free to submit too.


I. Mearsheimer's Crash Course

For a relatively brief overview of the Ukraine conflict starting in 2014, and what the future may hold, of all the stuff I've seen I would recommend the following two videos by Prof. John Mearsheimer, my favorite analyst of the conflict. These videos are worth sharing with normies as they're generally easy to follow.

The first one shows Mearsheimer in 2015, famously blaming the crisis on NATO expansion and predicting with noteworthy prescience that Ukraine will get "wrecked" if NATO persisted (which it did):

"Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer"

(Sep 2015, runtime 1h14m)


For a few months after the Feb-2022 invasion, Mearsheimer refrained from speculating about how the war was going to turn out. This changed a few months ago and now M is predicting a Russian victory of sorts, in an address to the Committee for the Republic:

"John Mearsheimer Ukraine Salon"

(May 2023, runtime 1:33)


I would say these two vids allow a person otherwise disconnected from the conflict to get up to speed in less than three hours.

 

[Petr]

 

[Petr]

 

[Mike]

I present you with John J. Mearsheimer's postmortem of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive. Mearsheimer is the guy whose two vids I recommend above (both of which were recorded before the counteroffensive and display striking prescience).

Bound to Lose

Ukraine’s 2023 Counteroffensive

mearsheimer.substack.com

Sep 2, 2023

I was thinking of Mearsheimer as mainly a geopolitics guy. This is by far the best military analysis I have read so far of any phase of the war. In it, M explains the general anatomy of a blitzkrieg-type offensive and gives the history of blitzkriegs, including the famous original one, which culminated in the 1940 Fall of France. M observes that blitzkriegs tend to fail when the adversaries are roughly evenly matched, and in fact the Fall of France has been the only success by an attacker in a "fair fight", and even that was a close call, based partially on luck.

Hence M explains in detail why the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive failed and why the failure was entirely predictable. It is difficult for me to understand why so few professionals who work in diplomacy and policy making and the military, and so few "experts" who speak to the MSM, display even a fraction of the insight and understanding of M. It is shocking and worrisome that the West is run by such fools, when the wisdom is clearly available, for free even.

M spoke a bit in a recent panel discussion incl Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen. There are no video aids, so you can treat this vid like radio.



EDIT: Used unfurl="true" per Macrobius's suggestion.

 

[Macrobius]

I present you with John J. Mearsheimer's postmortem of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive. Mearsheimer is the guy whose two vids I recommend above (both of which were recorded before the counteroffensive and display striking prescience).

For those who generally prefer text (or read transcripts because you can skim them faster than watch youtubes:

From the man's site:

https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf

From his substack:

Bound to Lose

Ukraine’s 2023 Counteroffensive

mearsheimer.substack.com

 

[Mike]

Mearsheimer was not the only one. Some Ukrainians knew well what they were getting into when they refused to compromise with Russia. Arestovich, a former adviser to Zelensky, was one. Like almost all of the Ukrainian nationalists, he believed that Ukraine should join the EU and NATO. But I don't think he thought it was a totally easy choice. And he also knew that the current war was entailed; in fact he predicted it before it happened.



Uploader's description: "Excellent predictions in 2019 by Zelensky's advisor, Arestovich, concerning the Russia's motivations and war plans. Although, he has since lost hope that defeating Russia is possible."

 

[Mike]

[TLDR: Ukraine is going to get wrecked. The concluding remarks from Mearsheimer's speech, linked above, from Sep 2015.]

I actually think what's going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path. And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. And I believe that the policy that I'm advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side and NATO on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. What we're doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We're encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way; time is on our side. And, of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this and the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that, the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked. And what we're doing is, in effect, encouraging that outcome. I think it would make much more sense for us to work to create a neutral Ukraine. It would be in our interest to bury this crisis as quickly as possible. It certainly would be in Russia's interest to do so. And most importantly, it would be in Ukraine's interest to put an end to the crisis.



[I will add something interesting and new to this thread in the near future.]