Now that we are counting the length of  the Ukraine-Russia War in months, it’s  

time to start thinking about how it might end. So armed with the knowledge of political science  

research on that subject, here are ten ways  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could conclude.

Number 1: Afghanistan Syndrome No, not the Afghanistan War that the  

United States recently withdrew itself from. This Afghanistan War against the Soviet Union  

from the 1980s. Brezhnev invaded to prop  up a floundering communist government  

that could have pivoted westward otherwise. The conflict ultimately became the Soviet  

Union’s version of the Vietnam War: A long fight that lost political  

support at home and ended with the superpower  withdrawing with little to show for their effort. 

The outcome for the Soviet Union was  even worse: the economic turmoil led  

to Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power and  the subsequent breakup of the country. 

The parallels today are stark. The United States,  led by Congressman Charlie Wilson’s efforts,  

were pleased to provide military  assistance to Moscow’s opponent. 

If the trend continues, the war in Ukraine  will last for years. Putin will keep enough  

of his political opponents at bay to survive  for a long time, but the war will go nowhere,  

and Putin’s popularity will eventually disappear. Ukraine “wins” but at an enormous cost.

Number 2: Putin Removed from Office While public approval numbers for Putin paint  

him as a popular leader, it is difficulty  to know exactly how popular he truly is. 

Autocracies aren’t exactly known for eliciting  truthful responses from their citizens. 

If Putin were actually unpopular, this could lead  to Putin’s removal from office in a few ways.  

As we have discussed before, a popular protest  could unexpectedly arise, overwhelm security  

forces, and storm government buildings. A single unhappy individual with good  

connections could assassinate him. Or a more organized group of disaffected  

politicians and generals could initiate  a coup to remove Putin from office. 

The commonality here is that the new leader  would then remove Russian troops from the  

war and build a fresh regime, free from  the burdens of the floundering conflict.

Number 3: Victory Day “Victory” 

Circle your calendars now,  because this one is coming up. 

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to  end the European portion of World War II. 

This occurred late at night in Berlin,  which therefore made it May 9 in Moscow. 

The end of World War II was momentous  for all the allies. But the Soviet  

Union suffered more casualties than  any other country during the war. 

As a result, Victory Day became a major  holiday until the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Under Boris Yeltsin’s administration,  the celebrations became muted.  

The country was in the process of eliminating  Soviet institutions, and that was one of them. 

However, the holiday returned  since Vladimir Putin came to power.  

And it is a huge celebration once again. 

If you have seen photos of the Russian army on  parade, it’s probably from Victory Day. And one  

theory is that Putin will wait until May 9  to declare mission accomplished in Ukraine. 

He will sell the gains made in Eastern  Ukraine as fulfilling the purpose of the war.  

This might give Putin a politically convenient  way out of the conflict, and stop the mounting  

casualties from ending his rule over the country. Russian troops might formally withdraw at that  

point, but the conflict will go  back to 2021-levels of intensity:  

fewer and unmarked Russians still  participating in a Ukrainian civil war.

Number 4: Putin Gambles for Resurrection A May 9 end to the war would require that Putin  

feel comfortable with what Russia is currently  holding onto if it ends active operations. 

But that might not be enough. A settlement  is only as good as a leader’s ability  

to politically survive it. Let’s go back to World War I.  

By the end, it was clear that Germany was  very likely to lose and that a settlement  

would be better for all countries involved. Nevertheless, Germany continued to fight.  

The problem was that making the appropriate  concessions to the United Kingdom and France  

would have forced the autocratic regime  to make democratic concessions at home. 

Erich Ludendorff, a member of the de facto  military dictatorship, described that the  

hypothetical granting of equal enfranchisement “would be worse than a lost war”. 

He subsequently increased his demands against  the opponents despite the German military fading. 

Ludendorff reasoned that “If  Germany makes peace without profit,  

then Germany”—or at least his  preferred version of Germany— 

“has lost the war.” Political scientists call this  

“gambling for resurrection”, and it  might be at play today with Russia. 

If Putin is vulnerable politically—something  very hard to deduce from the outside—then he  

may find the war’s current progress  insufficient to negotiate on. 

That means a longer war that either ends after  Putin can secure a larger swath of territory  

or continued Russian military defeats and  a political disaster at home for Putin.

Number 5: Negotiated Settlement 

It’s also possible that Putin is not  facing much domestic pressure at home.  

After all, from the Russian perspective, this is  still a “special military operation”, not a war. 

If so, both Ukraine and Russia  would be better off thinking 

about what the eventual outcome of the  war would be—perhaps something like this,  

as a hypothetical—and just implementing that  without continuing the war to its bitter end. 

This would give them exactly what they would  anticipate receiving if they continued to fight,  

except the soldiers that might otherwise  die in the process survive instead. 

As we have discussed before, however,  

such agreements require consensus on  what the eventual outcome would be. 

If Ukraine thinks the eventual  division would look like this 

But Russia thinks that the eventual division would  look like this, then negotiations won’t work out.

Number 6: Zelensky Eliminated This, at least, was Putin’s hope at the  

start of the war. Reports indicate that a Russian  strike team tried to parachute in on Kyiv, storm  

the presidential compound, and take out Zelensky. In theory, without a head of state to rally  

around, the rest of Ukraine  would immediately fold. 

