Where will Ukraine be in a year? Four scenarios that could end the war

“It is not just that no one really knows how this invasion started,” he said, “it’s that no one, no one knows how it might end.” That was what I was told recently by a retired Russian army officer who, to his great relief, emigrated to Latvia two years ago. He’s not the only one uncertain of where things go from here. This is a war that has defied expert analysis and punditry alike, from Vladimir Putin’s refusal to let his generals fight the war they trained to fight, to the Ukrainians’ dogged and skilful resistance and, increasingly, counter-attacks. 

Now the Russians are radically changing their approach, withdrawing from the north of Ukraine and giving up on any thought of trying to take Kyiv, and instead focusing on the east and south-east of the country. Although they may look on the ropes, it is certainly too soon to count them out. They have pulled many of their battalion tactical groups back to Belarusian and Russian soil to rearm and regroup, and will soon have to address the dilemma of how to handle the imminent end of the year-long national service terms of those conscripts drafted last spring. 

A new batch of 134,500 young men are being drafted this spring, from April 1 to July 15, but it will take months for them to be trained and ready to take part in the war. While conscripts only represent a minority of the forces deployed to Ukraine, this churn creates further disruption. Unless Putin is willing to break his own taboo and call this an actual war – something that ordinary Russians currently could get up to 15 years in prison for doing – then 2021-vintage conscripts will have to be allowed to go home, bringing with them real knowledge of what is actually going on under the guise of the “special military operation”.

Yet in time, the Russians will probably be able to draw on their reserves and take advantage of shorter supply lines to the Eastern front. They may also be able to address the obvious weaknesses in command, discipline and logistics that have dogged them throughout this short but ugly war. None of that is to say that the Russians are likely to win – but they are not likely to lose a more circumscribed conflict, either.

It is hard enough to be sure exactly what has happened in the past month and a half, let alone to try to predict where things may be in a year’s time. Nonetheless, it is worth trying to sketch out some of the possible alternatives, not least to help illuminate where and how Western involvement may be of some help in avoiding the nightmares and encouraging the more positive scenarios. From the bloodiest to the most benign, here are four possible outcomes.

It seems unlikely that either side will be able to deliver a convincing knock-out blow. Moscow is trying to encircle Ukraine’s “Joint Forces Operation” – essentially some of their best troops – currently engaged along the Donbas front line. The Russians have so far not demonstrated the speed, skill or coordination that a major encirclement would likely entail, so this seems implausible. On the other hand, however heroic the defence of Mariupol, this looks likely soon to fall, leaving the Russians in control of a stretch of land along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, connecting their Donbas territories with Crimea. Beyond that, they may well be able to consolidate their hold on eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but that is about their lot: the western port city of Odessa, quite possibly even the embattled city of Kharkiv would remain beyond their grasp.

But these occupied territories would be fortified and protected, with easy supply across the long border with Russia, and the well-defended bastion of Crimea keeping Ukrainian ships and aircraft at bay. Here the Russians, not the Ukrainians, would have the advantage of the defence, and while brave Ukrainian partisans would continue to harry the occupiers, the National Guard and the Federal Security Service would prosecute as ruthless and relentless a campaign against them as the Germans did the resistance in occupied France. 

One former Russian officer still living in Moscow warned me “the worse thing is if they send in the Chechens”. Fighters from the southern Russian region of Chechnya, technically members of the National Guard but in practice oath-sworn to capricious and brutal Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, have a terrifying reputation. They have been associated with some of the worst atrocities in the war to date – including the massacres at Bucha – and would be used as Moscow’s stormtroopers behind the front line, hunting down suspected guerrillas and visiting terrible reprisals on communities thought to be harbouring them. 

Those front lines would be at once hotly contested and essentially static. Both sides would be increasingly exhausted, not least in weapons. Russia has already lost many of its more advanced tanks and precision-guided missiles, so it is having to start taking older vehicles out of storage depots where they have been mothballed for years. As for the Ukrainians, while the West will still support them with weapons, these are being consumed more quickly than they are being produced and Nato stocks may begin to run low. In order to minimise the training time required, former Warsaw Pact states are also beginning to provide their dated Soviet-made tanks to Kyiv, with the Czech Republic leading the way. 

In some ways, then, this would be closer to the trench warfare of World War One than modern, high-tempo manoeuvre war. Periodically, one side or the other would gather what forces it could and spend carefully husbanded resources on launching an offensive. Some territory would be taken, a village here, maybe even a town there, before the attack runs out of steam. But as likely as not, the other side would then launch a counter-attack of its own. The front line would shift back and forth, and no doubt generals on both sides would express their confidence that “one more push” would prove decisive, but in practice, this would not be a frozen conflict, but a hot deadlock, with both Ukraine and Russia burning resources neither could afford on a war neither could win.

