Calgary ACX meetup, July 7
- [Open in Google Maps] [Open in local app]
- 7 July 2024, 2:00 pm—4:00 pm
- Calgary, AB, Canada
We hope to have a meetup in Pearce Estate Park, on picnic tables at 51.0411, −114.017. Parking is free and it appears to be a 10-minute walk from the nearest transit stop.
However! I’ll check the WeatherCAN app the morning of (or day before) the meetup and, if a chance of rain or snow is listed, switch the location to First Street Market (1327 1st Street SW).
Hi all, I wanted to follow up on some of the things I said about the Ukraine war at the last meetup, partly because I said some things that were inaccurate, but also because I didn’t complete my thoughts on the matter.
(uh, should I have put this on the previous meetup’s page?)
First, at one point I said that Russia was suffering about 3x as many losses as Russia and argued that this meant the war was sustainable for Ukraine, as Russia has about 3½ times the population of Ukraine and is unlikely to be able to mobilize as many soldiers as Ukraine can (as a percentage). I thought there were credible sources saying this, but it turns out the source I was thinking of gave only a ~2.36x ratio, and more importantly, I realized about two seconds later that I myself didn’t actually believe that number. In fact, I believed that Ukrainian losses were 50%-90% of Russian losses, so 1.1x to 2x[1] (and if there is some difference in the kill/wound ratio between the two sides, I have no information on that). So, I’m sorry. I remember feeling annoyed and I guess I just wanted to win the argument at that point.
However, I did believe, and continue to believe, the overall idea that Ukraine can hold on as long as it receives enough western aid. The reason for this is that I believe Ukrainian losses are currently “propped up” by the Russian advantage in materiel, and this problem should resolve itself in time.[2] During this war Ukraine has always been at a disadvantage in terms of equipment, because although older western equipment is generally superior to Soviet equipment, Ukraine always had limited supplies of them, and usually they’ve been at an even larger disadvantage in terms of artillery shells. With rare exceptions, Russia has typically fired several times more artillery shells than Ukraine (I would guess 6x more by mass, varying from ~1x to ~15x in different times and places). The thing about Russia’s materiel advantage is that it relies heavily on deep stocks of weapons left over from the Soviet Union. Those stocks will not last forever. You can see Covert Cabal’s OSINT videos about this for detail; for instance, this recent video estimated that Russia has “2, maybe 2½ years left” in its Soviet tank supply (edit: Euromaiden Press estimates tanks will last until “2027-2029” but artillery will run low sooner―unless, I would add, Russia develops more barrel production capacity). Regarding artillery shells, they’ve already switched to North Korea as a major supplier, and rumor has it that the quality of those shells is lower. If I remember right (and my memory is clearly fallible, admittedly) Russia makes new tanks at about 20% of the rate it is losing them in Ukraine, with the rest being Soviet refurbishments. So my thinking is that Ukraine just needs to hold out until Soviet stocks run low, after which one of two things will happen: (1) Putin finally gives up on the war, or (2) Russia keeps fighting with much less materiel, which will be much easier for Ukraine to manage (edit: if western support doesn’t drop).
The second inaccuracy was that I said that the rules to join NATO include a requirement not to have contested territory. After the meetup I looked up the formal rules, and they did not include this requirement. Instead it’s more of a de-facto expectation of NATO members. Wikipedia puts it this way:
Still, as far as I know, Ukraine made no actual progress on joining NATO prior to the invasion.
The third inaccuracy was I said that Zaporizhzhia city has a population of over a million people. Not sure how I got this wrong; its pre-war population is estimated at 732,000.
The other thing I didn’t get to say about this topic during the meetup was to talk about how life is like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The Ukraine war isn’t just about Ukraine, it’s about Taiwan. Whereas Russia has a 3.5:1 population advantage over Ukraine, the PRC has a 54:1 population advantage over Taiwan even if ideas about China inflating its population numbers are true.
I strongly suspect that Xi Jinping (unlike his predecessor) really would like to invade Taiwan (or at least launch a naval military blockade aimed at taking over Taiwan). While a naval invasion would be much more difficult than simply driving over the Ukrainian border, I can’t imagine China could actually lose a war against a country more than 50 times smaller than itself, unless the U.S. military directly engages in fighting on Taiwan’s behalf.
