How will the Ukraine War end?

Oreshnik missile warheads hitting a Dnipro defence industry plant in Ukraine on 21 November 2024. This missile was not armed with explosives. It hit the target at a speed of 3 km per second (at a temperature of 4000 degrees Celsius). It is a kinetic energy weapon (KEW) possibly comparable to a very small nuclear bomb. It is a precision guided missile that can take out any target in Europe. It will have a significance for Russia to avoid escalation to a nuclear war. 

Western countries argue that Russia attacked Ukraine in an attempt to conquer the country, and “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there”. He may attack “other countries after Ukraine”, Jens Stoltenberg says. But the leadership in Moscow says that Russia will not be able to defend itself if US forces can operate from Ukrainian territory only 500 km from Moscow. This has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin. Everyone in Moscow, the entire Russian leadership will claim the same thing. They all wanted a neutral Ukraine. That was their only real demand, said Ukraine's chief negotiator David Arakhamia after the Ukraine-Russia talks in March-April 2022. “Everything else was cosmetic”, he said. But when the West did not accept a neutral Ukraine, Moscow demanded a Ukrainian buffer zone under Russian control. However, Russia is unlikely to occupy areas that do not have a Russian or Russian-speaking majority.

Now, both Russia and the Western countries describe “the other side” as an existential threat. Both sides will then sacrifice everything to survive. This means that they must be able to imagine a possible extension of the war to Western Europe. Ultimately, we must expect a possible nuclear war, and Western authorities must explain how they envisage being able to avoid such an escalation and such an expansion of the conflict in the coming years.

There is a lot we do not know, but we can say the following with certainty:

1. In a conventional war of attrition such as the one we are experiencing in Ukraine today; Russia will necessarily prevail because Russia has a many times larger population. At the same time, Ukraine seems to lose more than five soldiers for every lost Russian soldier. The exchange of dead bodies between Ukraine and Russia indicate much larger losses on the Ukraine side. In the recent months, there seems to have been ten Ukrainian dead bodies exchanged for every Russian, and this is also supported by a statement by General Syrsky. “If it continues like this, we will lose the war”, said Ukraine's former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in November 2024. Eventually, there will simply be no Ukrainian men left. On the Russian side, it is about the survival of the state. And it does not matter how much weapons the Western countries contribute, because Russia produces more weapons than the Western countries combined. And if the West deploys more advanced weapons, Russia will do the same. The war will end when Ukraine runs out of men

2. If large Western forces do not enter the war, Russia will take more and more territory. Ukraine must then accept the Russian demand for a neutral “residual Ukraine” in order to end the war. The 2015 Minsk Agreement and the Istanbul Agreement of April 2022 had given Ukraine neutrality and territorial integrity, but the US and the UK did not accept these agreements. The fact that the Minsk Agreement had been signed at the UN Security Council, also by the United States and the United Kingdom, was completely ignored. It was an internationally valid agreement. Now, it turns out that Ukraine will never again be able to get such a favorable agreement. Moscow will not trust the words of the West, and in a future negotiation, Russia will never exchange the Russian-controlled four eastern counties for something else, because those who still live there, who have collaborated with the Russians, will almost certainly be liquidated if these counties will be returned to Ukraine, as the collaborators were after the Russian forces left the Kyiv area and Kharkov in 2022.

3. British analysts claim that the only option to turn the war around is to deploy Western ground forces or to launch hundreds of long-range Western missiles (Storm Shadow, ATACMS or SCALP) against bases far into Russia, but these missiles are guided by the Americans and British. According to Russia, it is not Ukraine, but the United States and Great Britain that are attacking Russia. Other countries arming Ukraine will also be responsible for these actions, Putin said. Moscow will then respond to such attacks, not by entering Western countries with ground forces, but by using missiles to take out, for example, British or American bases in Russia’s vicinity (Rygge and Evenes in Norway or bases in Poland, Sweden and Finland). The British attempt to turn the war around will by necessity extend the war to Europe and have direct consequences for countries like Norway.

4. Informally, Russia has said that it will respond by launching inter-continental Avangard missiles, which move at a speed of 6-9 km per second and hit the target at 3 km per second. In Europe, Russia will presumably respond by launching the new intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, which was launched in November against a military industry in the city of Dnipro in Ukraine. Western air defenses have supposedly no ability to take out these missiles, and the kinetic energy released when hitting the target at a speed of 3 km per second is said to be equivalent to a small atomic bomb, but with no radioactivity. In response to Western launch of missiles against Russian bases, Moscow will launch above missiles to knock out US bases in, say, Poland or Norway. Western countries do not yet have this capability, unless they escalate to nuclear war.

5. It is, accordingly, more likely that the Western countries, not Russia, will escalate to a nuclear war. However, if Britain would respond to a Russian Oreshnik attack with use of nuclear weapons, Russia would also go nuclear, and Britain is a small country, and the destruction would be horrible. The United States, on the other hand, cannot do much, because Russia will not go into Europe with ground forces. And if the US were to attack, for example, the Kola bases, Russia would knock out the Norfolk Naval Station outside Washington. The United States will most likely try to avoid such terrible destruction. According to US intelligence, any war game with these assumptions will lead to a general nuclear war. Europe will find that the US nuclear umbrella no longer exists. This will be a crisis for NATO. An escalation to a nuclear war is unlikely to be an advantage for Europe.

6. If Western countries continue to claim that a Russian victory in Ukraine is an existential threat to the West, while Russia says that a Western presence in Ukraine is an existential threat, we will necessarily move towards a nuclear war. Military targets in Europe will be destroyed and American bases in Norway will be knocked out. The Russian perception has been the same since the 1990s. It was clearly expressed by Putin several times from 2008 and has been accepted by the realist school in the West with Henry Kissinger. To avoid a nuclear war, the Western countries must change their attitude and their perception. They must understand that Russia also has security interests and that the only chance for us to survive in the next few years will be to recognize a “common security”, which takes the interests of both sides seriously.

