Hi Luke, I would encourage you to write down your predictions in a Substack post or otherwise. Give your rationale and timetable, and then circle back to revisit it when the time comes.

In my opinion Russia has already lost this war. It’s goals were to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the E.U. and both of those things will now happen; Ukraine will end up hosting NATO troops and nukes. The East half of the country which broadly supported Russia is permanently lost to them. Russia has bled half a million troops for almost no gains (sacrificing their soldiers in frontline assaults against heavily fortified positions with little to no artillery or air support while simultaneously continuing to send Ukraine massive amounts of oil/gas and failing, intentionally, to bomb the Dniper bridges that Ukraine uses to resupply itself in the East), versus the West has used Ukrainian conscription without caring about their casualties while losing none of their own. Russia has lost Syria and lost access to the European oil and gas market with Nordstream 2 destroyed; with Assad gone there will be a pipeline built from Qatar into Europe to bypass Russian oil. The conflict may be frozen along current lines or close to them, but that is not and will not be a Putin “win”. It is a ruinous Russian defeat, and an intentional one: if you want to understand why, I suggest you start by looking at Strelkov’s 39 questions from early 2023 about the curious state of the conflict: