How will the war in Ukraine end?

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Jordan As the war in Ukraine neared its 100th day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the world that Russian forces now control one-fifth of his country’s territory. For an unprovoked invasion to conquer one-fifth of a country, especially given what we’ve learned about how Russian troops have acted while occupying that territory, is sad and it’s disturbing. It is also worth considering, though, that nearly 100 days after the war began, one fifth is about four-fifths less of Ukraine than many people assumed Russia would control.

Nothing about this war has been certain. That remains as true today as it was in February. At some point, though, somehow this war will end, with a deal with the capture of a capital with Putin soldiers slinking home tails between their legs, or more likely, with a long slow attrition on the front lines that eventually becomes a stalemate. At this point, it’s impossible to tell which of these scenarios will play out. But today we’ll examine what’s happening on the ground now that some of the world’s attention has moved on, what the implications are for summer and fall, and eventually how this conflict might finally close.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Balkan Devlen is a senior fellow at the McDonald Laurier Institute. He is a Superforecaster for Good Judgment Incorporated. We invite him on to discuss foreign policy because he looks both forward and backward. Hey, Balkan.

Balkan Devlen Hello.

Jordan Why don’t we start with the opposite of forecasting? How many people predicted in February when the war in Ukraine began, that it would still be ongoing and still hard fought in June?

Balkan Devlen I think that’s a very good question. First, a lot of people, of course, missed that the war was going to happen. But when it started, I think it led to two different ways of thinking. One, which you saw also among the people who were not actually expecting a war, saying that this will be over soon, Russians will be able to roll through, Ukraine won’t be able to resist. And the others, who are also sort of on the other side and expecting a war–and this is some Western analysts, but also a lot of people in Eastern Europe, in Poland, in the Baltics–who know the situation on the ground and who have been working with Ukrainians and Ukrainian Army and others closely, are arguing that, no, this will not be over quickly.

But the majority, I would say when the war initially started, especially in the first few days, were thinking that this will be over soon, some sort of a settlement or a change of government in Kyiv, and that the blitzkrieg that Putin tried to sort of execute, going all the way to Kyiv would succeed. Of course, after three days, it became quite obvious that that’s not going to work, and that’s not how it is. And the Ukrainians are putting up a very brave and courageous fight, and then people started looking a different way.

Jordan What was the most optimistic prediction in terms of how Ukraine’s military would fare against Russia’s? And did most people not understand Ukraine’s military? And, I’m trying to think of a more official term than their will to fight or their heart, but it sure seems like they’ve been underestimated this entire time.

Balkan Devlen Exactly. And I think morale is an extremely important component of modern warfare. I mean, people tend to focus on the shiny objects and the latest weaponry and so on and so forth. But if you do not have either the capable people who are using those things, as well as who are willing to defend and die, most of the shiny objects could just remain there. Great examples are the Iraqi Army sort of melting away in 2013-14 in the face of ISIS in Mosul, or the Afghan Army in the face of the Taliban just last year. Now we no longer talk about that because the events took over. But the West trained 20 years, provided a lot of weaponry, and they just basically left and the Taliban took over.

So that morale component is extremely important. And I think a lot of people underestimated the degree to which the Ukrainian society and Ukrainian National identity is really consolidated in the past eight years, since the first invasion in 2014, and a lot of the Ukrainian armed forces have been through that training, have been through the front, have been fighting this war for eight years. So it has been there. And that really changed the way people see, both in terms of capabilities, but also their willingness.

They also saw what happens when they do not resist. They see what happens in Donbas. They see what happens to Ukrainians or Ukrainian Patriots in the occupied Crimea when they do not resist. So I think those two things that they experienced over eight years and the notion that they lost 14,000 people, as well as knowing what happens if they do not resist, really sort of makes the Ukrainian Army and the Ukrainian people more broadly, fiercely independent and fiercely committed to defending. And a lot of observers, including the Russians themselves, I think heavily underestimated that.

Jordan As we talk today, and I believe we recently passed 100 days of this war. What do we know about the situation on the ground right now? Is the fighting still fierce, and are troops moving in both directions the way they were in the early days of the war? And the reason I ask this is because of the way the media in the West has, I don’t want to say moved on because they haven’t moved on. But in the early days of the war, we were getting daily updates of here’s where the Ukrainians are, here’s where the Russians are, here’s what’s happening. And now it feels like whether or not we’ve become distracted by other pressing issues, or have things just moved closer to a kind of stalemate?

