Peter Turchin calculates that the Ukraine war will be over later this year:
The Persian Gulf war of USA/Israel against Iran has largely displaced reporting on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Reading the news on mainstream media one may think that this war, now in its fifth year, is still in stalemate; or even that the tide is turning against Russia (Washington Post: Putin remark on war ‘coming to a close’ points to exhaustion, not peace, analysts say; NYT: I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia).
Upgrade to paidBut quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine. My readers may know that three years ago I developed a an Attritional Warfare Model, AWM (based on the Lanchester equations) for forecasting this war’s outcome.
More recently a similar conclusion was reached by Warwick Powell (see Estimating Trajectories in Attritional Warfare: The Russia-Ukrainian Conflict Through a Quantitative Lens). Powell used a similar model, with the most important difference being the choice of the end point. My model assumes that the war ends when the level of casualties, as a percentage of population, exceeds a certain threshold, which I estimated via a sample of past attritional wars from the Correlates of War data.
Powell, alternatively, assumes that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000). From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak. Powell’s model predicts that the tipping point will happen in July-September (updated on May 14).
Naturally, this is only a model-based forecast, not a prophesy. There is a lot of uncertainty about the estimates of various parameters. Furthermore, the threshold at which collapse occurs is only imprecisely estimated. For example, it’s not clear whether the threshold of 0.65-0.73 above which the Ukrainian force can maintain its operational integrity still applies on a battlefield heavily dominated by drones. For example, a smaller force size may be sufficient to continue defending positions given an abundant supply of drones.
My model also doesn’t incorporate any possible effects of the shift to the drone warfare — simply because it hadn’t happen when I published its predictions. Determining how this technological shift affects the AWM’s predictions will have to wait until the post-mortem after the war is over and when estimates would become much more precise. However, I tried a few preliminary explorations and they suggest that the drone effect on the war trajectory is not quite as huge as might be imagined. What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones.
Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.
The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:
2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.
One can hardly blame the young Ukrainians for attacking the “enlistment officers” who are really straight-up kidnappers. At the end of the day, the odds of surviving a violent encounter with these rear-echelon thugs is a lot higher than surviving one with frontline Russian troops.
Young European men have probably already figured that out, which is why I expect any attempt by any European country to enact a draft besides Russophobic Poland and Finland to meet with literally violent resistance. Why would any European man fight to defend against civilized Russia instead of rapey third-world invaders?