This market resolves "YES" if Russia closes its borders to the majority of men of military age for at least two weeks before the end of 2023.
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Signals of whitelist-style Russian border closure lately from UA sources:
- Reznikov (defense minister) says he's "absolutely confident" RU will close the border for men <55y in the beginning of January (along with tightened martial law + a more massive mobilization wave). It doesn't seem like this guy made that many public predictions like this before. He did have a very imprecise Kherson assessment and was featured in a couple of colorful propaganda videos, but they weren't peddling specific near-term misinformation on this scale.
- Podolyak (presidential advisor) mirrored this and commented saying that he's not sure about the exact dates Reznikov named but he's "confident the general picture is correct based on intel obtained in Dec" because a greater RU mobilization volume is needed and it's difficult to support it w/o a border closure. I wouldn't place trust in particulars of what he says since he often makes exaggerated and emotional statements, but he basically confirmed the story.
- Danilov (national sec & defense council chair) mirrored this with less confidence but a week earlier than others, citing <65y upper age limit for men. Plenty of controversial and flavorful statements from him before, some inaccuracies, but it doesn't seem like he was planting such psyops before.
- Budanov (spy chief) mirrored this, saying the decision was made to close the borders and naming Jan 5 as the date in docs. His forecaster reputation looks tarnished though. E.g. he did let the war news out in Nov'21 and said other reasonable stuff, but he also pushed Putin coup nonsense in Mar'22.
- The disclosure format of these videos and announcements doesn't particularly appear like it's oriented at Russians at scale. Instead, it's mostly shown on Ukrainian TV channels in shows and in interviews. So it doesn't neatly fit the pattern of content distribution I would expect for misinformation. Reznikov's statement (maybe the most explicit piece), even though it is oriented at Russians, has lowish num of views (100-200K) compared to copies of the video on Ukrainian TV YT channels (1M+). When I looked into random telegram discussions of this in Russian chats, people mostly seem quick to dismiss the disclosure.
- Similarly, if this was a psyop, I think a more coordinated format of delivery is slightly more likely, but they disclosed the info with some differences in presentation, confidence levels, and timelines. And then you don't need many people highlighting it from different angles necessarily, it can be just one guy, and then you publicize it widely.
- All these officials have been occupying their govt positions for more than a year.
- Reznikov and Budanov made it explicit that Russians would not be able to fly away via Belarus. On that note, Putin visited Minsk for the first time in 3y+ on Dec 19 (slightly before the disclosures), together with Lavrov and Shoigu.
- Putin-Xi held talks/video-summit on Dec 30 (about a week before border closure per UA officials), announced 2 weeks prior. Last time they talked officially seems to be the Samarkand summit which happened a week before the September mobilization.
- If it's mostly an honest intel disclosure for the most part (likely), conveyed confidence can be misguided, it could be one of several plans and not that final, things could change quickly (e.g. after the Xi meeting), maybe they'd mobilize people but borders would only be closed at some threshold outflow and not immediately, etc.
- If it was actual exit visa style border controls, maybe we'd see leaks of the whitelist construction as it's such a decentralized process (as there were plenty with covid) but I haven't seen any.