Is Ukraine-Russia War Entering the End Game?
A Model of Attritional Warfare Suggests Yes
The Persian Gulf war of USA/Israel against Iran has largely displaced reporting on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Reading the news on mainstream media one may think that this war, now in its fifth year, is still in stalemate; or even that the tide is turning against Russia (Washington Post: Putin remark on war ‘coming to a close’ points to exhaustion, not peace, analysts say; NYT: I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia).
But quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine. My readers may know that three years ago I developed a an Attritional Warfare Model, AWM (based on the Lanchester equations) for forecasting this war’s outcome (see links at the end of this post).
Ten realizations generated by the AWM for the dynamics of Ukrainian casualties. The blue band represents the estimated end point (the level of casualties when the war becomes unsustainable). Source
More recently a similar conclusion was reached by Warwick Powell (see Estimating Trajectories in Attritional Warfare: The Russia-Ukrainian Conflict Through a Quantitative Lens). Powell used a similar model, with the most important difference being the choice of the end point. My model assumes that the war ends when the level of casualties, as a percentage of population, exceeds a certain threshold, which I estimated via a sample of past attritional wars from the Correlates of War data (see the SocArxiv preprint below for details).
Powell, alternatively, assumes that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000). From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak. Powell’s model predicts that the tipping point will happen in July-September (updated on May 14).
Naturally, this is only a model-based forecast, not a prophesy. There is a lot of uncertainty about the estimates of various parameters. Furthermore, the threshold at which collapse occurs is only imprecisely estimated. For example, it’s not clear whether the threshold of 0.65-0.73 above which the Ukrainian force can maintain its operational integrity still applies on a battlefield heavily dominated by drones. For example, a smaller force size may be sufficient to continue defending positions given an abundant supply of drones.
My model also doesn’t incorporate any possible effects of the shift to the drone warfare — simply because it hadn’t happen when I published its predictions. Determining how this technological shift affects the AWM’s (Attritional Warfare Model) predictions will have to wait until the post-mortem after the war is over and when estimates would become much more precise. However, I tried a few preliminary explorations and they suggest that the drone effect on the war trajectory is not quite as huge as might be imagined. What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones.
Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.
The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:
2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127
Source: Kyiv Independent
The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.
This resistance translates into lower enlistment numbers. Warwick estimates that (as of May 14) that on the Ukrainian side net daily loss rate is 900–1,700 units (as best as I can determine, by “net” he means the difference between casualty and recruitment rates). And in his estimation the current Ukrainian effective force has already declined to 320,000–380,000 (from the peak of 550,000). In other words, according to his calculations, the Ukrainian army has already entered the downward spiral.
When will these pressures reach the breaking point? Powell thinks by September of this year. But I would be much more cautious, because the nature of such dynamical processes resists precise predictions. Think of a steam engine with broken regulator valve. The pressure grows, but the timing of explosion cannot be predicted, because it depends on the presence or absence of internal flaws in the engine casing. Same with earthquakes: we understand perfectly the physics of them, but it can be years or even decades before they actually strike.
Ukraine is like a steam engine with internal pressures building up. But it is impossible to make an accurate forecast on when things blow up.
Here are the links to my blog posts on the Ukraine-Russia AWM:
What Osipov and Lanchester Tell Us about the War in Ukraine
War in Ukraine III: Projections
War in Ukraine VI: Adding Economic Power to the Attrition Model
War in Ukraine V: Alternative Hypotheses
The SocArxiv Preprint:
Empirically Testing Predictions of an Attrition Warfare Model for the War in Ukraine
You can experiment with the model here:
Thanks, Peter for building on and extending the original piece. When I did the exercise the aim really was to get a broad sense of dynamics, trajectories and velocity. The original piece was pretty clear that it wasn’t trying to be anything more ambitious. It may be September, it may be January. Or somewhere in between or a bit after. What seems clear however is trajectory. And there doesn’t appear to be anything that can change that. The only regulator goes to speed and the ultimate tipping moment.
In a war of attrition, it is usually not the battlefield that collapses first, but the home front - and once the home front collapses, the battlefield follows.
In Ukraine, it is not so much the battlefield that is collapsing as the home front. Ukraine will not fall because of the destruction of the battlefield - it will fall because of the collapse of the home front.
Today, the Ukrainian home front is in a pre-collapse state: there is no trust in the authorities, and support for the battlefield is steadily declining. People themselves flee from the front and hide, and the harder the authorities try to drive people to the front, the more desperately they run from it.
At the same time, unity within society is also declining. That wartime effect which managed to reconcile Galician Catholic Ukraine with Orthodox Ukraine is beginning to fade, and the old ideological divide is returning once again. Once again, people are beginning to argue over who is a “real” Ukrainian and what the criteria are.
And so we end up with a president who has a very low approval rating and a very high distrust rating in a country at war. At the same time, the president is now putting far more pressure on the people than his public support realistically allows him to.
Not only is he disliked, but he is also oppressing the population by stripping people of their rights and grabbing men off the streets to replenish the front.
A society that is fleeing from the front and losing unity both within itself and with the battlefield itself. And at the same time, the people are completely losing trust in the authorities.
And the cherry on top of all this is the dying economy and infrastructure of the country.
This is not a war of strength - this is a war of endurance.
And the resilience of the Ukrainian home front has never been as fragile as it is now. While the battlefield slowly retreats, the home front is simply crumbling.
The Ukrainian home front has been losing the internal side of this war for a long time already - it is just that now this is beginning to turn into an obvious collapse.
And a repost of a text on this subject from March 2024:
//“...For some reason, it is commonly believed that when the frontline stands still, it creates a false illusion of balance between the sides 🤷♀️.
But in reality, this is not true, because not only the frontline participates in war, but also the home front. And for there to be balance in a war, there must be balance not only on the frontline, but also on the home front. And if your HOME FRONT IS LOSING while the frontline stands still, then this is not balance in war and not a temporary draw - no, this is an internal retreat.
For example, one of the reasons that led to Germany’s defeat in the First World War was that it was not the frontline that collapsed, but the home front, due to demoralization and economic problems. While there was “nothing new on the Western Front,” the German home front was losing its own war during that same time. And this is one of the major reasons why the Germans, led by Hitler, so desperately sought revenge, because those who had fought on the fronts of the First World War did not feel defeated themselves.
That is why Hitler learned the lessons and made his home front just as resilient as the battlefield itself. Germany’s home front during the Second World War held out all the way until the Reichstag.
It is entirely possible for the frontline to remain static throughout almost the entire war, and yet the war can still be lost because of a weaker home front.
And which side in this conflict has the weaker and smaller home front, one that has long been losing the internal war, has already become very obvious by many indicators...”//