Time to update the score on Anatoly Karlin's Ukraine predictions
Back in 2022, Karlin said:
>The duration of the conflict will depend on the extent to which Ukrainian soldiers are prepared to fight. In conventional models, it will take several weeks, with a few thousand Russian casualties and several 10,000’s of Ukrainian casualties. However, given those very disparities – inevitable given Russia’s vast preponderance in materiel, mobility, and technology – I suspect there’s a very good chance that the collapse might happen much quicker. By moving its Embassy to Lvov, the US has already implicitly acknowledged that Russia will win, so the correct game theory move for Ukrainian soldiers is to follow their own oligarchs into defection and accept the 2-3x salary increase from joining the Russian Army. In this scenario, which is both my hope and intuition, Russian and Ukrainian military casualties will be limited to the hundreds and thousands, respectively.
Scott graded his predictions (including this one):
>Anatoly Karlin: B-
>Anatoly is a Russian nationalist who wrote Regathering Of The Russian Lands, which has become the canonical (in these circles) essay for understanding how Putin thinks.
He was totally right about what Putin would do, but his predictions about weak Ukrainian resistance are on the verge of being disproven
With buildings in Moscow on fire, refineries and Crimea in chaos, I think we'll have to say that the "predictions about weak Ukrainian resistance" were about as off-base as you can get.
I freely admit that this post is entirely motivated by an animus for warmongers.