You don't seem to have considered the real problem with the paying for desertion strategy: the enemy would immediately exploit it by training soldiers to defect and then launch attacks from behind our own lines. (Or flooding the system with fake deserters, who were never soldiers in the first place, etc.)
The use of the EU would help, but in order to be effective, the deserting soldiers have to be completely removed from the theatre of war - sent to South America, perhaps. This makes the project harder to administer, and thus less credible.
1) If this $100,000 policy + EU citizenship was indeed implemented, there would be a deluge of young Russian males volunteering for what we call the “special military operation” to find the first opportunity to surrender.
2) Ukrainian soldiers will quickly lose their patience with safely handling $100K to Russian deserters and seeing them to the EU border while continuing to fight in the trenches.
"The evidence cited in the post suggests people value their children’s utility as 9% of their own"
It seems unlikely to me that this exercise is autism will work.
I'm not against the idea in general but both armies are conscript slave armies and I don't think anyone wants to introduce the idea that they can escape their servitude. All adult men in Ukraine are currently forbidden from leaving under penalty of imprisonment/death, but they are going to give Russians cash prizes and EU citizenship (and presumably find a way to extradite their families too).
The way to end the war is pretty simple. Declare that the current front lines are the new international border and stop launching attacks.
Your last paragraph is extremely foolish. It would reward Russia for its murderous invasion, make other nations insecure and hence ramp up militarism worldwide, and signal that Europe is too frightened to defend itself against a brutal dictator. It’s also back-seat driving another country’s dismemberment.
Libertarians seem to have a blind spot that individual freedoms need defending collectively. This makes me suspect that in the real world, a country of libertarians would end up enslaved to a genuine despot.
If you can’t spot the difference between Russians and Ukrainians in this war, I suspect you have spoken to neither.
This is the same bullshit trotted out every single time there is a conflict anywhere in the world. If we don’t fight the axis of evil it’s Munich all over again!
Grow up. I can remember when the mainstream opinion on Ukraine is that it was another neocon plot to get us into another war.
You know what would happen if we “rewarded” Russia with a bunch of shelled out depopulated villages in the Donbas full of some aging Russian pensioners? Nothing. Literally nothing would happen. Nobody is going to look at that and go “man that really worked out for Putin, what a reward”.
I haven’t spoken to any Russians or Ukrainians about this conflict. I also never spoke to any Iraqis or Iranians about their war, but I sure as fuck know we shouldn’t have been involved. I also never spoke to any Hutus or Tutsis, or any other random group of third world people slaughtering each other.
I have spoken to a good Vietnamese friend about the Vietnam war and he was pretty glad we lost the war and left despite not liking the communists. Remember how leaving Vietnam was supposed to result in a domino theory that turned the whole world communist? How could we “reward” the Vietcong aggression in such a way?
The bottom line is none of these third world conflicts are worth our time.
MAD makes war between great powers obsolete. There are only two countries in the world. Countries we are willing start a nuclear war over and countries we aren’t. Figure out which is which and state it loudly and officially. Then cut the defense budget in half and stop trying to police the world.
The Ukrainians aren't "random third world people". The way you talk about everyone but Americans suggests to me that someone here indeed needs to grow up.
Ukraine has a GDP per capita of $5,000. That's pretty third world. Far less than Russia even.
Its people appear to have an IQ in the low 90s. Nearly all of the young and talented people had left before the war, its a museum of pensioners. This has only gotten worse. The country was broke on the eve of the war. People want to join the EU because its their ticket out of Ukraine.
Here's a prediction, after the war Ukraine will still be a shitty country. It will get a ton of my money to pay for rebuilding but this will ultimately be a waste. It will be Iraq and Afghanistan all over again, where I pay to blow it up and then pay to put it back together and then the locals fuck it all up anyway.
> You know what would happen if we “rewarded” Russia with a bunch of shelled out depopulated villages in the Donbas full of some aging Russian pensioners? Nothing.
How well did it work in 2014, when nobody seriously objected to Putin taking over Crimea and Donbas?
If Putin hadn't met any resistance, the next on the list would've been Georgia, then maybe Moldova. If nobody gives a damn, then why not take Baltic states as well? Do you really want to go that route?
All Ukrainians and Russians who oppose Putin really appreciate Western help.
"How well did it work in 2014, when nobody seriously objected to Putin taking over Crimea and Donbas?"
