Special military graph

So here is, on request from Astral Codex Ten commenters, a graph of how much my prediction of the outcome of Russo-Ukrainian war evolved over time. My last update, which is still stands as of the time of publication of this, is from 10 July 2023, here. Sorry, graph is not auto-updating for future updates, since it is worth what you pay me :-). Table with values below; just pictures, since I am too lazy to figure out how to convert xls table into substack format. It should be easy to convert back to machine readable date through powers of our soon-to-be AI overlords. Dates are in the European format of day.month.year.

If you are interested in sources that I mostly use, you might check their rundown here, in Czech. But it is somewhat incomplete, since it leaves out great deal of Czech sources, mostly illegible (in a sense of “not being a website”; I do list three Czech sites). Czech sources, both of legible and illegible, are useful mainly for assessing internal situation in Ukraine, whose coverage in mainstream English media is, um, lacking.My standard formula for definition of victory/compromise/defeat, which got refined but not substantially altered after first few updates, based on a feedback from wonderful Astral Codex Ten commenters, is:

Ukrainian victory:

I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.

I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.

Compromise then is an outcome somewhere between minimal conditions for victory and minimal conditions for defeat.

I do occasionally get pushback that I define Ukrainian victory too narrowly, to which my stock answer is that my starting point is what Ukrainian government defines as its war goals and subtracting a little from them to what I feel Ukrainian people would realistically thought of as a victory. Which is very different from sentiments one occasionally hears from non-Ukrainians of the type “if Ukraine survives the war, that means they won”.

*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.