In this video, my first substantive one, I lay out my theory of conventional deterrence and use it to explain Russian thinking in the run up to the war in Ukraine as well why the war has taken the form it has over the past 4+ years.

The key question I address is: why wasn’t Russia deterred from attacking Ukraine? After all, Russia did not have a large and finely-tuned army and the West had gone to substantial lengths to arm and train the Ukrainian army between February 2014 and February 2022.

This was not a case of Bambi versus Godzilla. So, why did conventional deterrence fail in this case?

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REFERENCE

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction
0:31 Overview: Russia, Ukraine & Conventional Deterrence
3:25 What is Conventional Deterrence?
5:20 The Military Variable: Three Strategies
8:52 Which Military Strategies Deter and Which Fail
11:34 The Limited-Aim Strategy Explained
13:23 The Political Variable and The Pressure To Go to War
15:30 The Political Variable: Sinai Peninsula 1973 & Pearl Harbor 1941
18:43 Turning to Ukraine: The Conventional Wisdom
22:07 Why the "Russian Blitzkrieg" Story Is Wrong
28:38 What Actually Happened: A Limited-Aim War
34:53 Summary & Conclusions

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.