Balkan Devlen I think there are a few things. First, of course, unlike the first days of the war, you do not have a three axis of attack vectors anymore, right. You don’t have the sort of the Northern front. You don’t have the one through Kharkiv and the south and the Southeast. What we have in terms of fighting on the ground is very much concentrated in Donbas, particularly around Luhansk or Oblasts region right now. So you essentially have a single sort of front where the Russian forces are being concentrated and therefore sort of trying to encircle key cities and encircle Ukrainian forces either to capture them or force them to retreat.

So there is a lot more concentrated fighting. The fighting is very fierce, and Ukrainians are also, unfortunately, losing a lot of people. Zelensky himself said that they are losing about 50 to 100 people a day, soldiers a day.Russians are experiencing losses, not as far as I can see, not at the rate that they did initially. They adapted, they changed, and they’re fighting in a better position. They have shorter supply lines. They managed to dig in. They’re fighting with their backs to their own proxies in the region, et cetera, et cetera. But the fighting is extremely fierce still, partly because the military situation right now is such that the outcome of this fierce fighting will probably determine where will be the better lines going into the fall. So Russians try to push a mile or two ahead every day. Ukrainians are trying to push back and trying to make decisions when they need to focus their forces right now. So I think the situation on the ground is as fierce as before. We’re just not paying attention because it’s smaller front. It’s more concentrated in the Southeast.

Jordan When you and others try to look ahead to how this war might end and when, I guess what kinds of factors are in play and what influences that kind of prediction?

Balkan Devlen A few things. I mean, I can talk about myself when I look at this. I tend to look at it a number of number of factors. One, what are the material facts on the ground? I think one thing this war made it quite clear is the importance of logistics and the material capabilities. If you don’t have the weapons, if you don’t have the ammunition, if you don’t have the trucks, if you don’t have the actual capabilities, you might be overwhelmed quite quickly. And that’s why I think Western support to Ukraine is extremely important and needs to be sustained. So you need to look at what the material factors are, how that works out, who has sort of higher levels of material support and supplies and resources, how fast they can replenish them, including soldiers. So that’s, number one. You might want to look at how long can you sustain this at a particular tempo.

Number two, you might want to look at the key decision makers and how they perceive the situation. What are their incentive structures? We all operate in certain incentives, we reply, and we react to different incentive structures. That’s how we work. And you need to look at what those incentives are for decision makers such as Putin and Zelensky and Macron and Scholes and Biden and others, how they assess the situation vis a vis their perceived interests. And that has a lot to do with how they process information. So I try to understand what kind of information, for example, Putin is getting, how he ranks different outcomes, say outright victory, defeat, a compromise solution, a stalemate, and try to reason from there. It’s important to understand that when you think about rationality, you want to think about rationality in terms of means and ends, right? And in order to understand that, you need to be able to understand what the ends are and how different actors rank those different ends. So that will be another one.

Of course, the last, perhaps the component is the broader international context in which the war takes place. There are a lot of unintended and perhaps intended consequences of the war, and that creates ripple effects that create different pressures, such as the food crises that will be coming up, such as energy, such as higher inflation, that has other sources, including sort of old economic policies and whatnot. But the war and the energy and the food crisis is not helping there. Other actors, such as China, how they perceive inter-reliance relationship, how the Western Europeans versus Eastern Europeans are seeing the war. So you try to understand how the context in which this war works because the parties to the war needs to be able to maintain those relationships. They do not act in a vacuum. They act within the particular context of economic and political relations with others. So I tend to look at those things and look at what the material structures on the ground, what is possible and what is not possible to do, what the incentives are for the key decision makers, how they think about this war, how they think about their own interests. It doesn’t matter what we attribute to them, what their interests are. It matters how they see their own interests, as well as what is the international context and how that shifts and changes as the war goes on.

Jordan How much of that gets thrown into chaos by the sheer irrationality of Vladimir Putin?

Balkan Devlen I don’t think he is irrational. It is important to understand, like going back to my comment about rationality as connecting means and ends. We’re not necessarily talking about whether those ends make sense from our own value system or what we think it is important and what we see as Russian state interests are. If you look at through that particular perspective, I think it is important to understand that Putin is a rational actor. He has a very distorted view of the world. His information is probably quite distorted. He’s not really getting the true nature of the situation.

