The move comes a day after the US gave federal agencies 30 days to wipe TikTok off all government devices.

Flawed judgments about military history helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Military history doesn’t say what Ukraine’s critics think]

One line of argument, advanced by some French and German leaders in recent discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that sooner or later Russia and Ukraine can reconcile like Germany and France after World War II. (A German government spokesperson later denied the report, but this is hardly a new recommendation.) It is a terrible analogy. Reconciliation may have arrived a couple of decades after the Second World War, but that conflict had ended with the aggressor not merely defeated but devastated. French troops had occupied Germany, including a part of its former capital. Clear borders between the two countries had been established and German society, if not thoroughly de-Nazified, had moved a long way in that direction.

The Russia-Ukraine case is very different. Russia, as unambiguous an aggressor as was Nazi Germany in 1940, will not, even under the most optimistic assumptions, see its cities flattened, its regime overthrown, its military disbanded for 10 years and only reconstructed thereafter under the supervision of the Western democracies. And the idea that the fighting will conclude with Russia again accepting (as Moscow did three decades ago) the legitimacy of Ukraine’s 1991 borders is barely conceivable.

To suppose that any real peace between Russia and Ukraine is possible within the next decade, after the horrors of the invasion—rape, torture, murder, the wholesale kidnapping of children—is simply naive. Nor are the Arab-Israeli truces a plausible model for the future. Those truces lasted, respectively, seven years (1949–56), 11 years (1956–67), six years (1967–73), and nine years (1973–82). And that does not count the cross-border raids, aerial dogfights, terrorist attacks, and up-to-the-edge-of-war mobilization crises during those truces. In the Middle East, the great powers were able to put brakes on their clients, and the country whose existence was up for dispute, Israel, eventually became the strongest power.

A rather more popular analogy is the truce after the Korean War, which has lasted for a good 70 years. But here as well the comparison is too flimsy to hold up to a closer look. Stalin approved the original North Korean invasion of the South. Only after he died, in March 1953, did the new Soviet leadership indicate that it was willing to bring the conflict to an end. In July of that year, the armistice was finally signed. Not to put too fine a point on it, although Vladimir Putin’s demise would probably make it easier to conclude the conflict in Ukraine, he is not dead yet.

The analogy breaks down in many other ways, as well. For one thing, China and North Korea couldn’t have imagined victory after early 1951. In August of that year American and United Nations ground forces, coupled with the South Korean army, numbered more than 500,000 troops, half of them American. The front line was about the length that the demilitarized zone is today, stretching through 150 miles of mountainous, and therefore defensible, terrain. The lines had been restored roughly to the prewar demarcation between the South and North.

[From the September 1953 issue: Our mistakes in Korea]

In Ukraine, the active front lines are about 600 miles in length, but the Russia-Ukraine border is much longer than that. Ukraine must defend not a narrow, mountainous peninsula but rather wide open spaces and vulnerable cities. No multidivisional foreign force is deployed on Ukraine’s side. And neither side can accept returning to the pre-February 24 lines of demarcation.

The peace on the Korean peninsula was kept only by a robust South Korean military, tens of thousands of American troops, and, for a long period, the presence of American tactical nuclear weapons. Although historians still debate how far the United States was prepared to go during the war, the use of nuclear weapons was a matter of discussion within the U.S. military and government at that time, and presumably word of that reached Moscow and Beijing.

Adroit and historically informed statecraft lies not in casting about for historical analogies and crying “Eureka!” after finding one that fits. It lies, rather, in recognizing the distinctive features of the situation before us. We must understand both the history that has led us here and the personal histories of those making decisions, but we should focus on particulars rather than generalities. Reaching for comparisons is a heuristic, an analytic shortcut that risks at best discomfiture, at worst disaster. “As our case is new, so we must think anew,” Abraham Lincoln said in his message to Congress in December 1862, and he was a statesman if ever there was one.

That being so, how should we think about a Russia-Ukraine peace—or, if that is not possible, a cessation of hostilities?

Begin with the reality that neither side is looking for a cessation of hostilities at this moment, and Western leaders would therefore be foolish to attempt to persuade and nudge the Ukrainian government into it. The record of such attempts (including Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy during the early stages of World War I) is largely one of failure, for the very simple reason that in war, as in other human endeavors, if you do not play the game you usually do not make the rules. It would not only be a waste of time but send all the wrong signals if Ukraine’s partners were to discuss such matters with journalists and pundits before at least one side is ready for it.