This creates a problem for the U.S., which does not want Taiwan to fall under the CCP’s control, because Taiwan is a democracy, and because Taiwan is full of TSMC chip factories that the U.S. and its allies depend on. However, the U.S. also very much doesn’t want a war with China, because it would be extremely costly for U.S. military forces, it would heavily disrupt the U.S. and global economy, it would empower India’s authoritarian BJP party, it would heighten the trade war with China (e.g. China has a global monopoly on rare earths), it would heighten China’s propaganda war against the U.S. (an area of obvious advantage for China), China may attack the U.S. mainland directly, and last but not least, there’s a risk of nuclear escalation. (Did I miss anything? Probably!)
But Taiwan by itself would lose the war, so the U.S. needs to deter Xi from invading in the first place. So one thing Biden did was to say directly that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan (breaking from the previous U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity). But talk is cheap, so it’s no surprise that Metaculus says there’s only a 65% chance that the U.S. will actually respond to the invasion with military force, including even covert force. What else can the U.S. do to signal a willingness to defend Taiwan? The obvious answer: defend Ukraine. Conversely, to the extent the U.S. doesn’t defend Ukraine, that implies it wouldn’t defend Taiwan either. Ukraine, after all, is globally recognized as a sovereign country while Taiwan is not. If a country universally recognized as sovereign (except by Russia) can’t get a strong defense against a nuclear-armed neighbor, why should Xi expect a strong U.S. defense of Taiwan?
So far the U.S. response in Ukraine has been underwhelming. To the 2014 invasion they initially responded only with a sprinkling of sanctions, and while they gave a much stronger response in 2022, they’ve sent no troops to defend Ukraine, they did not impose a no-fly zone (though eventually they sent Patriot batteries, which are pretty similar), and they’ve spent only 3% of the military budget as detailed below (plus, I don’t know, some dozens of $billions in other forms of aid). I think I heard officials “explain” this at one point by saying that the rest of the budget would be needed in case of an invasion of Taiwan, but I think that actually if you want to show you’re serious about defending Taiwan, the clearest way to do that is to defend Ukraine directly, troops and all. Biden doesn’t do that because he’s very afraid of nuclear escalation. But this implies that if Xi Jinping wants to keep the Biden Administration on the sidelines, he just needs to build more nuclear weapons and make a veiled nuclear threat when his invasion starts. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that reports of an expanded Chinese nuclear arsenal appeared in late 2022.
A couple of other things I’d like to say...
First, the price the U.S. is paying to destroy Russian military capacity (Soviet stockpiles) is probably much lower than it would spend if it were in a direct shooting war with Russia. According to this article from March, U.S. direct military aid has been $46.3 billion (over two years), which was less than 3% of the U.S. military budget that exceeds $800 billion annually (the new aid bill passed in May would’ve increased this percentage modestly, and I think the amount of nonmilitary aid is greater than this.) The numbers so far compare favorably to Iraq + Afghanistan war spending (“at least” $757.8 billion for Iraq, and about $2 trillion for Afghanistan, more or less). But Iraq and Afghanistan had small enemy forces compared to Russia.
Second, people keep making this bizarre mistake of treating Putin as a truthful person, and the mainstream media seems to keep making this mistake sometimes even today. Putin insisted in 2014 he didn’t know who those little green men were who invaded Crimea. Then he said that Russia wasn’t militarily involved in the Donbass region of Ukraine, when in fact many Russian soldiers were directly fighting in Ukraine (e.g. here and here)―yet I remember the media telling me the whole time that it was “Russian-backed separatists”. I didn’t know any better until the 2022 invasion was well underway. And of course, Putin said he had no intention of invading Ukraine in 2022 (and notice that since his official policy was “we won’t invade”, he never said “we will invade unless Ukraine promises not to join NATO”.)
State propaganda told the Russian people in 2014 that Ukraine was full of “nazis” which is why, even after a Jew was elected president in 2019, Putin started the invasion with a speech about “denazification”. This is utterly cynical: neonazis certainly existed as they do in every country, and Ukraine agreed to command a far-right group in the armed forces during the 2014-15 war, but only 2% of Ukrainians voted for the far-right Svoboda party in the 2019 election, the head commander of the Russian Wagner group had nazi tattoos, I could point you to a video where a Russian with nazi tattoos gets a reward in a Russian military ceremony, and Russia has the Rusich group. Also, is it fascist to propose on Russian State TV to kill 10% of all Ukrainians? Seems fascist-adjacent, anyway. So “Nazi” functions as a magic word in the modern retelling of how Russia rescued Europe from Nazism in the Great Patriotic War, and is now forced once again to fight the modern decadent Nazis of Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe.
