The only reason we didn’t want to get directly involved in Ukraine was because we feared that Russia might go nuclear over that. If Russia goes nuclear first, well, then, the worst has already happened, so we might as well unleash all of NATO’s conventional forces on Russia and see what happens. And Putin is smart enough to know that. He’ll only use nukes if he thinks he’s going to lose anyways, and he’s still far from that point.
The military effect of the population disparity between Russia and Ukraine is increasingly less important. Ukraine is rapidly moving to a battlefield in which their soldiers stay well to the rear and use air, sea, and ground drones to conduct operations. Russia seems to be still trying to move away from their traditional “overwhelming mass of troops” tactics but with little success. Ukraine has made a deliberate choice NOT to send their young men to be slaughtered en mass - Russia seems to be doing the opposite.
The population of Russia has a larger percentage of elderly people (with state pensions a significant and politically touchy part of the budget), and the economy also needs workers as well as soldiers and is already having problems in that respect. North Korean mercenaries and foreigners enticed into the country then press-ganged are signs of desperation that do little to make up combat losses.
Wars often end not because one side achieves its maximal goals, but because the marginal cost of continued offensive action exceeds likely gains. The battlefield in Ukraine increasingly resembles an ultra-lethal surveillance zone where offensive maneuver is extraordinarily expensive for both sides, so increasingly favours defence. Russia’s loss of armoured vehicles, and Ukraine’s reduced manpower mean an increase in marginal cost for both sides.
That suggests a long attritional contest in which Russia probably has the stronger raw endurance capacity, while Ukraine retains adaptive efficiency and technological innovation. Absent either Putin’s position being threatened or somehow NATO becoming directly involved, an effective stalemate looks increasingly likely, IMHO.
And defense, on that battlefield, is fine for Ukraine. Because their offense on other battlefields is phenomenally effective.
Another (now obsolete) thread on end of war predictions. Obsolete I say because in 2022 we had Biden, and now we have Trump 2.0, so any assumption of good faith on the USA’s part is … highly suspect in terms of ending the conflict. But it may be a useful comparison at least!
Right.
I feel like this war isn’t going to be decided on the battlefield, but rather on the home front. Something is going to make the Russians decide that the fight isn’t worth it any more- economic issues, manpower issues, or something else.
My guess is that what they’ll do is pull back to the borders of the oblasts in the Donbas region they already claim to have annexed and that have been in contention since 2014, and defend them. That’ll put the Ukrainians in the position of having to choose between stopping fighting, or trying to go on the offensive to retake those areas.
Of course, this could change if one side or the other comes up with the Russo-Ukrainian War equivalent of the invention of the tank and breaks the stalemate. I don’t know what/how that might happen, but it could I suppose.
Actually, I think it already has. With the demonstrated power, range, and reasonable efficacy of long range drones, even if Russa retreats back to the Donbas to hold without a negotiated peace, Ukraine can take it as a new-normal and keep sending drones to occasionally attack Russia’s infrastructure, including their petro options, which seems to be their only remaining non-nuclear leverage.
So, without someone enforcing a peace (note, I do not say an honest peace) a partial win for Russia is ever-harder. Though a LOT of that depends on if Ukraine takes the temporary loss of territory (say a 5 or 10 year ceasefire) rebuilds, and prepares to fight offensively with the next generation of drones built from their experiences. It could be a very costly war for Russia down the line, especially if Putin’s successors are fighting for control in the hopefully not-so-distant future.
You beat me to it. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of drones to this conflict. To give folks some perspective on this, it’s helpful to consider how battlefield casualties have been inflicted historically compared to today. During WW2 its generally agreed that around 70% of battlefield casualties were caused by artillery and mortars. What a lot of mainstream media sources are not covering is the fact that drone technology is already revolutionizing the battlefield. By most sources, drones account for ~90% of total combat casualties. The beauty of tracking drone kill numbers vs artillery estimates in WW2 is that casualties can be independently verified because drone kills are usually captured on video.
Drones have already changed how war is being fought. We see maps that purport to show lines on maps shifting one way or the other based on photos of soldiers holding a national flag in a geolocated place, however, the reality is far murkier. There are no actual ‘front lines’ in Ukraine. Instead there are zones that have varying levels of drone saturation. Day or night don’t prevent drones and their imaging tech on both sides from identifying targets tens of kilometers in either direction of the ‘front line’ shown on maps. Instances of Russian forces even reaching lines of contact where there are actual Ukrainian soldiers to shoot at in recent months is actually quite uncommon. Far more likely to see a convoy or troop formation knocked out by drones while moving on a road 25 km away, or ‘hunter’ drone units systematically targeting individual soldiers trying to move in very small groups of only two or three. At this stage of the conflict Ukraine is leading on the drone technology front. Given the amount of international financial backing, partnerships, and support Ukrainian drone manufacturers are receiving from the West, this advantage appears only to be widening.
