How long will the war last?

Many in the media and politics anticipated dramatic and rapid Ukrainian victories during the summer of 2023. Nevertheless, progress on the ground has been slow, raising the prospects of a protracted war.

This begs the question: Just how much longer could the war last?

The precedent of prior wars is one way of looking at the issue.  On the graph below, we consider the three wars perhaps most similar to the current war, each involving Russia.

The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 lasted one year and three months. The current war has already run longer, and therefore we can safely dismiss this example as relevant.

The next longest war of interest is the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which lasted two and one-half years.  If this were the template, the current war might be expected to end in August 2024.  

The longest arguably comparable war was World War I, which ran three years and seven months, implying an end date of September 2025.

If one were to guess, the Crimean War would seem the likely precedent.  By August 2024, the Ukrainians will have eliminated 430,000 Russian soldiers (if we accept the Ukrainian body count and 500 incremental eliminations per day).  Russia lost 450,000 soldiers in the Crimean War, so the scale would appear similar, granting that imperial Russia’s population was approximately half the current level of the Russian Federation.

Russia has had longer conflicts, including the Second Chechen War, which lasted ten years, or for that matter, the first phase of the Ukrainian War, which ran from 2014-2022. Nevertheless, both these wars were low level affairs from the Russia perspective.  For example, total Russian losses in the Second Chechen War are estimated at no more than 14,000, fewer than the Russians are losing every month in Ukraine.  Large countries like the US and Russia can maintain low level conflicts almost indefinitely.

Major wars, however, are another matter, and the current conflict in Ukraine constitutes a major war from both the Russian and Ukrainian perspective. The dynamics are therefore likely to follow those of other major wars. This suggests slightly better than even odds that the war ends within a year and near certainty that it ends by September 2025.

I would note that in the three comparable wars — the Russo-Japanese, the Crimean and the first World War  — the Russians lost.