“Either way, it increasingly appears that this is going to be a protracted conflict.”įor weeks, Ukrainian officials have promised to storm through Kherson, the southern Ukrainian province known for its watermelons that was occupied by Russia in the first days of the war, launching wide-ranging preparatory strikes to hit Russian military bases and supply points on the Crimean Peninsula. It’s just unclear what its chances of success are,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military with CNA, a think tank. “We’re likely going to see an inflection point in this war, and there’s likely to be a Ukrainian counteroffensive. and Western-provided multiple rocket launch systems, such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System-a protracted conflict remains the most likely outcome. “I think what’s more likely is the second option-that the Russian position collapses.”Īlthough experts almost universally agree that the Russian military is at a unique point of vulnerability-lacking enough troops to conquer new ground and facing Ukrainian assaults bolstered by advanced U.S. I don’t think that’s likely,” said Michael Ryan, a former U.S. “One is a linear extrapolation where they gradually wear each other down and they both get exhausted and come to some agreement. They described scenarios that varied from a complete Russian military collapse to a nuclear strike to a frozen conflict along the lines of nearby Georgia. And the outcome of the war, once thought to be a decisive Russian rout in a matter of hours, is far from clear.įoreign Policy spoke with a half-dozen experts in the United States and Europe to ask where the war in Ukraine, which has captured the world’s attention for most of 2022, is headed. With Russia’s military campaign running on fumes but still dangerous, and with battle lines in Ukraine moving little in the past two months, both sides are facing significant attrition. Inside the Biden administration, officials were already hotly debating how (or whether) they could legally support a Ukrainian resistance led out of the west of the country if Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, fell.Īs it turns out, a lot can change in six months. and Western intelligence analysts believed in the hours before the Kremlin started sending waves of troops over the border in late February. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government was not expected to last a week against Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, U.S.
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