Barring Putin dying and his replacement deciding that Ukraine isn’t worth it and pulling out, this war isn’t going to “end”. I expect the closest we’ll get to an ending is the above. A prolonged cease-fire in which both sides use the pause to rebuild their military and build up defences in depth on both sides of the border.
A living Putin will never allow himself the indignity of admitting this whole mess was a mistake in the first place, and Ukraine just doesn’t have enough to force a win. So, stalemate, quagmire, and then a pause, for how long is impossible to predict.
The point I think, is that in this conflict drones are the WWI machine gun/trenches => something that stops breakthroughs.
The question was, will an equivalent of the tank appear? something that can break through the drone “kill zones”?
We’re already seeing drones experimented with in an offensive role too. This may have gone largely under the mainstream media radar, but you may recall Ukraine’s military CIC Oleksandr Syrsky announcing back in January that 2026 would see Ukrainian forces taking more offensive actions. Ukraine’s generals have undertaken a series of what have so far appeared to be limited local counterattacks. However, it’s becoming more clear that Ukraine has greatly improved their drones’ medium range (sometimes called ‘operational depth’) strike capability in 2026, and have been systematically/daily going after targets that were only occasionally hit before, such as ammo dumps, fuel depots, and most important of all Russian drone operating units, that are like 90 km behind the “lines”. They then follow this up by designating a small width area, say a 5 km wide zone, and super-saturate that zone with like 5-600 drones which essentially kills everything in that path and occupation forces simply walk into the cleared area afterwards. I’m oversimplifying this strategy, but that’s the basic idea. This tactic has been used successfully in a number of locations this year beginning with Zaporizhia, and can account for the recent shift where Ukraine is now recapturing more territory than it’s losing each month.
The “tank” of WW1 is currently under development, and it is a drone. The offensive impact has been fairly limited thus far, but it’s a question of scaling up operations to achieve more impressive breakthroughs in the future. Something Ukraine seems determined to do.
Only thing I can think of that would work in this function would be some sort of large area-denial technology that can shut down every drone that flies in within a certain radius of a few kilometers or something (although even then, it may be unable to stop wire-guided drones.) Of course, such tech may be damaging to human bodies and brains.
I started to write that may be dense concentration of drones could clear paths for offensives but stopped myself because I didn’t know enough about the issue to issue a theory.
May be I should have 
The thing is, Putin dying isn’t something in the “might happen” category. It will happen, one way or another, eventually. And when it does, well, anyone with a brain can already see that the war isn’t worth it. The only reason Putin hasn’t cut his losses is that it would mean an enormous loss of face for him. Whoever succeeds him won’t have that handicap.
As for drone offensives, they don’t even need to clear paths for other units. Drones themselves can be the offensive, as seen by the destruction of a large fraction of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, or all of the damage they’ve wreaked on Russia’s oil infrastructure.
Also, it’s my understanding that Putin is one of those dictators who has made sure there’s no clear successor to him, to make it harder to replace him. Which is fine for him, but means things likely get chaotic and nasty when he dies and a power struggle breaks out.
Which will probably help Ukraine in the short-to-medium term, but the long term effects depends on who finally claws their way to the top. Still, I don’t imagine that the effectiveness of the Russian military against Ukraine will improve if the leaders in Moscow are fighting each other.
Yes, Putin dying will happen eventually. But it’s not certain that his replacement will end the war. Depending on who it is, and what they had to do to end up on top, they may not want to, or be able to, end the war. Doing so might open them to attacks over “Wasting all those lives” and whatnot.
A different objection of the same nature …
It’s sorta easy to accurately predict what might happen over the next 6 months if Putin died tomorrow. Because we’re starting from the facts of today.
It’s much harder to accurately predict what the first 6 months of a post-Putin future looks like if he dies 5 years from tomorrow. Because the 5 years between now and then also need to be accurately predicted. And that’s the toughie.
So the absolute truth that he’s a) mortal, and b) 73 right now, only says his death is a 99% certainty within the next 25 years. An awful lot can change in those 25 years.
I personally doubt he’ll last all 25 on Earth, much less in charge of Russia. But he could (and IMO will) last long enough that the state of the war when he does die/is deposed will be very different than it is today.
And then comes @Horatius excellent point about which somebody is next and what their opening agenda looks like.
The Russian mindset is weird. In the West, it would be “We’ve already lost a lot of lives, let’s cut this war short before we lose more.” In Russia, it’s apparently “We’ve already lost a lot of lives, so we’d better lose a lot more, lest those already-dead lives be wasted.”
Yeah, you’ll need a new Russian leader who is both sensible enough to realize that ending the war is a good idea, and has enough political support that they can actually do that. From what we’ve seen so far, though, satisfying both of those conditions will be difficult.
Sunk Loss fallacy.