For the United States, it is certain: Vladimir Putin’s plan was to capture Kiev and oust Ukrainian President Zelensky within days.
That did not work. More than two weeks after the start of the invasion, Russian tanks are standing on the Dnieper River, but a Russian victory on the battlefield is by no means certain. With Putin’s “special military operation” mired in bloody chaos, analysts are left with one question: how will this end?
Nobody can predict the future. It is possible, however, to draw up scenarios, not as prognosis, but as first aid for thinking about Putin’s war. The actual outcome will probably contain elements of different scenarios. At the same time, however, it is also clear: in most scenarios, Putin does not achieve what he intended.
The military campaign has come to a complete standstill, with Russian losses steadily mounting. To replenish the decimated units, Putin has been forced to deploy conscripts. However, the resistance of Ukrainians cannot be broken. In a war, morale weighs three times more than material, goes one of the many clichés about armed conflict.
After only two weeks, Russian state TV starts asking difficult questions aloud. Moments later, with the first Russian conscripts killed, opinion in Russia turns against the Kremlin – the state propaganda loses out to the Russian mothers who are mourning on Red Square.
Putin is forced to withdraw behind the Ukrainian-Russian border. In the least-disastrous scenario for him, he will be allowed to keep one or more of the three Ukrainian areas that he also had under control before the invasion – Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea. A consolation prize to limit the loss of face.
A loss could also turn out to be more disastrous for him: Putin loses Russia. An anti-Putin coalition of frustrated oligarchs, crushed Paladins and disappointed top military personnel is formed, who overthrow the regime. Against that scenario, Putin has decimated political opposition and critical media in recent years. In this scenario too, the war has disrupted a country and cost thousands of lives.
Russia takes power in Kiev. Ukrainian President Zelensky cannot justify any more death and destruction in his country and is taking refuge abroad. The Ukrainian armed forces lay down their arms. Putin installs a regime led by ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled in 2014.
Russian state media crows victory: Putin’s mission is complete, historic Russia is one again. Moreover, the sanctions coalition that the West had forged is slowly crumbling. Businesses and citizens in the fickle democracies are beginning to feel the pain of lower profits and higher bills. Bakers predict a bread price of 5 euros.
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In a favorable scenario for Putin, he will sing out the sanctions. A severe economic crisis does not necessarily mean the downfall of an autocratic regime, researched historian Tom Pepinsky.
More realistically, Putin finds that although he has won the war, he has a huge problem with it. Ukraine is slightly larger than France. It’s an area you can’t just occupy. “Even the 190,000 soldiers that have now been deployed are not enough to control the country,” said Tim Sweijs, defense expert at the The Hague Center for Strategic Studies. “Just look at Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Ukrainians have no intention of resigning themselves to the inevitable, especially after all the sacrifices. A resistance backed by arms and money by the West turns Putin’s war into a protracted guerrilla war, haunting Putin and the rest of his government. Russia is languishing under an international regime of sanctions and isolation.
Scenario 3
Putin Consolidates Conquests, Partition Ukraine
The Zelensky government eventually has to flee from Kiev and settles in Lviv, the new capital. The Russian troops stop at the Dnieper and dig in. “There may come a time when Putin says: let’s declare victory and go home”, says Sweiss. A new border is emerging: southern and eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, will be annexed to Russia. De facto, this means that ‘Russian-speaking’ Ukraine comes under the Russian flag.
Putin would achieve a number of goals in this case, but he runs the risk that the rump state Ukraine will seek permanent affiliation with the West.
Scenario 4
Putin attacks yet another non-NATO country
After Putin stabilizes the situation on the battlefield, his eager eye turns to other buffer zones. “It seems very likely to me that he will continue to Moldova, for example,” said former ambassador Timo Koster, former NATO defense policy director. The Moldovan region of Transnistria is pro-Russian. With Belarus, which he already has in his pocket, and a friendly government in Kiev, little Moldova would control the border area along the entire eastern flank of NATO, from Finland to Turkey. Putin also concludes a military alliance with pro-Russian Serbia. In Belgrade, after two weeks of war, demonstrations continued in front of him.