Likelihood rating

Sadly, at the moment this looks as if it might be the most likely outcome, all depending on the much-anticipated coming battle for control of the Donbas.

Many of the same Western leaderships publicly lauding Zelensky as some modern hybrid of Che Guevara and Winston Churchill, and competing to find more superlative adjectives to describe Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, are also privately wishing this war could be ended. It is a distraction from other priorities, whether achieving net zero or America’s long-heralded “pivot to Asia”. It poses a constant risk of escalation, of Nato being dragged into a direct confrontation with Moscow. It forces them to plunder their own arsenals to arm the Ukrainians, and spend more on defence that they would like. 

A combination of their quiet arm-twisting and a genuine desire in Kyiv to try to end the bloodshed might induce Ukraine to accept a peace deal that is neither fair nor satisfying, but does at least stop the shooting. 

Admittedly, this looked unlikely enough even before the news broke about the Bucha massacres and now seems even more implausible, but a deadlock in the east, a hard winter, and a sense that the West is feeling “Ukraine fatigue” might make what is unpalatable today appear the least worst evil tomorrow. 

So Kyiv would renounce its hopes of Nato membership in return for Western security guarantees that could prove no more effective than the ones it had before. It is currently talking about something as powerful as Nato’s Article 5, which would virtually demand the guarantors to intervene militarily if Moscow invaded again. The power of any such paper promises depends entirely on their credibility, though, and if Moscow did want to pick up where it left off, it would seek some workaround. Perhaps, as in Georgia in 2008, it would provoke its target into throwing the first punch.

Meanwhile, Kyiv would also relinquish any formal claim to Crimea or the “people’s republics” of the Donbas. It is almost inconceivable that cities such as Mariupol, which have fought so long and so valiantly against the Russians, could be sacrificed in the name of a deal. This would not only be a deal-breaker for Zelensky, but also political suicide. 

The Russians would essentially retain only the territory they occupied at the start of the war, but now with a kind of strong-armed international legitimacy. Moscow might then revive the old notion of combining the “people’s republics” into a puppet state of “Novorossiya” – “New Russia” – or simply bite the bullet and annex them. Part and parcel of this mutilated peace would have been some kind of agreement with the West that saw some of the sanctions lifted, but not the crucial ones targeting Russia’s defence-industrial complex and the banks and suppliers that service it. 

This is a peace that would leave no one happy. Moscow would likely view it merely as a breathing space, a chance to lick its wounds and brood about the way Ukraine resisted its rightful destiny of being part of a wider Russian-led Slavic commonwealth. The West would be locked into a new Cold War with a hostile Russia. 

As for Ukraine, it would continue to remain vulnerable to future Russian aggression but arguably have even less traction with the West to demand continued economic and military support. At the time, of course, everyone would promise Kyiv all kinds of help, but over the months and years, new governments would face new crises, new demands on their resources. Ukraine would increasingly be left to its own devices – and subject to continued Russian “sub-threshold” pressure.

Likelihood rating

As more atrocities come to light, and Moscow digs in its heels, it looks increasingly unlikely that such a deal could be imposed on Ukraine.

It is alternatively possible that the conflict will freeze along this new front line. Ukraine might become freer to chart its own course. Moscow may be busy managing an economy in crisis, a restive population and a disaffected elite at home, unable to accept the humiliation of withdrawal, yet unwilling to spend more resources on a futile war. The threat of a missile or artillery attack across the border – perhaps even from a Belarus that is now little more than a Russian puppet state – is also enough to encourage Kyiv to focus on reconstruction and consolidation. Every now and then there is a skirmish across the new line of contact, but just as during most of the period 2015-21, a grudging and mutually suspicious stalemate becomes the norm.

Of course, it would not be quite the same as before, even allowing for the larger area under Russian control. The days when people could still leave the occupied territories, whether to collect pensions, visit family or undergo medical treatment, would be a thing of the past. Concerns about weapons being smuggled in to the partisans and news of the reign of terror within these territories filtering out would ensure that the Russians keep the line of contact locked down. 

Russian-held areas would bit by bit become either akin to Chechnya – horrorscapes of filtration camps, arbitrary arrest and constant insecurity offset by shiny vanity projects paid for by Moscow – or shabby caricatures of the old Soviet Union, like the Transnistrian break-away region in Moldova, an unrecognised pseudo-state whose currency is not even accepted in Russia, but where statues of Lenin still stand tall.

