5 Scenarios for Putin’s Ukraine War

It was an unexpected assessment from Russian President Vladimir Putin after a noticeably smaller-scale Victory Day than usual. “I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin told reporters of his yearslong Ukraine war, now essentially at a stalemate. The line landed as a temporary U.S.-brokered ceasefire was near expiry, with Moscow and Kyiv accusing each other of breaching a 72-hour pause and American and European officials weighing further talks. But the combatants remain far apart on sovereignty over Donbas and a durable settlement that guarantees Ukrainian security in the future. Putin must calculate what outcomes he can force, sell, or survive. The question is: How will the Ukraine war unfold from here? Here are five possible scenarios. 1. Armistice Without Peace The likeliest “peace” would be an armistice whose main asset is ambiguity, but whose biggest burden is a lack of resolution. Putin still wants all of Donbas, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he will not surrender it. Such a deal would defer the hard questions—territory, sanctions, security guarantees, and reconstruction—because the current diplomacy has exposed incompatible aims more clearly than it has narrowed them. The Korean precedent in the 1953 armistice created a military demarcation line and a four-kilometer demilitarized zone while leaving the peninsula divided. There could be a similar setup in Ukraine. The catch is in the machinery: The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank warned that “ceasefires without explicit enforcement mechanisms, credible monitoring, and defined dispute resolution processes are unlikely to hold.” This scenario would save lives first and solve sovereignty later, which is why it may be both the most humane near-term option and the most durable form of instability, as the latest ceasefire fight already suggests. But it does nothing to solve the core problem, creating the serious risk of a renewed conflict in the future. 2. The Forever War The war could also continue as an adaptive, grinding contest. Even ceasefires since Russia’s full-scale invasion have failed to stop the fighting during them. This scenario is dynamic rather than frozen, with fighting never stopping even as its intensity peaks and valleys. A forever war would require, to a large extent, and at least in the near-term, ongoing external support for each side, with the U.S. and Europe behind Ukraine, and China, North Korea, and Iran behind Russia. Ukraine would fight through drones, local counterattacks, daring special operations, and deep strikes, and Kyiv would use more of its domestically developed long-range drones and missiles to hit targets inside Russia as it expands its homegrown capacities. The Russian answer would be brutal attrition, intense aerial barrages on cities, pressure on infrastructure, and the wager that Western politics tires faster than Russian mobilization. (There has been no new U.S. aid legislation for Ukraine since 2024.) The forever war is the scenario in which every temporary pause becomes a negotiation tactic, every aid package becomes a political fight, and every innovation merely buys time, as the latest 72-hour truce showed. 3. Russian Coercive Victory Russia need not conquer Kyiv to win a coercive victory; it needs to make Ukraine’s remaining choices harsher than Moscow’s costs. The Kremlin controls just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and has shown a willingness to keep throwing more men into the grinder, despite the huge human and financial costs involved. This victory would look like a ceasefire on Russian terms, limits on Ukraine’s military future, delayed guarantees, or tacit Western acceptance—not just in Washington, but Brussels, too—that occupied territory is lost for the foreseeable future. Moscow’s staying power is helped by friends: Chinese dual-use components have supported Russia’s defense industry, and North Korea has bolstered Russia with ammunition, weapons, and troops. Russian weakness is certainly painful for the Kremlin. Oil and gas revenues have dropped under intensified sanctions and weaker demand, though they have been buoyed by the Iran war in recent weeks. But while Putin’s coercive win would be messy, costly, and strategically ugly, he could still try to sell endurance as victory, especially as time, politics, and domestic priorities erode Western allied support for Ukraine. It may still be possible for Putin to grind out this form of bleak, high-cost win in Ukraine, even if it is some distance from the victory he had originally thought possible in 2022. 4. Ukrainian Strategic Recovery Ukraine’s best outcome may be strategic recovery: a war made unwinnable for Russia through an unbreakable defense rather than a cinematic march to Crimea. Kyiv has certainly improved its battlefield performance after a hard winter, and more deliveries of vital supplies are arriving. Germany has helped provide an “unprecedented package” of air defense missiles and begun financing medium- and long-range Ukrainian strike drones, the Ukrainian defense minister said. Moreover, Kyiv’s defense ministry said April’s deep strikes hit at least 14 Russian refineries and terminals, plus military-industrial and naval targets. At sea, the think tank Carnegie argues Ukraine’s asymmetric approach has made Russia’s Black Sea Fleet functionally useless for key missions. The manpower problem remains the hinge, and Ukraine’s defense ministry has announced reforms on defined service terms and revised pay to boost recruitment and morale. Holding Russia to a stalemate would be a victory in itself for Ukraine, and a vindication of its pursuit of increased self-sufficiency in key defense areas such as drone technology and long-range missile production. This path gives Kyiv leverage before talks, and, even if Russia wouldn’t admit it openly, may be one of the most significant factors in a Kremlin decision to bring the war to a conclusion through negotiations and meaningful compromise that ends the war once and for all. 5. Russia-NATO Spillover The most dangerous scenario is grey-zone escalation that mutates into a NATO crisis as Russia lashes out against allies for their ongoing support of Ukraine. NATO says hybrid threats combine military and nonmilitary tools such as disinformation, cyberattacks, economic pressure, irregular groups, and regular forces. The European Union has already accused Russia of long-running hybrid campaigns involving cyberattacks, sabotage, disruption of critical infrastructure, physical attacks, and information manipulation. Poland’s internal security service said Russia is moving toward more professional sabotage networks, and Western officials have linked more than 150 incidents to Moscow since the invasion. This is why diplomacy and deterrence now overlap: Finnish President Alexander Stubb said, “It’s time to start talking to Russia,” while EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas replied that Europe must first decide what it wants to discuss. A missile, drone, sabotage cell, or cyberattack could become the hinge between shadow conflict and open confrontation, and NATO says the speed, scale and intensity of hybrid threats have increased. Worse still, Putin may try to test NATO’s resolve in the era of Trump’s skepticism with a direct attack on an ally, one that is plausibly deniable by the Kremlin through the use of proxy forces, or perhaps justified as a form of retaliation. A weak response or one that lacked Donald Trump’s backing would undermine NATO and call its entire existence into question. It would also be a high-risk move for Putin; Russia cannot match a united U.S.-led NATO in military might or capabilities. The Beginning of the End? Putin’s “coming to an end” line should be treated as an opening bid over the definition of ending, because he paired it with vows to fight until Russia’s war aims are achieved. Washington and Europe should judge the next phase by enforcement, leverage and escalation control because, as ISW has argued, a pause without credible mechanisms can become another battlefield. A ceasefire can be merciful, a frozen war can be dangerous, a Ukrainian recovery can be real and a NATO crisis can arrive sideways.