Karlin is worth reading because, though born in the Soviet Union, he spent most of his early years in England before repatriating himself back to Russia. As such, he is fluent in English and gives us a clear window into Russian populist/nationalistl ideology, an ideology that sees little room for reluctant recruits to their proposed Russian world to decide for themselves about joining.
This article was published a week before the invasion, and makes some surprisingly prescient predictions about how events would unfold, rejecting the idea held by most in the West that some kind of limited annexation of predominantly Russian areas was the goal. He got it right, and he thought it correct, and furthermore that there was a distinct window to execute this project that would likely not persist.
One fascinating aspect of his analysis is that he frankly acknowedges, and supports, the patently cynical negotiation stance of the Russian administration. Consider this: "Even as the military buildup proceeded apace, Russia forwarded demands to NATO to disavow further expansion (including Ukraine), and to withdraw foreign military forces from the ex-Warsaw Pact states. Regardless of one’s stance on NATO expansion, this is an objectively and patently impossible ultimatum, and the Kremlin clearly designed it to be so (even leaving aside the minor matter of their intended recipient being a country it has labeled as “agreement-incapable”
He was dead wrong on one aspect however: the level of Ukrainian resistance, and the manifest incompetence of the Russian forces. He thought it would all be over in short order.
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There is a good chance that the coming week will either see the culmination of the biggest and most expensive military bluff in world history, or a speed run towards Russian Empire 2.0, with Putin launching a multi-pronged assault invasion of Ukraine to take back Kiev (“the mother of Russian cities”) and the historical provinces of Novorossiya.
There is debate over which of these two scenarios will pan out. The Metaculus predictions market has given the war scenario a 50/50 probability since around mid-January, spiking to 60-70% in the past few days. This happens to coincide with the public assessments of several military analysts: Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were notably early on the ball, as were some of this blog’s commenters, e.g. Annatar. The chorus of skeptics is diverse, but includes Western journalists and Russian liberals who tend to believe Putin’s Russia is too much of a cynical kleptocracy to dare go against the West so brazenly (e.g. Oliver Carroll, Leonid Volkov); Western Russophiles who are all too aware of and disillusioned with hysterical media fabrications about Russia, and are applying faulty pattern matching (e.g. Michael Tracey); and Ukrainian activists who have spent the last eight years hyperventilating about “Russian aggression” and have been reduced to shock and disbelief now that the real thing is staring in their face.
For the record, my own position is that the war scenario was ~50% probable since early January, might be as high as 85% now, and it will likely happen soon