How will Russia’s war with Ukraine end? Here are 5 possible results

Less than 2 weeks into Russia’s intrusion of Ukraine and the nation’s individuals and militaries continue to install a strong– and unquestionably brave– resistance versus Russian forces.

But for all of Ukraine’s heart and guts in dealing with down numerous, continual attacks from Russia’s military in the north, east and south of the nation, numerous experts and strategists think it is just a matter of time prior to Ukraine is overwhelmed by Moscow’s military may.

What follows for Ukraine might be bleak, these professionals state, with numerous anticipating a long and dragged out dispute, keeping in mind that even in the most favorable circumstance– that Russia withdraws its soldiers and Ukraine stays a sovereign country– Europe is not likely to go back to the prewar status quo.

CNBC has a look at the possible results for Ukraine and what may occur in each of them:

Close watchers of the Russia-Ukraine war state the fluid and quickly altering nature of the dispute makes it tough to assess what will occur next in Ukraine, with both Moscow’s and the West’s next relocations unforeseeable.

However it’s extensively anticipated that Russian President Vladimir Putin, loathing Ukraine’s existing pro-Western federal government and its goals to sign up with the EU and NATO, wishes to set up a pro-Russian program in Kyiv.

Just how and when (and if) that occurs doubts however Eurasia Group’s base-case circumstance for the next 3 months is for Russia to acquire “patchy control of eastern Ukraine, up to the Dnipro River” and to record the capital Kyiv after a lengthy siege, and for “a Russian-backed puppet government” to be developed.

Eurasia Group’s chairman, Cliff Kupchan, and coworkers included a note Thursday that “a rump Ukrainian state” is most likely to be led from Lviv, a city in Ukraine’s west and near the border with Poland, with the semi-exiled federal government most likely to get “heavy western support.”

The experts forecasted refugee circulations of 5 million to 10 million individuals from Ukraine to Western Europe.

In such a circumstance, Eurasia Group forecasted that NATO, which has actually up until now declined to step in militarily in the dispute (Ukraine is not a member of the military alliance), would offer “considerable military support to the western Ukrainian state and materiel [military materials and equipment] to support revolt in eastern Ukraine.” But they included that this might cause the danger of air-borne clashes in between Russian and NATO airplane.

Russia’s military method has actually at times been beleaguered with logistical issues, puzzling the photo of what Russia’s primary or instant objectives are.

To date, just one city has actually definitively been up to the Russians because the intrusion started in the morning ofFeb 24– Kherson– although others like Mariupol, in the south, seem perilously close amidst food, water and power lacks.

Resistance to Russian forces is most likely to get harder as the war advances and Russia takes out the stops to take more area.

Scott Boston, a senior defense expert at the Rand Corp., informed CNBC on Friday that the Russians “have a whole lot of combat power left and a lot of capacity to scale up the violence, which seems to already be happening. This thing could really drag on for a long time.”

Some experts concur that any irregular control over Ukraine by Russia might cause some sort of partitioning of the nation, especially as Russia ends up being strongly entrenched in eastern Ukraine– especially in the Donbas area where it acknowledged the self-reliance of 2 pro-Russian republics ahead of its intrusion of the broader nation.

Taras Kuzio, a research study fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, composed in a short article for the Atlantic Council on Thursday that Moscow has actually suggested that it is focusing on “the complete military conquest of Ukraine followed by a partition and a massive purge of the civilian population.”

“Putin’s apparent objective is to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian identity while condemning the country to a grim future as a military dictatorship locked firmly inside a new Russian Empire. This nightmarish vision tallies closely with Putin’s own stated objectives for the current military campaign along with his long record of public contempt and animosity towards Ukrainian statehood,” he stated.

There are numerous concerns over who might lead a loyalist program in Ukraine, one that might look like that of Belarus’ AlexanderLukashenko Kuzio kept in mind that there has actually been speculation about Moscow looking for to set up previous Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was removed of his powers by Ukrainian legislators throughout the 2014 Maidan Revolution and left Kyiv for Russia.

“This would be entirely in keeping with Kremlin propaganda, which has insisted for the past eight years that Yanukovych was illegally removed by a Western-backed coup,” Kuzio kept in mind.

Most alert that Ukrainians would continue to battle versus any puppet program, with the dispute coming down into a revolt with those Ukrainians left in the nation trying to fall any such program by any ways readily available.

Close watchers of Russia like Tim Ash, an emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, have actually stated Russia is most likely to deal with a long, dragged out, expensive and uncomfortable profession of Ukraine.

“Assuming Putin wins the military war the trillion dollar concern is how he wins the peace in Ukraine … Ukrainians have actually had 30 years of liberty, which they enjoy, and how can Putin turn the clock back to 91′ [the collapse of the Soviet Union] without harsh suppression which would even more make him, and his puppet program in Kyiv, global pariahs. This is not 1945, 1956 or 1968 where Soviet troops/the NKVD [the Soviet law enforcement agency] did bludgeon civilians into submission, however 2022,” Ash stated in emailed discussFeb 25, a day after Russia got into Ukraine.

“Ukrainians will resist long and hard even if the formal military battles end. And news 24/7 and the internet will expose Putin’s brutality for all to see.”

There’s naturally the possibility that a Ukrainian fightback does not present a substantial difficulty to Russian forces that stay in Ukraine– after all, countless fighters are civilians who used up arms and have actually been quickly trained.

Other experts alert of a “quagmire”– where there is no simple option for what would likely be a greatly ruined Ukraine, or for Russia– if a revolt continued long term.