And by the way, I don’t understand why this needs to be explained, but it’s important to realize that refusing to join a defensive alliance does not assure safety against a huge neighbor with a history of invading its neighbors to annex territory (i.e. Chechnya 1994, Chechnya 1999, Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014… and the USSR’s history is also relevant given Putin’s attitude). If NATO refused Ukraine’s requests to join, that would not protect Ukraine either. NATO is a defensive alliance! Protecting against invasions is its raison d’etre! Surely all the countries that have ever joined (or tried to join) NATO thought it was in their best interest to do so, which would be a weird thing for everyone to think if it wasn’t true.
So where does this idea come from that countries not joining NATO would keep them safe? I suspect it comes from Russia. Russia spends a lot on disinformation and misinformation, after all. They’re always field-testing and boosting messages that fit their interests. Obviously their disinformation budget is a secret, but if Russia spends 1% as much on its information war as it does on its actual war, that would buy a lot of social media personalities!
Russia lies constantly. Many of the lies are not very convincing ― their greatest hits include “the Ukrainians are bombing themselves”, “after we surrounded the city, Ukrainian soldiers planted explosives in their own drama theater to kill their own civilians”, “Bucha was a provocation”, and “we didn’t invade Ukraine”. But here is one that almost fooled me.
With that in mind, today I learned the “news” about Putin’s “fresh demands” in Ukraine.
To me it’s neither news nor fresh. It has the same headline items as their demands from last December[3] that I was telling you guys about. Putin is still asking Ukraine to:
give up the rest of the Kherson oblast including all the territory Ukraine retook in November 2022, including Kherson city (pre-war population ~280,000)
give up the rest of the Zaporizhzhia oblast including Zaporizhzhia city, which Russian troops have never before been able to approach (p.w.p. 732,000) ― which would also give Russians a major strategic victory in the form of a second large bridgehead on the west bank of the Dnipro river, and control over the defensive lines Ukraine has been building in northern Zaporizhzhia
give up what little of Luhansk Ukrainians were able to retake
give up the rest of the Donetsk oblast, including the small cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk, countless towns and villiages, plus all the defensive lines Ukraine has been building in that region
never join NATO
As if expecting not to be laughed out of town, he also demands that the West drop all sanctions.
So as I was saying, the media. How does the media report on this? Sometimes, exactly as Putin wants:
“withdraws from occupied regions” is a very Russian way of saying it, since Russia consistently describes any land it takes as “liberated” from the Ukrainian “nazi regime” occupying the fake country of Ukraine.
(on the other hand AP had a nice documentary from their journalist who was on-scene in Mariupol.)
Half of these headlines don’t mention the huge land grab, so they help communicate Putin’s message that “Russia just wants peace, unlike the Kyiv Regime and NATO warmongers...”
While I didn’t highlight The Hill there, I think they screwed it up by saying “ceding land” rather than “ceding additional land without a fight”.
More broadly the media tends to ignore Putin’s history of bald-face lies. Saying “Trump says the trial is a witch hunt, Biden denies it” cannot hurt Trump. In the same way, reporting like “Putin says X, Ukraine denies it” can’t hurt Putin, but it can help him by planing X in people’s heads.
Final thought: although Sarcasmitron has a clear liberal bias, I don’t know of anyone offering a better documentary of the history of the Ukraine conflict, so here you go: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
I don’t have a source for “50%-90%”, it’s basically a gut feeling based on following the war closely. However, after the meetup I encountered a new video that reaches roughly the same conclusion with Ukrainian data that I hadn’t seen before (to be more specific, based on that video I think Meduza’s conclusion can be summarized by saying that the ratio is roughly 0.95x to 1.9x, not counting DPR and LPR losses on the Russian side.
Though at the current moment Ukraine is in a difficult spot since they waited too long to mobilize, won’t have new soldiers for months, and won’t be able to use F-16s for months
I couldn’t locate original source where I saw these demands in December, but based on this ISW report the demands in December likely came from Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
Hi David,
Thanks for writing this. I have read it all and you make good points, although I will point out that if you want rapid responses be aware that the length put me off reading it for a few days.