In Crimea there was no war. The overwhelmingly Russian population agreed in a referendum to join Russia, reversing what was in effect a random administrative decision in the 1950s. Although unable to conquer Crimea by force the central government in Kiev tried its best to punish the citizens of Crimea by cutting off their water supply turning a lot of the Peninsula into a desert. I see zero reason to believe the people of Crimea want to be violently "liberated" by a hostile force.
In Donbas there was an ongoing war for eight years because Kiev wouldn't let them go. Wanting to separate seems like a reasonable thing after over 90% of your citizens for for a president only to have him violently overthrown by a rival political faction which actively persecutes your language and culture. People in Donetsk have had to deal with shelling by the AFU for a long time. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform to try and implement the Minsk accords, but failed to do so due to pressure from the Ukrainian far right. Most famously in a confrontation with soldiers at the front. His approval rating sunk to 20% before the war started.
In other parts of the Ukraine Russians were openly subject to persecution and violence for which they had no defense. Anti-Maiden protestors in Odessa were burned alive.
I think that most people don't want to fight a war over this stuff. I see little evidence that people one either side of the front line are desperate to be "liberated", especially if it means living in a warzone. It is not a huge surprise to me that the current front lines have settled around something like the ethnic, language, and political dividing line in Ukraine going back a long time.
If you ask someone in Ukraine if they want to give up territory they will be incensed, but what choice do they have? Can they end the war? Can they even desert their unit? People who are forced into a situation invent reasons why they need to be doing what they are doing as a psychological defense. And their biggest hope, that the war will simply end, can only be worked towards by trying to achieve victory (they can't decide to negotiate peace).
But if peace came, and a few years later you went and asked them what they think when their blood cooled down, I don't think any of them really want to die for the Donbas.
The Baltic States are protected by Article 5 of the NATO charter, which we are duty bound to enforce. We can have a separate debate over whether we should have expanded NATO or if we should be a part of NATO today. So long as we are we have to enforce our treaty obligations.
Personally, I think Europe has more than enough to deter Putin if it chooses to. Given Russian performance its not clear to me they could take on Poland, let along the EU (which vastly dwarves Russian GDP and also has nukes). The days of the Warsaw Pact being a peer competitor that could seriously tank rush to the Atlantic are over. This war makes me less likely to see Russia as a threat, not more.
I think the reason people have treated Ukraine the way they have, in addition to it not being in NATO, is that everyone knows the messy history there. It isn't actually like Putin randomly invaded a nation out of nowhere. It is like a low grade civil war has been going on in a country with deep divisions whose borders were arbitrary lines on a map drawn by Stalin that didn't mean anything to him except as a propaganda tool. The United States should not have made things worse by taking an active role in one side of that civil war.
Just in the mobilization during autumn 2022 at least 350 thousand people were drafted, according to the official numbers. Alternative sources report the plans to mobilize as many as 1.2 million reservists.
The total number of soldiers that Putin could plausibly draft in the next few years is probably in the millions.
There is an old military saying that if the enemy is in range, so are you. Nothing would stop Bad Vlad from seeing the bet and raising it. Citizenship of the EU? Pffff.
I liked your ideas about desertion a lot. I am surprised you read and liked the "paying for peace" post. I considered it a naive exercise in econ-math-modeling. L'art pour l'art. - Any Russian unfortunate/unprivileged enough to get recruited will gladly desert for considerably less than 100k.. But not if he has to return to Russia later. So, a fine new passport (Kamil Galeev suggested Argentine et al., EU would be excellent, Ukrainian not sufficient), and the promise backed by EU/US not just UA (as you wrote then), is more important than 10K, 40k or 100k. Spot on on the marketing! -Instead we see our countries closing their borders for Russians likely to flee Putleristan (we even stopped to take their money in exchange for glass-beads, err: Gucci-bags).
I mean, I love the idea but I doubt it would go very far. These potential deserters have families back home, yes? Wives, mothers, sisters?
All the Russian government would need to do is retaliate against a few of them and the desertions would dry up real quick
I agree!
You don't seem to have considered the real problem with the paying for desertion strategy: the enemy would immediately exploit it by training soldiers to defect and then launch attacks from behind our own lines. (Or flooding the system with fake deserters, who were never soldiers in the first place, etc.)
