It has been 366 days since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each month since then has been different, the war eddying from Russian success to failure, Ukrainian triumph to a plateauing conflict. Few predicted that Ukraine would do as well as it has. Even fewer are willing to predict what might come next.
Here, Express.co.uk speaks to three experts who were willing to throw their hats in the ring and forecast what the next 12 months might hold for the war, each to varying degrees of Russian demise, Ukrainian success, and a permanently changed world.
Putin doesn’t back down
Natia Seskuria, founder and director of the Georgia-based Regional Institute for Security Studies (RISS) says judging by his annual address on February 21, Putin “isn’t willing to back down or negotiate” to bring the war to a close.
She expects the minimum that Russia will look to achieve this year is capturing the Donbas region. “But I don’t think that he will necessarily stop at Donbas region,” she says.
Losses will be high, she predicts, as hundreds of thousands of undertrained conscripts are shuttled into Ukraine from Russia. “They will lack equipment, and there will be serious issues with planning and logistics.”
She thinks that Putin is now more aware than ever that the war poses an “existential threat” to his legacy, “because his whole future and the way he will go down in history depends on this war effort,” she says.
Because of this, there is no other strategy for Russia other than victory.
And Putin is banking on such a victory because he thinks Ukraine’s allies will at some point falter. Ms Seskuria says: “He is continuing this war with a long-term perspective that the West may at some point crumble.”
Ukraine regains territory and a peace conference is held
It will be hard for Ukraine to reclaim all of the territories it has lost in the next 12 months, says Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
However, he says he is “optimistic that the Ukrainians can make substantial territorial progress”.
If President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces manage this and put themselves in a position to threaten Crimea, “at that point, there may be the opportunity to have a peace conference, which would be a reset of European security relations”.
By this point, Dr Melvin says: “President Putin would be under a lot of pressure at that moment possibly step down or be overthrown.”
But this is the “optimistic scenario”. The pessimistic one? “That the Ukrainians probably still make some progress but not enough to stop the war dragging on into the second half of the year,” he says.
“At that point, Western unity begins to break because people will start to say, When is this war going to end?”
Dr Melvin thinks Russia may well begin to throw everything behind the war, “throwing in as many people as it takes, paying whatever economic costs”.
He continues: “Perhaps China will start supplying the weapons, at which point Ukraine may find itself having to settle for an agreement with Russia which sees large parts of its territory, including Crimea, essentially given to Russia. At that point, a new division of Ukraine emerges.”
JUST IN: Royal Family went against age-old mantra to show support for Ukraine
Mass mobilisation and Putin to use nukes
While Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), is hesitant to predict the future, he believes Putin could call for a mass mobilisation of all Russian citizens of fighting age in the next 12 months.
“What can Russia do that it hasn’t yet done? It can announce the whole mobilisation for its citizens,” he says. “It already has 300,000 ready to mobilise. Its potential is much bigger, at least theoretically.”
He says Russia may move to “blackmail” the West into making Ukraine stand down. It will do this, he says, “with chemical weapons, and maybe the most dangerous weapons: tactical nukes”.
He doesn’t think this is close, “but I’m pretty sure Russia will begin blackmailing with nuclear arms and I’m pretty sure it will be ready to use it [at some point in the future].”
DON’T MISS
US makes big threat as China urges Putin to END Ukraine war [EXCLUSIVE]
Lukashenko won’t help Putin for fear his military would ‘switch sides’ [REPORT]
‘Putin won’t see his next birthday’, Russian dissident MP claims [PREDICTION]
In late 2022, as Ukraine go the upper hand in the war, Zelensky said he wanted to retake Crimea from Russia. He reiterated those words in January 2023. For Mr Slunkin, this will be a deciding factor in whether the West continues to supply Ukraine with weapons in the next year.
He says: “If we talk about Crimea, then I would say that this would bring us to the moment that the world experienced in 1962 with the Cuban Missiles crisis.
“This doesn’t mean that Ukraine shouldn’t receive support from the West. But it is something that the Western allies will think of, and how their reaction should be.
“They won’t be able to stop the Ukrainian army from liberating some of the territories like Crimea. They can of course try to push it not to do so, but Ukraine would not have to listen.”
Mr Slunkin doesn’t see a ceasefire happening anytime soon, or at least for as long as Russian troops remain in Ukraine — something he thinks will last indefinitely.