"The darkness ahead: Where the Ukraine war is headed," by John Mearsheimer.
"This paper examines the likely trajectory of the Ukraine war moving forward. I will address two main questions."
"First, is a meaningful peace agreement possible? My answer is no. We are now in a war where both sides -- Ukraine and the West on one side and Russia on the other -- see each other as an existential threat that must be defeated. Given maximalist objectives all around, it is almost impossible to reach a workable peace treaty. Moreover, the two sides have irreconcilable differences regarding territory and Ukraine's relationship with the West. The best possible outcome is a frozen conflict that could easily turn back into a hot war. The worst possible outcome is a nuclear war, which is unlikely but cannot be ruled out."
"Second, which side is likely to win the war? Russia will ultimately win the war, although it will not decisively defeat Ukraine. In other words, it is not going to conquer all of Ukraine, which is necessary to achieve three of Moscow's goals: overthrowing the regime, demilitarizing the country, and severing Kyiv's security ties with the West. But it will end up annexing a large swath of Ukrainian territory, while turning Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. In other words, Russia will win an ugly victory."
"Before I directly address these issues, three preliminary points are in order. For starters, I am attempting to predict the future, which is not easy to do, given that we live in an uncertain world. Thus, I am not arguing that I have the truth; in fact, some of my claims may be proved wrong. Furthermore, I am not saying what I would like to see happen. I am not rooting for one side or the other. I am simply telling you what I think will happen as the war moves forward. Finally, I am not justifying Russian behavior or the actions of any of the states involved in the conflict. I am just explaining their actions."
Commentary: John Mearsheimer is operating from different assumptions about Russian motivations from our media. He thinks the Russians view NATO expansion, Western interference in the Ukrainian government (Victoria Nuland et al), and Western dishonesty in negotiations, such as in the Minsk II Accords, as constituting an existential threat to Russia, upon which they had to and still have to take action. The prevailing view here, at least where I live, is that the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked and Putin is a dictator driven by imperialist ambitions.
If Mearsheimer is correct, the Russians will attempt to keep the territory they have control over and even add some additional provinces that are majority ethnic Russian. They will additionally try to interfere with the government in Kyiv and keep it in a dysfunctional state, unable to mount a military response to Russia and unable to join NATO.
If this is what the Russians want, the next question becomes whether they will be capable of achieving this. There are intentions and there are capabilities. The Ukrainian side will try to prevent Russia from achieving its objectives.
And the Ukrainian side has intentions of its own. In this case, we don't have to speculate. What the Ukrainian side wants is to recapture all the territory of pre-2014 Ukraine including Crimea. Furthermore they want long-term security guarantees that can only come from the West and joining NATO.
Beyond Ukraine, the intentions of the US and NATO go beyond recapturing territory and demand the ousting of Putin from power. Biden has called for regime change with Putin and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges of genocide, which as I understand it, makes it impossible for there to be any kind of negotiated settlement with the Europeans that ends the war with Putin remaining in power.
If this analysis is correct, we know the participants intentions, the question comes down to capabilities and who will be able to achieve their aims. Russia has annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, and had already annexed Crimea in 2014. The provinces Mearsheimer speculates they may want to add are Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Odessa.
Mearsheimer wrote this before the Ukrainian counteroffensive began. I just checked the maps. The Ukrainian counteroffensive so far has been underwhelming. The lines on the map have not moved. The lines on the map are the one bit of information I consider reliable. Everything else is potentially distorted, as both the Russian and Ukrainian sides are motivated to promulgate false information if it advantages their side. However, with satellites and the ability of anyone to see satellite imagery as open source intelligence (OSINT), it's really hard for anyone to lie about what territory is controlled by which side, so neither side seems to be trying to lie about what territory their side controls.
One of the mistakes futurists make, according to Philip E. Tetlock's analysis of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency's prediction competitions, is that they don't update their beliefs quickly enough.
Applying that lesson to the current situation, it looks like I should update my beliefs about the Ukrainian militaries capabilities against the Russian military. Ukrainian success in 2022 was dramatic and I had to update by beliefs in the other direction -- before the war I believed the Russian military was more powerful, and would be able to defeat Ukraine. But I was proven wrong. I failed to take into account the US had been pumping $300+ million worth of weapons into Ukraine since 2013, and "NATOizing" the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian military was much more powerful and capable than I thought.
Today, though, it looks like I need to update my beliefs in the opposite direction. It looks like it may be the case that the Russians have fundamentally changed their strategy from the initial invasion of last year, and learned many lessons from the failures of the last year. The Russians last year may have been willing to rapidly abandon territory to reduce casualties, but today, they may be dug in hard, with massive amounts of mines and artillery preventing Ukrainian movement. The Russians may have moved in effective air defense, denying Ukraine control of the skies and rendering Western F-16s ineffective. Maybe I'm wrong and the Ukrainians are just getting started, and we'll see rapid movement on the map. But right now, I'm not expecting that. I've updated my beliefs and I now think the Russians will put up effective resistance, preventing Ukraine from moving the lines. If that's correct, then what we'll see from now on is Ukraine throwing a lot of people and equipment into a meat grinder without the lines moving. The war will become a "war of attrition" and a long-term "war of attrition" favors the Russians, because Russia has a larger population and a larger industrial base. Ukraine will be able to make up for the lower industrial base by relying on the West, which will drag the conflict out for a long time, but Ukraine can't do anything about the population difference that I can see. So that's how the situation looks to me.
The darkness ahead: Where the Ukraine war is headed, by John Mearsheimer.