It was very clear initially that he wanted to do that blitzkrieg, and he thought he could just drop in paratroopers and he can take over Kyiv and the Ukrainians will welcome the Russian forces as liberators. So that’s just a very bigoted and racist and a very distorted view of Ukraine and Ukrainian identity and Ukrainians broadly. But if that’s your assumption, if that’s your worldview, we can connect it to a particular means to achieve your end. You can say that, oh, they will lay their arms, it’s going to be a walk in the park. We can even send the National Guard, because what we will rely on is crowd control, the Ukraine army will melt away. We will go through. And if you want to do that, you can try to do that blitzkrieg, right. So it doesn’t make him irrational because he has bad information, because he has a distorted worldview, or the fact that he prefers different outcomes than what we would consider to be good outcomes. If you prefer to have a long-lasting stalemate and conflict over compromise, you will try to maintain that rather than reach a compromise. That doesn’t make you irrational, that just makes you different preferences over different outcomes.

And this one last point here, I think it is also important to understand that it is also a tactic by the Kremlin to present, particularly when it comes to nuclear saber-rattling, for example, to present Kremlin as if they are ready to take all sorts of risky behaviour, which doesn’t actually reflect on the ground realities and how they actually act. Rhetoric is not necessarily the same as reality. Look at look at the ground, right? They try to have a three axis attack. They tried to take Kyiv. It didn’t work. They changed tactics. They change war aims, immediate war aims, and switch to securing the Donbas region and gave up the idea of Kyiv and going through all the way and so on and so forth. So he can adapt and he can change, depending on the circumstances. So he’s not irrational. His ends are not our ends and we might not make sense of them, but he’s trying to connect those ends to the means and he learns.

Jordan So given all of those factors, and given what we know now about the state of play on the ground, what are the most likely outcomes for this war to end? Or is one of the most likely outcomes that it simply doesn’t?

Balkan Devlen Historically speaking, if you look at it, these type of wars, you do have a sort of a barbell system in a way–that either they end very quickly with the sort of victory of one side, or it goes on. Since it didn’t end in three days that the Russians hoped to take over. This war is going to be with us for a while now. The intensity of it will ebb and flow and will change. There is nothing on the ground today that suggests that there is any potential for a negotiated settlement now. Ukrainians are rightfully pushing back and trying to push back the invading forces as much as possible. And on a political level, they are winning, but they are also trying to win underground. Russians can dig in and they already start digging in and they show no desire to stop right now. They believe that they can outlast both Ukraine and the Western support to Ukraine. So they are planning to stay long.

So I don’t expect the war, to be frank, to be over. You might have some kind of temporary fixing of battle lines in the next few months, if it comes to that. But I don’t even think that is a possibility. We are going to witness a long term conflict that is a stalemate that will in intensity go up and down in the coming months and perhaps years. I’m not expecting anything being sorted out and sort of a negotiated settlement being reached and all that kind of thing in the next, say, 18 months.

Jordan So there’s been some talk recently about Ukraine perhaps ceding some land, particularly in the Donbas, to the Russians in order to, and I’m paraphrasing here stuff that I’ve seen mostly from the U.S. but in other places as well, to give Putin a victory of sorts, that he can claim that Russia has succeeded in its goals and they can go home and this war can finally end. What’s the likelihood of that? And also when we talk about moving forces like that across a map, what does that mean to the Ukrainians on the ground there?

Balkan Devlen Exactly. I mean, this is not a game of Risk where you move pieces. We know what it means to cede that land now, right? It means butcher. It means people’s hands being tied in their back and shot in the head in front of their homes, women and kids as young as five being raped, people being forced into filtration camps and basically deported or kidnapped to Russia. They adopted a number of laws, including adoption of kids, Ukrainian kids in a much more simplified and fast manner as they kidnapped them and send them to camps and resettlements in Russia. We see what happened in Mariupol in terms of the destruction of the city. That’s what it means. And Ukrainians are very much aware of that. And that’s why they’re very much fighting. And it is important to also remember that a lot of the people, supposedly where these concessions were supposed to happen or the heaviest fighting is going on, are Russians speaking Ukrainians, and they are the ones who are fighting the fiercest. Right. So it actually sort of put a lie to this very simplistic narrative about there is this mythical pro-Russian Ukrainian East that will be welcoming Russia. Now, Mariupol is largely a Russian speaking city which is completely levelled and destroyed. Kharkiv is the same story. So that’s what it means on the ground.