We can think of four scenarios, four possible ends to the war.

A) That the war will end fairly quickly, perhaps after the U.S. and the UK have started firing missiles into Russia and Moscow has started taking out U.S. and British bases in Europe. In such a case, Crimea and the four counties in the southeast (Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) will become part of Russia, while the “residual Ukraine” will have to accept neutrality and some form of demilitarization (some form of “Finnish solution”). The area around Lviv may be given a special status. This would be the absolute best scenario for Ukraine. Russia will not accept a “Korean solution”: a division between a Western “NATO-Ukraine” and an Eastern “Russian Ukraine”. In this first scenario, a neutral “residual Ukraine” will be able to keep most of its territory, have continued access to the Black Sea, and be given a clear non-Russian-speaking majority.

B) That the war continues as a conventional war. Ukraine will have increasing problems mobilizing ground forces, while the European countries are unlikely to go in with a hundred thousand men, and Europe is unlikely to continue the war when some Russian missiles destroy not only US bases in Europe, but also infrastructure. Russia will take more and more territory and will eventually take the Russian-speaking counties such as Mykolaiv, Odessa, Kharkov and perhaps Dnipro in addition to the counties already taken. But Russia will still demand a neutral “residual Ukraine”. Ukraine will lose its access to the sea and much of its industry and fertile soil. This option almost presupposes a Ukrainian and European capitulation.

C) That the war continues with missile strikes that trigger an attack with nuclear weapons. The Russian conventionally armed Avangard and Oreshnik missiles will perhaps destroy European military bases and partly civilian infrastructure. The British and French may feel compelled to respond with the use of nuclear weapons. Russia will then also respond with nuclear weapons. British and American military structure in Europe will largely be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people will be dying. The Russian losses will also be large, while the U.S., like China, will seek to avoid entering the war. There will be a U.S.-European split and NATO may collapse. Military targets and infrastructure, not least in the UK, will be destroyed. Norway will be better off, but it depends on where the wind is coming from.

D) Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the U.S. should not presuppose that it can avoid a war, while Europe is being destroyed. “For Americans, any talk about the Third World War comes down to something that would affect Europe alone, [… but] we have our own doctrine, including the one governing the use of nuclear weapons”, Lavrov said. Russia is unlikely to trust that the U.S. will refrain from attacking Russia. We may have a global nuclear war with terrible destruction. Those who are worried about global warming will immediately experience “a nuclear winter”. It will be the most drastic climate measure ever. No one can say when we will pass the threshold of disaster. To even consider such a nuclear war is an expression of hubris.

We now have a generation of politicians and journalists who only have professional experience from the post-Cold War era. They have experienced the wars in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Libya, all of which have led to chaos and destruction. But the Western states still succeeded in defeating the other party: forcing it to adapt. We now have a generation of politicians and journalists who believe that you can force an opponent to accept a Western view and that you can force Russia, a nuclear power, to adapt by using force. This is a generation that suffers from hubris, while at the same time lacking empathy and a sense of realpolitik.

One has to treat Russia and Russian leaders with respect, and this has nothing to do with one’s opinion about Russia, whether one believes that Russia is autocratic or democratic or whether President Vladimir Putin is the single dominating actor or not. What really matters is the Cold War notion that one “must turn away from shooting wars” between the major nuclear powers, to quote President Reagan’s Under Secretary of Defense Fred Iklé. Even the most hawkish members of the Reagan administration understood that such a war might escalate into a nuclear war.

It is incomprehensible that the Western authorities continue the war as they are now doing, and the longer they continue, the more territory Ukraine will lose. According to President Zelensky's former military adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, 4.5 million Ukrainian men have not registered. They stay in hiding. They do not want to participate in the war. Many are trying to flee. Financial Times writes that 50-70% of the new recruits are lost after a few days at the front. The Economist said in November 2024 that there have been Ukrainian losses of close to 500,000 soldiers, but this is probably a low estimate. Tass argues that the Ukraine losses were 118,500 in 2022, 405,400 in 2023 and 593,410 in 2024, or altogether 1.1 million. The New York Times revealed in 2023 a secret Pentagon document claiming that Ukraine lost close to five men for every Russian, while in November and December 2024 Ukraine lost close to ten men for every Russian (if one looks at the body exchange between the two countries). Associated Press (AP) quotes a Ukrainian soldier in November saying that for every shell Ukraine fires, the Russians fire 50, and much of the killings are because of artillery fire. AP also says that about 100,000-200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have deserted to Russia. According to Newsweek, 1,700 men of 5,800 men in the Ukrainian 155th Mechanized Brigade had fled, many during its training in France in 2024. Eventually, Ukraine will soon have lost more than a million men. Despite this, the West continues the war.

Continuing the war like this cannot possibly be in Ukraine's interest. It would have been better for Ukraine if Norway and other Western countries had thrown all these tens of billions into the sea. Although the elite that now rules Ukraine is dependent on Western support, it is hardly in Ukraine's interest that the country is destroyed, loses territory and allows all the men to be killed. Both Ukraine’s and Russia’s leadership claimed in 2022 that Russia wanted a “neutral Ukraine”, not to conquer the country. Those who said that Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine were an American-British political and media elite. It was the same neoconservative individuals – for example, the Kagan family with Kimberly Kagan and Frederick Kagan at the Institute for the Study of War, the father Donald Kagan and first son Robert Kagan and his wife, the US most central player in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, and her former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney – who already from 1991 wanted to dissolve the Russian state and who, from the end of the 1990s, pushed for a war in Iraq. But at that time, Norwegians were better at exposing all the lies.