@m0xee

I don’t think these are actually really bad. Don’t look only at the blue vs red strip - note that “blue” represents Ukraine’s victory which most people understand as return to 1991 borders, including Crimea, which by now should be obvious to anyone following the war is a very remote perspective and only possible in the case of Putin’s Russia collapse. Which I guess many people including myself would love to see, but objectively it’s a low probability event.

So all other answers except for red are probably a mark of realism - if you’d ask me, I’d probably be in the “don’t know” group because there’s too many variables defining the outcome of the war that I can’t honestly answer the question about its “most likely outcome”.

I’m personally doing everything in my power to get it into the blue field, like thousands of other people, but fully realising my impact on the final outcome is limited.

@kravietz
Sorry for another long post, I'm trying to set my own thought on the subject straight and putting it into text often helps

> objectively it’s a low probability event
It's more likely than most think — quite the opposite, it's bound to happen — no matter what they tell you, Russia isn't religious enough to become like Iran, nor it's possible to seal it shut like it had happened to the North Korea — it's too big and it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle and go 50 years back in time.
But I'm avoiding giving any predictions at this point as every time I do it I underestimate the capacity for how miserable Western politicians can be — willing to sacrifice everything for short-term political gain.
Every time you do absolutely crazy shit and it plays out, you lose touch even more — that's how it is with authoritarian regimes. In addition to that, incompetence accumulates on every level — people qualified to do the job love freedom, every time you choose loyalty over competence you bring yourself closer to being with underlings who lie to you and then do exactly as they are told instead of warning you and doing what's better.
And that is why I don't think that it will happen as a result of some external influence or, god forbid, revolution — no, I think it will be something seemingly insignificant, some really dumb move — so insignificant that we might even laugh at it in a few years.
This makes it very difficult to predict. Could anyone predict the collapse of USSR? I don't think so — everyone knew where this was going, but still wasn't expecting it until it started happening, and likewise now — even the most devout patriot doesn't have a vision of Russia's future at the moment. But it also means that it might happen really soon — and it will put these scenarios of 2-3-5 years of war to shame.
Experts don't see it behind numbers, they might tell that the economy "overcame challenges", but how come that economy that was in decline in 2013 went through "invisible" war, sanctions, the pandemic, then full-scale war and major sanctions and now is thriving? Because it didn't overcome any challenges — I've seen it with my own eyes, how we went from half the phones on Moscow subway being iPhones to 80% phones being imported being Chinese brands — not made in China, Chinese BRANDS. Numbers get pushed around precisely to fool the experts, but if anything, the economy isn't in any better shape than it was in 2013. Maybe Putin could use all these challenges to carry out some important reforms? No, it's not the case either — remember the "Putin solving the expensive gasoline problem for 20 years" meme mentioned yesterday? That's exactly how it goes and he only uses the war to justify the lowering living standards. But even if you can fool the experts with numbers and patriots with reforms that are right behind the corner — you can't do it forever. If you want to play the arms race you have to have a healthy economy — the assets of international companies you can seize and give to your friends to manage won't keep coming.
I think economy is the first thing that might start showing cracks, some experts get fooled by numbers some are happy to tell you how resilient it is for a generous bonus from Kremlin, but it won't make me — the eyewitness of it, buy it.
There is one more thing — ethnic conflicts. Those are often used by authorities and FSB themselves to shift the blame and turn people against each other — and before the war they did it to a great success. It's easy to intimidate the students supporting Navalny or to crack down on the made-up "international LGBT movement" — but it's not so easy with ethnic or religious groups. And it's true, they still have an army to do the policing inside the country — probably even more numerous than the regular army, but war also brings lots of lethal weapons into circulation — one wrong move and it might spin out of control real fast. I can see this going ripe and now I can also see them losing grip of it, things like this will be happening more often: https://theins.ru/en/news/268383
Remember this guy, Ilya Ponomarev? He gave an interview to a US media outlet a few months ago — sorry, I don't have a link on hand. This went largely unnoticed in the West, nor is he popular in Russia, but that's not the point — in that interview he mentions the weak points and how ethnic conflicts could be utilized to destabilize Russia from within — I do not support that as it would obviously turn into a bloodbath, but I think he's very spot-on with that. If like Kremlin tells us, someone was willing to destabilize Russia — they'd be doing this, not… forcing the Danish shoe maker to leave the country 🤦
@m0xee