Even pro-Ukraine analytics that appear to wildly exaggerate Russian casualties are suggesting that attritional exhaustion is rapidly approaching in the Ukro-Russian war.
Dr Powell’s model suggests that the war is rapidly nearing a tipping point. Ukraine is approaching the fulcrum beyond which the weight of the war tips its forces into rapid depletion, allowing the Russian military to start achieving much more significant territorial gains. In turn, this would lead to accelerated Ukrainian losses through the ruthless reality of the square law. This road heads toward an eventual Ukrainian collapse.
Ukraine’s effective combat power (a composite of manpower, machinery and munitions) is depleting, the model shows, at a net rate that outpaces its replenishment, while Russia’s holds steady or grows marginally. This imbalance, compounded by recent reductions in Western support, suggests a tipping point where Ukrainian force density thins below viability, triggering rapid territorial losses and operational collapse.
Based on his integrated projections from an updated model (as of 15 May), Dr Powell estimates window for this tipping point is 3-6 months from now (July-September 2026), followed by a 3-4 month cascade to functional exhaustion. Overall, this yields a 6-9 month horizon to “floodgates opening,” where advances accelerate from the current 0.3-1 km/day to 5-10 km/day, as seen in historical breakthroughs like the 2022 Kherson retreat. This non-linear result is the manifestation of the pitiless square law which Frederick Lanchester first codified into a usable model for military operations in 1916. But it boils down to this: Dr Powell’s model estimates Ukrainian collapse by early Spring next year (nine months from mid-May 2026) at the outside.
Two factors support Dr Powell’s conclusion. The first is that Anusar Farooqui, the hedge fund CEO and international relations scholar, and friend of Multipolarity, has managed to replicate Dr Powell’s results using the model. The second is that Peter Turchin, emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut in the departments of ecology and evolutionary biology and mathematics, has produced his own model, which reaches a similar conclusion: Ukraine is heading toward a tipping point beyond which its position becomes irretrievable.
A key understanding here is that it matters not who is attacking and who is defending; who is capturing territory and who is losing it. The losses of men, munitions and weapons platforms carry on regardless, and in an attrition war, it is exactly that which counts. Absent a black swan event, Ukraine continues heading toward the tipping point whether it is successfully counter-attacking or doggedly defending.
It must be noted that the tipping point Dr Powell’s model suggests would not be the end of the war. It would simply be the point at which the war of attrition finally makes Ukraine’s conventional military position irretrievable, with Russian territorial gains accelerating from that moment.
No doubt this explains the increased volume of the EU’s insane belligerence, but the reality is that the anti-democratic governments of Europe are far more likely to find themselves fighting their own citizens over their attempts to deny everyone air conditioning than they are to ever fight the Russians.
French health officials recorded around 1,000 excess deaths in less than a week as the country was hit by its most severe heatwave in more than two decades.
