Oct 2026 Update: Russia is winning the Ukraine war 🇷🇺🇺🇦
I'm adjusting my probability estimate of Russian victory to above 50%. I expect it to happen in 2028-30.
(1) The key question is attrition. The KIA ratio is 2:1 set against a population disparity of 5:1 (about 6k / month for Ukraine and 10-15k / month for Russia earlier this year; see Budanov, Tusk for Ukraine). Ukraine is having much more trouble generating manpower than Russia. As the more "motivated" side (as it is invaded), this should not be the case if the ratio was more like 5-7:1, as the most enthusiastic Ukraine supporters (counterproductively) claim. Ukraine has a better WIA/KIA ratio, because it is defending and doesn't "utilize" its wounded, but from a cynically narrow military perspective that's actually worse because those people are still out of action regardless. The intensity of losses on both sides is likely to scale out further in 2027 due to ever increasing drone lethality and the likelihood of intensified Russian recruiment/mobilization.
(2) Russia is surging ahead in raw military spending. Ukrainian spending is capped at 40% of GDP, it can't really go higher. GDP is $220B. And it is requests $78B from the EU. Even if satisfied in its entirety, that's $165B. Russia's GDP is $2.9T and military spending is now approaching "serious" levels of 10% of GDP. To the extent that oil prices remain as high as they are this poses no threat to Russia's fiscal sustainbility. So total military spending is now approaching 2x Ukraine's. Foreign aid is no longer making good the gap, and historically most wars are won by the side that spends more.
(3) Russia strike superiority is increasing to the point that normal life in Ukraine's urban centers will become increasingly unviable from this winter forward. This will degrade Ukraine's economy and its own military production capacity, making it even more reliant on Western transfers to maintain itself. What Ukraine is doing hurts Russia - oil refineries, warehouses, now data centers, soon perhaps civilian airports - but this is cumulatively just a 1-2% pinprick on its GDP.
Note that this year should have been unusually favorable to Ukraine because the US cut off Russia from Starlink, and then the Kremlin hamstrung their own forces by restricting Telegram, the primary comms system for the Russian military. But such setbacks are always temporary because systems learn to route around them. Russia has been compensating Starlink's loss with more sophisticated meshnets, and next year will see Rassvet, a simple Starlink clone, maturate.
Note also that I was becoming more bearish on Ukraine even before recent developments, which have seen the US cut off military Starlink access to Ukraine and ease some of the Russian sanctions. They do not even figure in this analysis. But if this, and a curtailment of intelligence sharing, becomes the new normal, then Ukraine is actually, unironically giga-fucked, and the defeat may then come as early as H2 2027.
I have long been consistent on how the Ukraine War will likely end if it ends in a decisive victory by one side or the other: "Slowly, then all at once". Cascading collapses is historically how most wars of attrition that ended in clear victory or defeat ended.
One final note. I don't think the Trump administration throwing in the towel on Ukraine ("betraying Ukraine") is exclusively just about them throwing a fit over the midterms. The Europeans are also sending out feelers to Russia, and even the UK ambassador is now sounding unusually amicable towards Russians. I do not think any of this is because they all suddenly became Russophiles. At the same time, the Europeans are talking up the prospect of a major war around 2030, and adopting rearmament schedules targeted at that date. Putting two and two together, I think it's more likely that Washington D.C. and European capitals have done some version of the above analysis and come to similarly bearish conclusions about Ukraine's prospects.
Can Ukraine still win?
There's two main ways this can still happen.
(1) Populism has peaked in the West and now starts losing bigtime to neolib types who are committed to emergency surging military aid to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia with renewed force. There are zero indications that this is happening. In fact, it's the precise reverse. Le Pen will probably win in France. Reform is looking strong in the UK. Whatever happens in the midterms, Trump still has 2 years left as President.
(2) Ukraine holds out until the US gets to aligned ASI, say in 2028. If this say 10x's US GDP and military power within 2-3 years after 2028, and aid to Ukraine as a share of US GDP/capacity remains constant, then it is Russia that gets giga-fucked. Highly esoteric/speculative scenario, but that's not really a counter-argument, because really strange and counterintuitive things will happen in a hard takeoff Singularity. Though the final outcome of this Slavic village squabble will be even less interesting than it already is to most people outside Eastern Europe.
One final note. IF that is indeed how things pan out, then it will turn out that Ukraine not surrendering quickly in 2022 will be one of the worst things that ever happened to Ukraine. Those who strongly supported a quick Russian victory back in 2022 would be retroactively vindicated. Meanwhile, those who enabled Ukraine's "heroic" but suicidal and demographically cataclysmic resistance, while withholding from it the means of actually defeating Russia, will be viewed ambivalently at best - and perhaps even cursed by more introspective Ukrainian observers.