Now, the likelihood of that at this stage is almost nil. Those who argue for it either in the U.S. on the right or sometimes on the left, as well as some European voices, are the same voices that basically were against arming Ukraine before the war and constantly asked for concessions to Putin. So this is their new spiel, saying that, I think there are a bunch of reasons, some of them are basically your simple sort of ethno-nationalists who do not want to do anything with it. Others are Kremlin Shields. And the rest are those who are annoyed with the distraction, is what they see as distraction of the war in Europe, and would like to focus on elsewhere, such as competition with China. So they will be pushing for that. But there is no, I think mechanism in which today Zelensky government or any other Ukrainian government, after seeing butcher, after seeing Mariupol, after seeing all the massacres and rapes, that they will be willing to trade those territories to Russia for some promise of a settlement, which there is no reason to believe that Putin will keep his word.

Jordan What about the Ukrainian Army itself then? You mentioned a few minutes ago that they were losing perhaps 5200 people a day. I know they’ve received a lot of military supplies from other countries, but they were seen as outgun to start this thing. How long can they hold out, despite how courageously they fought?

Balkan Devlen I don’t know. I’m not particularly privy to the Ukrainian military strength at this stage, and I think they are holding it close to their chest that I think that’s the right decision, to be frank. But simple demographics suggest that if this goes sufficiently long, a country of above 40 million versus a country of 135,000,000, the numbers are not necessarily on their side.

But this also suggests or assumes that Russia could bring to bear a larger number of troop influx and other things. And that’s not going to easily happen. There are costs to it. There is political costs to declaring mobilization, bringing those new, whatever number of troops, training them, equipping them, I’m not sure they will have the means, et cetera. So the damage that the Russian armed forces sustained, even if the full Ukrainian numbers are not right, they talk about about 300 dead, about 700 wounded. Let’s assume two thirds of those numbers are true. It is a huge amount of battle combat force losses which are not easy to replace. So yes, if you look at in a very grand scale, and if you look at in very aggregate numbers, Russia has more resources to bear, including weaponry and people. But politically mobilizing those resources will be extremely hard and will weaken Putin’s regime. So he will need to rethink whether he can commit and he can utilize that advantage.

On the other hand, Ukrainians are fully mobilized. They are training their people. They are being provided with weapons and they need to be provided more so that it is more on sort of the technological side of the things that bear the burden rather than the individual soldiers. So they can hold out a lot longer than a lot of people assume. And again, because they’re fighting for their homes, that also provides a lot of support, unlike the recruit, 18 year old recruit that has no idea why he’s being sent to Ukraine to fight. So I think there is that important component to it. How long they can sustain, I don’t know, but can they sustain it longer than a lot of people assumed in the beginning of the war? I’m pretty sure they could.

Jordan Well, last question then. Most of what you’ve said so far seems pretty indicative of weeks and months and months longer that we’re in for a sort of sustained grinding down of this war. What will you watch for in the next couple of months, and could anything change that?

Balkan Devlen I think we will see by the end of the summer where the front line is, where the battle lines would be. It would be very hard for Russians to push getting into the fall and the winter. They didn’t do a good job doing sort of a spring campaign season and going over the summer. They are unlikely to be able to make any major offensive in the fall and in winter. So I think the next few months will really determine where the long term stalemate and the battle lines will be. So I’ll be watching that number one.

Number two, we need to really be ready and we need to think about how we can react to a very bleak winter, not only in Ukraine, but also around the world, including food shortages, including energy crises. And whether the policies that are being sort of floated around to ensure that grain shipments can leave, that Russia cannot blackmail the world through holding hostage the food shipments from Ukraine, will determine to what extent Russia and Kremlin will be open to some sort of a negotiation, and a kind of a declaring victory and leave. Putin can do that anytime he can declare victory, enacts or try to enact the existing places that he controls and can leave. So I think the whole idea of providing some sort of a safe face saving option is a mirage, and it really works with the Kremlin’s narrative about it. But those things, how the food situation would evolve, as well as how long the Western unity can be maintained as the costs, but the economic and political costs of the war on the allies increase. Those are the things that I will be watching, because my concern is that there will be increasing voices, particularly on the Western European front, not so much the Eastern Europeans, to push Kyiv into a premature negotiation and ceasefire. And those could change the dynamics on the ground.

Jordan Balkan, thanks as always for this, and I guess something tells me we’ll talk in another couple of months.

Balkan Devlen It’s always a pleasure to be on the show. Thanks for having me

Jordan Balkan Devlen, Superforecaster for Good Judgment Incorporated. That was The Big Story.

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