With proper long-term assistance and a serious reform programme, Ukraine might become the West Germany to the Donbas East – a country where freedom and economic dynamism could go hand in hand. That time, though, Moscow could do nothing but build a wall – West Germany could prosper precisely because it was part of Nato and its security was guaranteed. This Ukraine’s relationship with the West would be different. 

If there is a model for the West German version of Ukraine, it may well be Israel: a state defined by vulnerability and ever-present threat. The popular movement in support of the armed forces would be turned into a wider campaign to create a nation under arms, with schoolchildren learning how to field-strip an assault rifle along with their maths and history, and conscription possibly even extended to women. As Israel shows, a militarised nation can also be a democratic one, but the experience of war and atrocities, and the constant threat of Russian invasion or subversion, would also likely squeeze away some of the diversity and even tolerance of the country: a wartime mentality exalting patriotism and making a cult of the martyrs of 2022 would be hard to challenge.

As Russia becomes mired in stagnation and repression, Putin virtually dragging it back into a post-ideological version of the 1970s Soviet Union, there will be those in Ukraine, buoyed by the country’s martial spirit and marvelling at the shiny new weapons with which their forces have been re-equipped, who will start to dream of the day when they finally drive the Russians out. The precedent they would cite would be the “Croatian scenario” after the four-day operation in 1995 when, having lost about a fifth of their territory to Serbian-backed separatists, the Croatians built up their forces and launched a savage lightning war that retook this lost land.

Likelihood rating

This gradual settle into a stalemate is a much more likely scenario than the ugly deal.

Of course, there is always the chance – however small – that things will take a much more positive turn. The impact of Western sanctions on Russia is clearly considerable, but hard truly to assess: never before has such a level of economic warfare been waged against such a large economy, that is so deeply connected into global supply chains and financial systems.

These will not bring down the Russian economy as such, but will create serious challenges, from rising unemployment to shortages of food and medicine. This gives Moscow less margin for error and bad luck. A Moscow-based political analyst texted me recently that “people in [government] offices are quietly beginning to talk not so much about 1917 and revolution, but Novocherkassk”. In 1962, by chance, news of an increase in food prices happened to coincide with the announcement of an effective pay cut in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk. A strike became a protest, and when local police and even an army garrison couldn’t or wouldn’t disperse it, then a protest became a challenge for the state. The KGB and security troops rolled in, and when the shooting was over, almost a hundred had been killed or wounded. The reason this so scared the Soviet leadership was precisely that Novocherkassk was not special, and what happened there could happen anywhere. This helped establish a consensus within the Soviet elite that general secretary Nikita Khrushchev was becoming a danger to them all – a consensus that led to his ousting two years later.

There is growing speculation that Putin is seriously ill, but what if he is even more sick than is assumed? Or if converging crises during a hard, hungry winter lead to protests that a National Guard – itself smarting because it felt it was used for cannon-fodder in Ukraine – does not control? It’s an extreme and unlikely scenario, but one that could see a cabal of generals, politicians, even senior security officers forcing Putin to stand down, offering him the choice between a safe retirement and arrest.

This would not mean peace and love breaking out on every side. The new regime would be composed of opportunists and kleptocrats, and unless they had seized power by force, the demands of maintaining a ruling coalition would likely mean they could not surrender Putin and others accused of war crimes. Nonetheless, they could claim that this war was Putin’s, not theirs. This may not be the free, democratic Russia the West would like to see, but for now it would settle for a pragmatic and more peaceable one.

Russian troops would be withdrawn, even from the Donbas. It is hard to see any Russian government being willing to give up Crimea, but even here a new face-saving fudge could be found, such as the promise of a genuine referendum on the peninsula’s future in five years, held under international supervision. Kyiv may not get to see Putin in the dock at the Hague, but at least Moscow would formally recognise its full sovereignty, and even promise some kind of reparations, albeit largely in the shape of free gas supplies and tariff exemptions.

Ukraine would at last be at peace. There would be much to do, from rebuilding the country to integrating territories under Russian proxy control for eight years. Nor would Ukrainians be likely to trust Russians for a long, long time, and in the meantime their borders would bristle with the best weapons they can buy, and their quest to join the EU and, yes, Nato would be pursued with zeal. 

Likelihood rating

Depressingly small.  However unlikely, it does mean that one can conceive of scenarios in which the guns fall silent. The balance of probabilities, though, is that a year from now, Ukraine will still not have found true peace.