Whenever I look at comments of recent news, a common point of contention seems to be the assertion that war is inevitable. Like, why should we prepare for a war with Russia, if Russia is showing itself to be incapable of doing Ukraine? Surely, Russia is not gonna do anything stupid in the forseeable future, not while they haven’t conquered Ukraine anyway, or negotiated a peace deal. And it’s a good instinct to have to be skeptical here, in a lot of cases things presented without alternative often do have an alternative. But unfortunately, the current situation really is this fucked.
Why can’t Ukraine just make a peace deal with Russia?
Both Ukraine and Russia currently see themselves as winning the war, for different reasons:
Russia has inevitability on its side, which means that if everything continues as-is, their win is inevitable as even conquering the land at a snail’s pace is going to conquer everything eventually. Russia has more people, more industrial capacity, bigger stockpiles, more advanced everything and Ukraine can’t outlast them.
Ukraine meanwhile is trying to stop everything progressing as-is, and making good progress at that. Between having a leg up on drone warfare, their refinery- and warehouse burning campaigns and inflicting disproportionate casualties on Russians, Ukraine is destroying a lot of potential for Russia to wage war in the first place. This, interleaved with periods of counteroffensives where they undo weeks and months of Russian progress in a couple of days, has them not merely wait out the inevitable, but change warfare itself to perhaps eventually favor Russia.
As a result, the negotiation positions of the two parties are hundreds of miles apart: Russia believes that Ukraine may break any moment now, at which point they can have all of Ukraine. Ukraine believes that Russia won’t meaningfully progress beyond the current contact line, and perhaps recapture all of it one day, leaving Russia none of Ukraine. If one party believes 0% is the way to go and the other believes 100% is just right, negotiation is practically impossible. A 50% deal is unacceptable to Ukraine as they’d just hand over territory they’ve now fortified which the Russians have been unable to take, while it’d also be unacceptable to Russia which went out on this “special military operation” to “denazify” all of Ukraine. There must be some overlap between the negotiation positions, and at the moment, they simply aren’t close enough.
Compare it to something like Facebook marketplace: If you want to sell a thing for 1000€, and someone contacts you to give it to them for free and also pay for the delivery, you’d just dismiss the message. The offer coming in must at least be reasonably close to your expectations to even consider negotiating.
Why would Russia want to go with NATO?
To answer this, let’s start with a seemingly unrelated question: How much is your life worth to you? How much money would someone need to pay you (or your family) to say “this is the best thing I can do with my life, and my family will thank me for it as they now are set up for life”? This is the question Russians must ask themselves every day when they see a recruitment poster to the Russian military. At the moment, depending on the region, this number seems to sit at about 4 million rubles, which would be somewhere around 42k€ if naively converted. However, this 42k€ buys you a lot more stuff in Russia as general prices are much lower there, which is where purchasing power parity comes in. For Russia, this ratio is around 30 now, so Russians are signing their life away for some 1.2M€ if we were measuring by our standards.
However, Russia already has hired most of the people who were available at this rate, so recruitments are going down. So Russia needs to up the hiring bonuses to meet their requirements, which is only getting more expensive from here. And Russia doesn’t have infinite money to throw around, especially since a lot of it is frozen assets internationally. The solution to this would be conscription (ie, forcing people to fight), but Putin tried that near the start of the war and it went down very poorly, even by Russian standards.
But what if instead of conscripting Russians for a vanity project in Ukraine that nobody but Putin really cares about, there was a big emergency? One that every Russian could get behind? One caused by the evil, fascist, capitalist NATO who has been itching to make Kaliningrad Königsberg again.
Of course, Russia doesn’t actually want NATO to invade because that’s a fight they won’t win. But they want NATO to do something – anything! – to justify triggering conscription. And with that, they’re going up and up the escalation ladder in the style of a schoolyard bully testing how far they can push before getting punished by the teachers. So far, they’ve tried things like:
- Airspace violations with their warplanes and helicopters and drones
- “Accidental” attacks of random civilian targets in Poland and Romania
- “Accidental” cutting of undersea cables by their shadow fleet
- (unsuccessfully) bombing Ukrainian planes in Germany
- (unsuccessfully) bombing NATO officials on visit in Ukraine
But unfortunately for the bully, NATO is barely acknowledging these things.
The standard approach for NATO for these things would be a “proportional response”. If a missile hits a NATO asset, send a missile in return to destroy the launcher, that sort of thing. But of course, the second that actually happens, Putin has his casus belli for conscripting tons of additional soldiers, as he simply can claim the NATO attack to have happened completely unprovoked due to either an accident (if it was a clearly Russian attack with dubious intent) or a false flag operation (if it wasn’t clearly a Russian attack, with clear intent). A proportional response by NATO would help Russia beat Ukraine. And NATO definitely doesn’t want that.
Russia’s gameplan is clear: They’ve spent the past couple years trying all kinds of hybrid warfare attacks on NATO and are hoping for a proportional response. Maybe they’ll “accidentally” drone strike some military targets in Poland. Maybe they’ll find a pro-peace group to blow up an ammunition stockpile somewhere. Maybe they’ll try the 2014 thing again and have an uprising of a Russian minority in Estonia which just happens to have “little green men” who totally aren’t the Russian army occupy a couple of border villages.
Unless Putin has a sudden and drastic change of heart (or just dies), Russian provocations will continue. And eventually, they won’t be ignorable anymore.
NATO meanwhile does not want to play into Russia’s plan. NATO also is not interested in an all-out war against Russia, as that would seem overly warmongery. So what are they to do?
I believe: NATO are threatening an all-out war if some critical threshold is met. But in order for this threat to be believable, there must be concrete preparation for such a war. It’s because of this that the war machine is being funded, it’s because of this that conscription is being re-introduced in western countries, it’s because of this that a war with Russia as early as 2027 is being discussed.
But again: Neither NATO nor Russia are really interested in an all-out war. If Russia believes NATO’s threat, they’ll eventually have to stop their bullying. But if Russia calls NATO’s bluff and indeed does something which normally would be Article 5 territory, NATO will have a choice:
Do they do nothing, risking the alliance’s cohesion? Do they do something, helping Russia to fight Ukraine? Or do they do everything, and go on a war that seems to be out-of-proportion?
Time will tell.
How to prepare for war without funding the war machine?
While everything I’ve said so far seems to point in the direction of just throwing endless money towards Rheinmetall, Lockheed-Martin et al., I don’t actually think it’s them that need the money. Our militaries probably have enough funding to take on Russia reasonably efficiently, even without the US’ involvement. The problem is going to be Russian strikes and sabotage of our infrastructure, so the best we can do is increase our resilience to that – which coincidentally also is going to be good for climate change:
- Get yourself some solar/wind power generator. Diesel generators might work too, but with prices being what they are and fuel stations being standard targets for Russia, I wouldn’t rely on it.
- Get yourself heating that can be powered by said solar/wind power. Heat pumps are probably the most efficient option here, gas and oil again depend on Russia not disrupting the infrastructure.
- Get comfortable riding bikes everywhere. Again, cars will be difficult. Electric cars may too, depending on how much electricity is around and how far your own power generation can take it. A bike will always go as far as your legs take it.
- Get yourself a stockpile of food and water. It doesn’t have to last you the entire war, just the first week or so while the unprepared do their irrational stuff.
- Get yourself ready to help others. Renew your first aid training. Join the volunteer firefighters or civil defense/emergency preparedness organizations. Donate blood.
If you’re prepared for war, war becomes a lot less scary. And a lot less deadly.
Leo Wattenberg 