The use of the EU would help, but in order to be effective, the deserting soldiers have to be completely removed from the theatre of war - sent to South America, perhaps. This makes the project harder to administer, and thus less credible.
1) If this $100,000 policy + EU citizenship was indeed implemented, there would be a deluge of young Russian males volunteering for what we call the “special military operation” to find the first opportunity to surrender.
2) Ukrainian soldiers will quickly lose their patience with safely handling $100K to Russian deserters and seeing them to the EU border while continuing to fight in the trenches.
Come on be real
Shoot what if Russia/China do a similar deal?
"The evidence cited in the post suggests people value their children’s utility as 9% of their own"
It seems unlikely to me that this exercise is autism will work.
I'm not against the idea in general but both armies are conscript slave armies and I don't think anyone wants to introduce the idea that they can escape their servitude. All adult men in Ukraine are currently forbidden from leaving under penalty of imprisonment/death, but they are going to give Russians cash prizes and EU citizenship (and presumably find a way to extradite their families too).
The way to end the war is pretty simple. Declare that the current front lines are the new international border and stop launching attacks.
Your last paragraph is extremely foolish. It would reward Russia for its murderous invasion, make other nations insecure and hence ramp up militarism worldwide, and signal that Europe is too frightened to defend itself against a brutal dictator. It’s also back-seat driving another country’s dismemberment.
Libertarians seem to have a blind spot that individual freedoms need defending collectively. This makes me suspect that in the real world, a country of libertarians would end up enslaved to a genuine despot.
If you can’t spot the difference between Russians and Ukrainians in this war, I suspect you have spoken to neither.
This is the same bullshit trotted out every single time there is a conflict anywhere in the world. If we don’t fight the axis of evil it’s Munich all over again!
Grow up. I can remember when the mainstream opinion on Ukraine is that it was another neocon plot to get us into another war.
You know what would happen if we “rewarded” Russia with a bunch of shelled out depopulated villages in the Donbas full of some aging Russian pensioners? Nothing. Literally nothing would happen. Nobody is going to look at that and go “man that really worked out for Putin, what a reward”.
I haven’t spoken to any Russians or Ukrainians about this conflict. I also never spoke to any Iraqis or Iranians about their war, but I sure as fuck know we shouldn’t have been involved. I also never spoke to any Hutus or Tutsis, or any other random group of third world people slaughtering each other.
I have spoken to a good Vietnamese friend about the Vietnam war and he was pretty glad we lost the war and left despite not liking the communists. Remember how leaving Vietnam was supposed to result in a domino theory that turned the whole world communist? How could we “reward” the Vietcong aggression in such a way?
The bottom line is none of these third world conflicts are worth our time.
MAD makes war between great powers obsolete. There are only two countries in the world. Countries we are willing start a nuclear war over and countries we aren’t. Figure out which is which and state it loudly and officially. Then cut the defense budget in half and stop trying to police the world.
The Ukrainians aren't "random third world people". The way you talk about everyone but Americans suggests to me that someone here indeed needs to grow up.
Ukraine has a GDP per capita of $5,000. That's pretty third world. Far less than Russia even.
Its people appear to have an IQ in the low 90s. Nearly all of the young and talented people had left before the war, its a museum of pensioners. This has only gotten worse. The country was broke on the eve of the war. People want to join the EU because its their ticket out of Ukraine.
Here's a prediction, after the war Ukraine will still be a shitty country. It will get a ton of my money to pay for rebuilding but this will ultimately be a waste. It will be Iraq and Afghanistan all over again, where I pay to blow it up and then pay to put it back together and then the locals fuck it all up anyway.
> You know what would happen if we “rewarded” Russia with a bunch of shelled out depopulated villages in the Donbas full of some aging Russian pensioners? Nothing.
How well did it work in 2014, when nobody seriously objected to Putin taking over Crimea and Donbas?
If Putin hadn't met any resistance, the next on the list would've been Georgia, then maybe Moldova. If nobody gives a damn, then why not take Baltic states as well? Do you really want to go that route?
All Ukrainians and Russians who oppose Putin really appreciate Western help.
"How well did it work in 2014, when nobody seriously objected to Putin taking over Crimea and Donbas?"