I’ll give you a few scattered notes in response. Bear in mind that by far the most common sentiment was broad agreement, even if the points will nitpick possible disagreements.
I appreciate your desire to highlight areas that you got wrong. Always admirable.
I remain more pessimistic than you that there are easy or strong answers in how to persuade others. Russian propaganda has been happening for a very very long time. There’s decent evidence that the earliest seeds of JFK conspiracies were planted by the KGB. If you wanted to do counterpropaganda against JFK conspiracy theories, you could (i) be a reasonable guy who gently pushes back when the topic comes up, which is a good thing to do, but won’t move the needle much; or (ii) start a media empire strong enough to rival popular Oliver Stone movies starring Kevin Costner and Kevin Bacon. I just think the task is almost impossible. (Oliver Stone has a 2016 movie called “Ukraine on Fire” which is also pro-Russia and anti-Western, by the way. Seems like a great guy).
I’d push back on the idea that western media agreed that 2014 was just Russian backed separatists. Lots of media got that right (e.g. 1, 2, 3).
It is difficult to talk about a “cease-fire” in a neutral way. It encompasses everything from offering an unconditional surrender to demanding an unconditional surrender. This also frustrates me in middle-east discussions.
Hi Jasper! Don’t worry, I definitely am not looking for rapid responses. I’m always busy anyway. And I wouldn’t say there are in general ‘easy or strong answers in how to persuade others’. I expect not to be able to persuade the majority of people on any given subject. But I always hope (and to some extent, expect) people in the ACX/LW/EA cluster to be persuadable based on evidence (more persuadable than my best friend whom I brought to the last meetup, who is more of an average person).
By the way, after writing my message I found out that I had a limited picture of Putin’s demands for a peace deal―because I got that info from two mainstream media articles. When the excellent Anders Puck Neilson got around to talking about Putin’s speech, he noticed other very large demands such as “denazification” (apparently meaning the Zelensky administration must be replaced with a more Kremlin-friendly government) and demilitarization (🤦♂️).
Yeah, Oliver Stone and Steven Seagal somehow went pro-Putin, just as Dennis Rodman befriended Kim Jong Un. There’s always some people who love authoritarians, totalitarians, “strong leaders” or whatever. I don’t understand it, but at least the Kremlin’s allies are few enough that they decided to be friends with North Korea and Iran, and to rely on a western spokesman who is a convicted underage sex offender. So they seem a bit desperate―on the other hand, China has acted like a friend to North Korea since forever.
I’m not suggesting all the mainstream media got it wrong―only that enough sources repeated the Kremlin’s story enough times to leave me, as someone who wasn’t following the first war closely, the impression that the fight was mainly a civil war involving Kremlin-supplied weapons. (Thinking In hindsight, I’m like “wait a minute, how could a ragtag group of rebels already know how to use tanks, heavy artillery systems and Buk missile launchers in the same year the war started?”) So my complaint is about what seems like the most typical way that the war was described.
A video reminded me tonight that after the war in Ukraine started, Russia pulled lots of its troops from all other borders, including the borders with NATO, in order to send them to Ukraine, and after Finland joined NATO, Russia pulled troops (again?) from its border with Finland―indicating that Putin has no actual fear of a NATO invasion.
Followup: this morning I saw a really nice Vlad Vexler video that ties Russian propaganda to the decline of western democracy. The video gives a pretty standard description of modern Russian propaganda, but I always have to somewhat disagree with that. Vlad’s variant of the standard description says that Russian propaganda wants you to be depoliticized (not participate in politics) and to have “a theory of Truth which says ‘who knows what if anything is true’”.
This is true, but what’s missing from this description is a third piece, which is that the Kremlin also wants people to believe particular things. Most of all, they want people to believe that Putin is a good leader who needs to stay in power, so while there may be all kinds of contradictory messages going around to explain what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, there is a strong consistency in trying to avoid linking bad facts to Putin, and to maximize the impression that Russia is doing fine. I think this only works to the extent Russians (and westerners) don’t think about it, so one of my counterpropaganda ideas was to get Russians thinking about Putin and about how their system works―better yet, to instruct Russians of things to watch out for, things to pay attention to that Putin wants people to ignore.
Also, of course, the video is about how our democracies are dysfunctional, and I have my own ideas about how to address that problem (I have little ability to execute, but I have to work with what I’ve got and at least my ideas are neglected, which is very frustrating but also a good sign in the ITN framework.)