As the war in Ukraine continues to escalate, one obvious request is: Tell me how this ends.
Although it's a mystery without any clues, it’s an important question, with the death toll mounting, the atrocities continuing, Vladimir Putin brandishing Russia’s nuclear arsenal and cutting off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, U.S. President Joe Biden asking Congress for another $33 billion in aid and other NATO members sending more weaponry to Ukraine.
Here are some tentative answers from more than two dozen current and former U.S. and NATO military and intelligence officials, diplomats and other experts.
Their responses vary, but the general consensus is that the war in Ukraine will not end anytime soon because it is, as one respondent put it, “an existential struggle for both Putin and (Ukrainian President Volodomyr) Zelensky”. Instead, a majority of the respondents ventured, the fighting will continue at some level while both sides try to drain their opponent’s patience, resources and resolve.
Putin, offered one current senior U.S. military official, “is probably still betting that we and our NATO allies will eventually be consumed by our internal bickering and dysfunction and lose interest in what’s going on far away — and in paying for it”.
A current NATO political leader called far right French politician Marine Le Pen’s loss to President Emmanuel Macron a setback for Putin, but one that, with “a wobbly Germany, probably did not erase his hope for a populist wave sweeping Europe, maybe resuming with the French parliamentary elections in June”.
While Biden’s success at mustering support for Zelensky appears to have surprised Putin, a number of respondents on both sides of the Atlantic said they think the Russian leader still sees the U.S. as a decadent, declining power that’s its own worst enemy, consumed by partisan and ideological bickering over whether arithmetic books are grooming students to become gays or lesbians.
“He’s probably also thinking that inflation and more new information about the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election will push Ukraine off the front pages,” said one Democratic member of Congress.
There also was a general consensus that both Russia and Ukraine’s allies think economics are on their side.
Putin, a number of respondents said, thinks Ukraine’s allies will buckle under the pressure of inflation and rising energy prices, while he can expect some economic help from China in addition to the elimination of its tariff on coal imports.
Ukraine’s allies, meanwhile, think the pressure from ever tighter economic sanctions, atop mounting military casualties and equipment losses, eventually will force Putin to abandon at least his most ambitious goal — beheading, both literally and figuratively, Zelensky’s government and installing a puppet regime that will end Ukraine’s flirtation with the West and return it to its rightful place in a resurrected Russian empire.
With that summary, and bearing in mind that armchair warriors often fail, here are some of the experts’ complete and unedited thoughts about how, when and whether the war in Ukraine might end:
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“A ‘frozen conflict’ on steroids. It doesn't ‘end’,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence officer.
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“Proof of concept for a likely Russian Ukraine strategy is available in the Astana Process, where ‘peace talks’ were another way of prosecuting an extended war. One author described it as ‘making peace to sustain war,’ said a former U.S. official who now works as a private consultant.
“While the Russian military may boast about a revivified campaign with goals of dominating the South and East, the reality is more likely a campaign focused on bettering Russia's position in the Donbas beyond the line of control while promoting instability in the rest of the country — disrupting the planting season and agricultural supply chain so as to export uncertainty to global grain markets and denying Kyiv the ability to undertake a real economic recovery by occasional attacks and asymmetric warfare in the areas Moscow could not dominate by conventional means.
“To what purpose? Sapping NATO resolve to provide huge amounts of reconstruction aid and denying Zelensky the stability he needs to restore hope and a path to the future. That's a lower cost option for Moscow than sustaining a high-intensity campaign, and it preoccupies NATO while he steps up violence in Transnistria and perhaps Georgia.”
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“Years from now after Putin leaves power and his successor decides it isn’t worth fighting anymore,” said a foreign policy expert at a major conservative think tank.