In Crimea there was no war. The overwhelmingly Russian population agreed in a referendum to join Russia, reversing what was in effect a random administrative decision in the 1950s. Although unable to conquer Crimea by force the central government in Kiev tried its best to punish the citizens of Crimea by cutting off their water supply turning a lot of the Peninsula into a desert. I see zero reason to believe the people of Crimea want to be violently "liberated" by a hostile force.
In Donbas there was an ongoing war for eight years because Kiev wouldn't let them go. Wanting to separate seems like a reasonable thing after over 90% of your citizens for for a president only to have him violently overthrown by a rival political faction which actively persecutes your language and culture. People in Donetsk have had to deal with shelling by the AFU for a long time. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform to try and implement the Minsk accords, but failed to do so due to pressure from the Ukrainian far right. Most famously in a confrontation with soldiers at the front. His approval rating sunk to 20% before the war started.
In other parts of the Ukraine Russians were openly subject to persecution and violence for which they had no defense. Anti-Maiden protestors in Odessa were burned alive.
I think that most people don't want to fight a war over this stuff. I see little evidence that people one either side of the front line are desperate to be "liberated", especially if it means living in a warzone. It is not a huge surprise to me that the current front lines have settled around something like the ethnic, language, and political dividing line in Ukraine going back a long time.
If you ask someone in Ukraine if they want to give up territory they will be incensed, but what choice do they have? Can they end the war? Can they even desert their unit? People who are forced into a situation invent reasons why they need to be doing what they are doing as a psychological defense. And their biggest hope, that the war will simply end, can only be worked towards by trying to achieve victory (they can't decide to negotiate peace).
But if peace came, and a few years later you went and asked them what they think when their blood cooled down, I don't think any of them really want to die for the Donbas.
The Baltic States are protected by Article 5 of the NATO charter, which we are duty bound to enforce. We can have a separate debate over whether we should have expanded NATO or if we should be a part of NATO today. So long as we are we have to enforce our treaty obligations.
Personally, I think Europe has more than enough to deter Putin if it chooses to. Given Russian performance its not clear to me they could take on Poland, let along the EU (which vastly dwarves Russian GDP and also has nukes). The days of the Warsaw Pact being a peer competitor that could seriously tank rush to the Atlantic are over. This war makes me less likely to see Russia as a threat, not more.
I think the reason people have treated Ukraine the way they have, in addition to it not being in NATO, is that everyone knows the messy history there. It isn't actually like Putin randomly invaded a nation out of nowhere. It is like a low grade civil war has been going on in a country with deep divisions whose borders were arbitrary lines on a map drawn by Stalin that didn't mean anything to him except as a propaganda tool. The United States should not have made things worse by taking an active role in one side of that civil war.
An excellent analysis that has clarified my thinking. Thank you.
20 billion would cover 200'000 Russian soldiers. This is not inconsiderable, but is nowhere near enough to end the war, unless all the defections happens almost simultaneously. As a matter of fact, Russian army by some estimates has already lost this number of troops as casualties (https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-death-toll-ukraine-tens-of-thousands-western-intelligence-2023-2?r=US&IR=T).
Just in the mobilization during autumn 2022 at least 350 thousand people were drafted, according to the official numbers. Alternative sources report the plans to mobilize as many as 1.2 million reservists.
The total number of soldiers that Putin could plausibly draft in the next few years is probably in the millions.
There is an old military saying that if the enemy is in range, so are you. Nothing would stop Bad Vlad from seeing the bet and raising it. Citizenship of the EU? Pffff.
Thinking that a $20k payment and entry into a billion $ lottery would work better.
I liked your ideas about desertion a lot. I am surprised you read and liked the "paying for peace" post. I considered it a naive exercise in econ-math-modeling. L'art pour l'art. - Any Russian unfortunate/unprivileged enough to get recruited will gladly desert for considerably less than 100k.. But not if he has to return to Russia later. So, a fine new passport (Kamil Galeev suggested Argentine et al., EU would be excellent, Ukrainian not sufficient), and the promise backed by EU/US not just UA (as you wrote then), is more important than 10K, 40k or 100k. Spot on on the marketing! -Instead we see our countries closing their borders for Russians likely to flee Putleristan (we even stopped to take their money in exchange for glass-beads, err: Gucci-bags).
Europe won’t take that deal if Russia is emptying their prisons for soldiers.
They might if the Russian soldiers suddenly discovered that they'd been misgendered at birth.