Putin takes the extra risk because NATO has made it clear that it has no intention of defending non-NATO countries by force of arms. The red line is the NATO border. When the United States threatened Putin with sanctions at the end of 2021, but also said that no soldiers would fight in Ukraine, “Putin saw that as a green light,” Koster thinks. That could also apply to other non-NATO countries.
Scenario 5
Putin tests NATO solidarity
It may even be that Putin thinks that the West will not respond to an attack on a NATO country with military force, Koster suggests. It would be a huge step for Putin, but, says Koster, we can no longer afford not to think about it.
After Ukraine, the Baltic states are also in sight. After all, one theory about Putin’s motivation is that he is not just about Ukraine, but that he wants to rectify the historic misfortune of the Soviet Union’s demise.
However, should Putin decide to invade the Baltic countries, he will immediately get into a fight with soldiers from Western NATO countries, who are stationed there. As a result, Russian aggression in the Baltic region almost immediately results in an armed conflict with NATO. Sweijs considers this scenario unlikely. “NATO has made it very clear that it will react strongly to an attack on an alliance member.”
Scenario 6
NATO intervenes in Ukraine, war with Russia
Both the US and NATO have sent out a clear message in recent weeks: the West does not want to get involved in the war in Ukraine. The question is, however, how tenable that position will remain if Putin burns Ukraine’s major cities to ashes. It is, wrote former American intelligence officer Chris Chivvis for think tank Carnegie, a major challenge for the Biden administration to keep a cool head even then.
The West faces a dilemma: will intervention lead to Putin provocation? “The deterrence by the West has not worked, the question is whether we want to continue to be deterred by Putin,” says Koster. That question keeps coming up: with tougher sanctions, with the delivery or non-delivery of combat aircraft, with the establishment of the no-fly zone that Zelensky so passionately begs for. Public opinion can play a role in this, thinks Sweijs. “In the Western interventions of the past thirty years, the emotion ‘we have to do something’ was often the primary motivation, without the consequences being well thought out. A no-fly zone would be a very dangerous operation.”
“The scenario I am most afraid of,” says Sweijs, is an unintended escalation. A mistake, a wrong interpretation of the actions of the other person, can have major consequences.” The worst possible consequence is the use of nuclear weapons.
Scenario 7
Putin and Zelensky come to an agreement
Half the world is ready to mediate between Kiev and Moscow. After Turkey, China, and Israel, South Africa also reported. Even former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, maligned in his own SPD for not wanting to distance himself from his friend Putin, flew to Moscow for mediation.
Initially, there is little cause for optimism. Temporary safe evacuation routes to allow civilians to escape from besieged cities only get off the ground after several rounds of consultation and with varying degrees of success. A first meeting between the foreign ministers, Koeleba and Lavrov in Antalya, Turkey, yielded hardly anything. Lavrov even denies that Russia invaded Ukraine. But they do speak to each other.
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Russia demands recognition of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea as Russian and wants Ukraine to become a neutral, disarmed country and thus not join the EU or NATO. For Zelensky, the demands are actually unmentionable.
Still, after two weeks of fighting, his government is hinting that something of neutrality is conceivable. NATO, Zelensky tells ABC, made it clear that we are not welcome. He puts everything on EU membership. His chief of staff has let slip that formal transfer of Crimea and the separatist areas to Moscow can be negotiated, but that neutrality and demilitarization are out of the question.
For negotiations to have any chance of success, there must be a ‘hurting stalemate’, says Sweijs. Putin must realize that further warfare poses a greater risk than a deal. Kiev will have to realize that defeating Russia is impossible. That situation does not seem to have been reached for the time being.
Scenario 8
Cold War 2.0
In all scenarios in which Putin remains in power, the West must prepare for a long period of confrontation, a new variant of the Cold War. Far-reaching economic decoupling is then on the horizon, certainly if Putin answers Western sanctions with the nationalization of Western companies. NATO and the EU will have to adapt to high military spending and a strong permanent military presence in Eastern Europe.
And Putin? There are virtually no sustainable favorable scenarios for him. Sweijs: “Putin has become the new Saddam Hussein or Assad in all scenarios.”