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“The precursors of how the war in Ukraine will end are likely to surround the conflict, rather than reveal themselves in the battlefield or its trends,” responded a former senior American intelligence officer. “In the United States, they will emerge in November when an administration finds itself hamstrung by a Congress that will make every decision a political contest, subsuming even actual agreement on ends in an endless politicized debate over means, all orchestrated for a domestic audience and electorate focused on an election two years hence, and oblivious to the consequences of the corrosive contest unfolding.
“In Europe, the end will come as weak leaders, a collapsing center, and an uncertain front line in East Europe contemplate an American role that leaders have understandably concluded will only weaken over time. And in Ukraine, the end will come in a pyrrhic victory over an invader who will win for losing, irrespective of his crimes and their sanctimonious condemnation by a West too weakened to continue the fight.”
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“I see no scenario in which this ends with a negotiated settlement (a la the Dayton Accords) and Putin stays in power,” said a former journalist and U.S. official. “So that leaves protracted conflict, perhaps at less intensity, indefinitely, until Putin goes (for whatever reason); or direct conflict with NATO if Russia topples the Kyiv government — or forces it into a small section of the country (the western part of the country) — and in the process, or by extension, clashes with NATO countries.
“My change since this latest phase began is to actually believe what the Russians are saying instead of dismissing it as trial balloons or bluster. They are trying to do exactly what they said they would do in Ukraine (eliminate it), and we didn't believe they would do so. I feel the same now about the nukes.
“I'm fully anticipating use of nuclear weapons by the Russians, and am uncertain how the West will respond.
“Gary Kasparov was dismissing, the other day, the comparison of Putin to a chess player. Chess players play by rules and nothing is hidden on the board. That hardly describes Putin's style. Instead, said Kasparov, Putin is a damn good poker player, consistently making the most of weak hands.”
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“What would a ceasefire have looked like with Hitler?” asked a retired American clandestine service officer. “Imagine a US or UK-brokered ceasefire in which he got to keep Poland, the Sudetenland, and Austria, or maybe France, Belgium and Holland? No. Lend-lease and then full US involvement in the war was the only choice. It was costly, deadly, and won through a preponderance of force, a willingness to pour our industrial complex into war efforts (thus pulling the US out of its deep depression), and by depleting the enemy (both Germany and Japan).
“The parallel lessons before us with Putin and Ukraine are clear, not ambiguous. The US must keep the allied front united and confront Russia with a preponderance of force, a willingness to pour our ENORMOUS economies and industrial complexes into the fight, and KEEP UP THE PRESSURE so that Ukraine does not collapse and the cost of constant war depletes the Russian arsenal. China needs to see this; Iran needs to see this; North Korea and Pakistan need to see that a ‘regional war’ will be met with global resistance — militarily and economically.
“We must be patient and persistent. Russia understands power, not talk. They must be beaten. Period. There is too much at stake.”
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“It does not end abruptly or conclusively in contrast to World War I or World War II,” replied a scholar and former intelligence official. “Rather, I foresee a gradual petering out of the conflict as Russia gets enough territory to declare victory — at a minimum a land bridge to Crimea — but too much for Ukraine to accept as part of a contractual agreement.
“Meanwhile, uncertainties — Putin’s health and the bite of sanctions on Russia — will weigh on Russian decisionmaking but, I suspect, not enough to lead to a reversal of Russian gains achieved on Ukraine’s eastern front. Ukrainian leaders will be faced with facts on the ground that they cannot reverse but cannot acknowledge as final.
“Europe (and the United States) will have to decide how long to maintain the most onerous sanctions on Russia, risking a collapsing state with nuclear weapons and a UN Security Council veto on NATO’s borders.”
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The most optimistic response was from a former journalist who’s now a university professor: “I believe it ends with a clear military defeat for Russia, perhaps a face-saving peace that preserves Russian control of Crimea, and maybe the rump Donbas states, but not sure about that. And leads, eventually, to the downfall of Putin.”
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Robin Knight, a British author and former Moscow correspondent, offered a more detailed assessment, which with his permission will be published separately.