That plot failed, of course. And at this point,  a successful attempt would seem unlikely to  

lead to a quick end to the war in Ukraine. The past couple of months turned a relatively  

unpopular Ukrainian president  into a national political hero. 

Assassinating Zelensky, arresting him, or  whatever might even backfire now, as it would  

only turn him into a martyr for Ukraine’s cause. So perhaps we can scratch this off the list.  

But that does not mean that  Ukraine can breathe easy because at

Number 7 we have the Complete  Military Defeat of Ukraine 

Oh how far we have come. Ukraine’s defeat seemed  inevitable to many at the beginning of the war. 

But Russia’s poor logistics—especially  in the western half of Ukraine—suddenly  

made the former superpower look very mortal. Still, Russia is learning from its mistakes  

and has reoriented itself to focus on the  east. It’s still plausible that the Russian  

army militarily defeats Ukraine, even if it might  take a lot longer than Putin initially thought. 

The lingering question is  what Russia would do next. 

Was the entire point of this war just to secure  ties to the Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine? 

And the initial attack on Kyiv was a feint? Or is Putin willing to pay the costs to  

administer the entire country over the long  term? And that first assault on the capital  

was not a feint but a failure? We still don’t really know,  

and we may never find out absent Ukraine  suffering a complete military defeat.

Number 8: Ukraine Destroyed It’s also possible that Putin’s  

motivation for the war has nothing to do  with Ukraine itself but is rather a renewal  

of Cold War-era east-west tensions. NATO has drifted eastward over time,  

and Putin might fear that Ukraine joining  the fold would give the United States a  

newfound military advantage versus Russia. This is the preventive war motivation for  

the conflict, which we have previously covered. One way preventive wars end is when the underlying  

source of the power shift is no longer possible. If Ukraine is no longer capable of arming itself  

or becoming a meaningful alliance partner, Russia  has no need to continue the war at that point. 

There is a lot of variation in what this  could mean, and those differences are  

substantial from Ukraine’s perspective.  An economy in shambles is one thing. 

The use of low-level nuclear weapons is another.

Number 9: It Doesn’t The Ukraine-Russia War is just a new phase  

of a civil war that began in 2014. The difference  now is that Russia is formally intervening. 

Interstate wars are notorious for being  much, much shorter than civil wars. 

In fact, your average interstate  war lasts less than a year. 

By contrast, civil wars can drag on  forever. Syria’s current civil war began  

during the Arab Spring, all the way back in 2011.  

This length of a fight isn’t abnormal. The civil war between Sri Lanka’s government  

and the Tamil Tigers began in  1983 and didn’t end until 2009. 

Civil wars are so bad that ongoing fights just  accumulated over time during the Cold War, 

as did the average duration  of those wars still ongoing. 

The main issue is that when a rebel group  reintegrates with the opposing government,  

it must lay down its arms. But governments can later exploit the disarmed  

rebels. Anticipating this, the rebels continue  to fight even when they are likely to lose. 

That may happen here. Even if Russia  withdraws tomorrow, rebels in the Donbas  

region might keep going, and it would take  a complete military defeat for them to stop.

Number 10: World War III 

The good news is that I think this option  is very unlikely—far less likely than  

the other options discussed in this video. As bad as things are now, they are nothing  

like to peak of the Cold War. This isn’t the Cuban  Missile Crisis, when the world ground to a halt  

thinking that the world might be coming to an end. That might be of little comfort to you. After all,  

if World War III did start, it would be  the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. 

Russia has about 6000 nuclear weapons. The United States has about 5400. 

Both of these numbers are substantially greater  than the next most-armed country: China at 350. 

The good news is that these figures are well below  the historical highs of 39,000 and 21,000 in 1985. 

The bad news is that they are still  way more than necessary to destroy  

all significant human population centers. 

Precisely because of that, it is unlikely that  either party would willingly start World War III. 

The problem is that accidents  or misunderstandings can happen. 

For example, back in 1983, Korean Air Lines  Flight 007 was heading from Anchorage to Seoul.  

The flight was supposed to avoid Soviet airspace. 

Instead, a navigational error put  it directly over the Soviet Union. 

Moscow scrambled some interceptors, which  shot down the plane. Everyone on board died, 

including a U.S. Congressman who  just so happened to be on the flight. 

Tensions between the United States  and the Soviet Union mounted. 

And just three weeks later, an early  warning alert system just outside  

of Moscow detected an incoming missile. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and  

this didn’t spiral out of control. World War III  had not started. Instead, the system had mistaken  

a high-altitude cloud for a nuclear weapon. The point is that accidents can happen,  

and a history of near misses does not mean  that we are safe from all future risks. 

What if the Russian plane that violated  Danish and Swedish airspace on April 29  

had a trigger-happy pilot. NATO might then have invoked Article V of the  

North Atlantic Treaty and respond by attacking  the airfield from which the flight originated. 

Putin might have escalated, NATO  could have retaliated in kind,  

and then we would have been off to the races.

And those are ten ways the Russia-Ukraine War  might end. Have any other ways that I didn’t  

cover here? Let me know in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video,  

please like, share, and subscribe, and  I will see you next time. Take care.