In this circumstance, strategists at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security program, Barry Pavel, Peter Engelke and Jeffrey Cimmino, kept in mind that Russia’s success in Ukraine would be a “pyrrhic one,” that is, a success unworthy winning due to the fact that a lot is lost to accomplish it.

In this circumstance, the strategists kept in mind that a Ukrainian revolt might require “a significant, sustained human and financial toll on Russia” as it would be needed to dedicate much more of its resources over a a lot longer amount of time than it had actually expected. In the meantime, NATO nations “would likely provide covert but very robust defensive assistance to the Ukrainian resistance.”

In this circumstance, “the conflict drains Moscow’s coffers and resolve, ultimately forcing a withdrawal after much violence and death,” a result that has echoes of Russia’s unfortunate, out of favor and expensive intrusion of Afghanistan in 1979, a dispute that lasted 10 years and resulted in the deaths of 15,000 Russian soldiers.

In this circumstance, the strategists kept in mind, Russia would recognize it has “once again fought an unwinnable war, the proverbial quagmire that has trapped many powerful states through history.”

While this circumstance may appear favorable for Ukraine, with Russia ending up being a pariah state at an international level and withdrawing after an expensive intrusion, Ukraine would be “devastated” at the same time, the strategists stated.

The Western military alliance NATO has actually consistently declined to straight intervene in the Russia-Ukraine war as doing so would likely bring it into direct dispute with Moscow which, for its part, has actually cautioned that any nation that “interferes” in what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine will deal with unknown effects.

Countries on the EU’s (and NATO’s) eastern flank like Poland, Romania and the Baltic states, all of which have actually seen their NATO implementations strengthened in current weeks, are exceptionally worried about the capacity for the dispute to overflow into their own areas.

If Russia dominates in Ukraine, experts consisting of Ash have actually cautioned of a brand-new “Iron Curtain” coming down on Eastern Europe, developing 2 opposing geopolitical blocs similar to those in the Cold War– the EU (and NATO countries) on one side of a possibly militarized border and Ukraine and other nations in Russia’s political orbit (such as Belarus and Moldova) on the other.

Such a scenario is a tinderbox in Europe, Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group’s president, stated in emailed remarksMonday He kept in mind that it’s a “non-starter” for the West to send out soldiers to eliminate together with Ukrainians or to execute a no-fly zone over Ukraine “because that leads to direct confrontation between NATO and Russian troops and accordingly risks World War III.”

“Anything short of that is fair game: you can send fighter jets and other advanced weapons systems to the Ukrainians, provide Ukraine with real time intelligence on the disposition of Russian forces, and take economic measures without limitation to destroy the Russian economy,” he stated.

But Bremmer thinks that Putin still views this sort of assistance “as acts of war taken by the United States and NATO allies against Russia, meriting retaliation.”

Bremmer stated Russia might for that reason turn to more indirect attacks consisting of cyberattacks versus important facilities, disinformation projects, and even the possible approving of terrorism in and versus NATO nations.

“It remains highly unlikely Russia would launch direct military attacks against NATO forces, given that’s understood by NATO to be a tripwire for a broader war … but support for Chechen terrorist attacks into frontline NATO states delivering all these weapons? That’s another matter. NATO would be unlikely to respond directly with military strikes against a nuclear power; the only way to prepare is greater intelligence efforts to prevent or at least blunt the effectiveness of the efforts,” Bremmer stated.

Strategists based in Eastern Europe are under no impression regarding whether NATO might get dragged into the dispute.

Michal Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Warsaw workplace, informed CNBC simply hours into Russia’s intrusion that Putin “told us what he wants to do, he wants to change the government in Kyiv and when he was laying out his demands he was talking about the eastern flank of NATO and the rest of Europe as well. So buckle up, we need to be deterring not only attacks on Kyiv but the rest of the lines.”

“The world has changed. There is no going back … we are in an entirely new era,” he stated.

“We are in for a very long fight, this is not going to be short, this is not only going to be about Ukraine. … This is probably the biggest challenge that we are seeing in Europe since World War II,” he stated.

Analysts naturally concur that an unquestionable withdrawal of Russian militaries from Ukraine would be finest possible result for the nation in its alarming circumstance.

Analysts at the Scowcroft Center kept in mind that, in their “rosiest” possible circumstance for how the Ukraine dispute might end, Ukraine might see its own protective abilities strengthened by NATO, permitting its military and civilian resistance to “overcome the odds and grind Moscow’s advance to a halt.”

In this theoretical circumstance, Putin would be avoided from falling Kyiv’s federal government and developing a puppet program, while “the determination and skill of the Ukrainian resistance forces a stalemate on the battlefield that favors the defenders,” the Atlantic Council’s strategists Pavel, Engelke and Cimmino kept in mind.

Indeed, in this “miracle” circumstance, the experts stated that the Kremlin recognizes that Russia “will pay an exorbitant price” for its intrusion of Ukraine and, dealing with the possibility of a long and expensive slog in Ukraine, paired with financial collapse and diplomatic seclusion, Putin would purchase a withdrawal of his soldiers.

Still, even this result where Ukraine stays a sovereign democracy and NATO is confronted with a better security circumstance might be “fraught with danger,” the experts cautioned.

“The short war has claimed thousands of lives on both sides, leaving widespread bitterness in its wake. And although a democratic Ukraine emerges intact if not unscathed, its still-dangerous neighbor faces an uncertain future with the Russian political landscape at a tipping point. Whether the country leans toward greater authoritarianism under Putin, or away from him altogether, will largely determine how Russia behaves with the rest of the world,” they included.