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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Over the past several months I read all his books. His previous book, Disunited Nations, is probably best for making the demographic argument. He devotes chapters to individual countries, covering their situations in detail, starting with several chapters on China.

(His first book, Accidental Empire, does a good job introducing his overall PoV, applying it to most of the great civilizations in history starting with ancient Egypt. This book predicted in 2014 that Russia would invade the rest of Ukraine by end of 2021. His next book, Absent Superpower, has the most on fossil fuels.)

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What was his theorized motivation for Russian invasion, geopolitical or otherwise? Was it tied to Nato moving in, as others have advocated, or something different?

Reiterating from memory of his lectures on YouTube:

  - The Russians consider some nine-odd geographic boundaries of the former union to be crucial to defense (e.g. between mountains and deserts, certain ports). Without fortifying there, a lot of the Rus land area is open and hard to defend. Interestingly, Ukraine contains only one in Crimea (which they already had) but is on the way to ones in Romania, Poland, etc.
  - With the fall of the union, there was not only a baby bust but also the collapse of technical training programs. The "demographic cliff" means that not only will the army half in size but, e.g. the rail lines and electric are also in danger.
  - While Ukrainian resolve and EU unity were a surprise to even the US, he also sees a leadership failing not unlike the Chinese one - authoritarian that drives out opposition too harshly also drives out the people in the room that push back on bad ideas. FSB had intelligence that overwhelmingly, UA would accept occupation?

An older summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo

Over the course of history, Russia has been invaded 50 times, so they're pretty touchy about that regardless of how peaceful things look at the moment. With their current borders, they have no real geographic barriers. The Soviet Union had pretty good barriers (mountains and such), needing to guard just nine passes, which can be done with relatively limited troops. They currently control just one of those passes. Taking Ukraine restores their control over two more, and provides a base to go further.

Meanwhile, Russia has horrendous demographic problems. Their fertility rate dropped to something like 1.2 children per woman when the Iron Curtain fell, and hasn't recovered. So now their military-age population is aging out. They're not going to have the population to defend Russia with the borders they have now, and right about now is when they start losing the ability to invade countries like Ukraine to expand their borders.

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