Ukraine How might the war end Five scenarios

Instead, over the past year Ukrainian forces have consistently and successfully pushed back the invading troops. As long as there is no direct conflict between Russia and Nato then there is no reason for this crisis, bad as it is, to descend into a full-scale world war. https://rentry.co/u6iif9zo are feeling distinctly nervous that Russian forces might not stop at Ukraine and instead use some pretext to "come to the aid" of the ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltics and invade.

The news from the battlefield, the diplomatic noises off, the emotion of the grieving and displaced; all of this can be overwhelming. So let us step back for a moment and consider how the conflict in Ukraine might play out. What are some of the possible scenarios that politicians and military planners are examining? Few can predict the future with confidence, but here are some potential outcomes.

Could the fighting spread to other countries?

The first - which would be the most optimistic from Kyiv’s perspective - is that Ukrainian forces successfully move towards Mariupol on the Black Sea coast, cutting off Russian forces from the southern part of the country. The move “would also put Crimea at risk and then potentially we could see a collapse of Russian forces and effectively Ukraine could win,” he said. There was, for example, a thread of continuity between the first and second world wars. To be sure, a lot happened in the intervening years that could have changed the direction of what followed.

• Senior Ukrainians are still doing their best to manage expectations about the summer offensive.









• There remains speculation that the Kremlin will seek a fresh mobilisation, and another worry is that Beijing may start covertly supplying Russia.









• There's of course the possibility that a Ukrainian fightback doesn't pose a significant challenge to Russian forces that remain in Ukraine — after all, thousands of fighters are civilians who taken up arms and have been hastily trained.









• Russian Communist supporters hold flags including one of the Soviet Union, as they take part in a rally next to the Karl Marx monument, marking the "Defender of the Fatherland Day," the former "Day of the Soviet Army", in downtown Moscow on Feb. 23.









• But on the other, having lost more than 7,000 of his troops, according to the U.S. government, Putin may decide to escalate his bombing campaign, which has already left parts of Ukraine in ruin and, at a conservative estimate, more than 900 civilians dead.









• In theory, that gives the West influence over the direction of the war.

In this scenario, the strategists noted, Russia would realize it has "once again fought an unwinnable war, the proverbial quagmire that has trapped many powerful states through history." There's of course the possibility that a Ukrainian fightback doesn't pose a significant challenge to Russian forces that remain in Ukraine — after all, thousands of fighters are civilians who taken up arms and have been hastily trained. There are many questions over who could lead a loyalist regime in Ukraine, one that could resemble that of Belarus' Alexander Lukashenko.

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They also promised to provide assistance to Ukraine if it "should become a victim of an act of aggression". Most of its people do not want their country to become part of Russia. It may not be a member of the European Union or Nato, but it is an ally of European powers and has a pro-Western government. But his remark lives on as a challenge to all policymakers thinking about whether to engage diplomatically - and even militarily - in a potential conflict between two foreign countries. The former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has long been criticised for describing Germany's attempted annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 as "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing".

However, what was not apparent to Russia until the fighting began is that the Ukrainian people are far more willing to fight than they anticipated. According to this approach, wars will end when the problem that caused the war is resolved by fighting on the battlefield. How long the fighting will last and the form it takes depends on the extent and type of the problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame.

I spoke to Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding in Ukraine about the current situation and what to expect from the coming months. Beyond the obvious dangers of a nuclear plant being shelled, there is also anxiety that Russia is trying to connect the facility to the grid in Crimea. If this happens, it’ll be the first time that one country has stolen a nuclear reactor from another. The war has already become very costly for the oligarchs and these costs will only increase with time. When a sufficient number of Putin’s coalition privately turn against the war, this will pressure Putin to end the war or risk his position of power.

• He is a strong believer in a professional army made up of volunteers.









• Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete “dragon’s teeth,” a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II.









• Now the U.S. and European militaries are training Ukrainian forces in Europe.









• The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average.









• But they note it's crucial for Ukraine to be able to show at least some gains in order to maintain Western support for the war into 2024 — and perhaps beyond.









• It may not be a member of the European Union or Nato, but it is an ally of European powers and has a pro-Western government.

Almost three months on, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Russia has suffered a series of significant military setbacks that make any victory for them look a much more distant and difficult prospect – but a swift win for Ukraine doesn’t look likely either. As Ukrainian forces continued to hold off Russian advances on Kyiv, President Biden traveled to Brussels on Wednesday for an emergency meeting with other NATO leaders to discuss how to respond to Russia’s assault and help the 3 million Ukrainians who have fled the country.

One year into the conflict, here are some of your questions about the war answered. Britain is not the only country to be punishing Russia with sanctions - the US has gone further and Germany, for example, has now postponed giving the green light to the massive Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia - but the UK is in the forefront of pushing for penalties. Often described as coldly calculating, like the chess player and judo fighter that he is, his speech on Monday resembled more that of an angry dictator than a shrewd strategist. Let's not forget that Russia and America have, between them, over 8,000 deployable nuclear warheads so the stakes here are stratospherically high.

• Russia’s economy contracted by only a little more than 2 percent last year – far less than expected.









• However, where this line is and if there are any viable alternatives that would better serve the interests of this coalition is questionable.









• Russia achieves a breakthrough in the east either very soon, before Ukraine gets its western weaponry in place in a few weeks, or after a Ukrainian counteroffensive fails.









• In the United States, the intrepid Ukrainian resistance and its battlefield successes soon produced a distinctly upbeat narrative of that country as the righteous David defending the rules and norms of the international order against Putin’s Russian Goliath.









• The fighting has echoes of Russia's long and brutal struggle in the 1990s to seize and largely destroy Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.









• There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances.

In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict. One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer.

• No one can know for sure whether Europe and the United States are headed for a recession, but many economists and business leaders consider it likely.









• The morale of the Ukrainians remained high and their military tactics adept.









• Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained.









• “It would have to get pretty bad for the Russians to get there,” he said, adding that there’s no way of knowing how many reserves the government stashed away after years of fat checks from energy sales.









• At some point, Ukraine will have to decide if there's a military solution to the conflict or if it has to look for another way out without conceding any kind of defeat, Barrons said.









• In his office, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, told the BBC that "Prigozhin is not the most senior. They might become the new political elite".