In the long term, moreover, a truly peaceful Ukraine is possible under only two imaginable conditions: NATO membership, or the forward deployment of tens of thousands of American troops coupled with a guarantee to wage war on Ukraine’s behalf comparable to that extended to South Korea. The former is unlikely until Ukraine’s borders have been recognized by all concerned, including Russia; the latter is also improbable, at least for now. The notion that defense guarantees by a collection of European states can somehow substitute is risible. No Ukrainian leader believes (or should believe) that French, German, Italian, or Dutch leaders will be ready to wage war against Russia in defense of Kyiv. That, ultimately, is what a defense guarantee means and what its credibility requires.

Any long-term planning for Ukraine and for the West should now also be predicated on the postwar persistence of a malignant and militarized Russia, which may well intend to restart the war once it has had a breather. Potential dissidents have fled the country or are in jail; a societal mobilization built on xenophobia and paranoia is under way; freedom of expression is being stamped out; and any successors to Vladimir Putin are unlikely to be much better. Both Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council, and Dmitri Medvedev, its deputy chairman, have expressed eliminationist views no less rabid than those articulated by their boss. Furthermore, even a defeated Russia will retain, in the Russian general staff, a thinking and planning organ of considerable quality. They will learn, adjust, and come back to avenge their humiliations at the hands of Ukraine and the West. And if they do not feel humiliated, it will only be because they have succeeded in crushing out the life of a free, sovereign, and whole Ukraine.

All of this being so, the best possible outcome leading to a cessation of fighting would be a Russian military collapse. If the West hopes to achieve this, it must provide Ukraine with a massive amount of all necessary weapons short of atomic bombs. Such an effort would require the kind of dramatic increases in output made possible under legislation like the American Defense Procurement Act of 1950.

[From the November 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

The Russian military in Ukraine is in a parlous state. On a large scale it cannot maneuver, it cannot coordinate, it cannot assault. Its losses have been stunning. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have suffered as well, but the indications are that General Zaluzhny has been conserving units for a spring offensive once the mud dries. The West needs to do all it can to ensure the success of that effort.

Should such an offensive succeed in breaking the land bridge between Russia and Crimea, and possibly even liberating Crimea and large parts of the Donbas region, there will be political repercussions in Russia. In all political systems, including authoritarian ones, dramatic failures on the battlefield in a war of choice reverberate in capitals. Already, Russian oligarchs and bureaucrats whisper criticisms of Putin and his war to Western journalists. He will not falter, but others may decide that he needs to be out of power. It probably will not be pretty when it happens, but Putin’s exit could, like Stalin’s death in 1953, open up the way for something better than war at a fever pitch.

At least for a time.

European low-cost carrier Wizz Air is is to suspend flights to Moldova because of concerns over airspace safety.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz summarized his country’s approach to the war in Ukraine. “Despite all the pressure to take action,” he said, “caution must take priority over hasty decisions, unity over solo actions.” The line provided Scholz’s most explicit defense to date of Germany’s cycle of denial, delay, and cautious delivery of new weapons technologies to assist Ukraine’s effort against Russia. What appeared to be hand-wringing over sending Leopard 2 tanks earlier this year, Scholz assured the audience, was in fact his government’s latest prudent measure to achieve a decisive victory for Ukraine in the war raging east of the Dnipro River.

Scholz’s allies in Kyiv and elsewhere surely paid careful attention to the evolution that the Munich speech represented. Nearly a year earlier, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the chancellor had boldly declared in another speech that Germany had reached a Zeitenwende, an inflection point in history. During a special session convened in the Bundestag last February, he said his country would have to transform decades of conciliation toward Russia into a clear-eyed will to dissuade President Vladimir Putin from further aggression. Scholz identified the war’s central struggle as “whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the 19th century … or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check.” The challenge “requires strength of our own,” Scholz stated.

The standing ovations that erupted after these key lines echoed the world over, as leaders throughout Europe and North America applauded the chancellor’s remarks. Yet in the intervening 12 months, he has not delivered on his sweeping vision for a more modern, more active German military.

[Anne Applebaum: Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine]

Three days after the war began, Scholz made a promise he repeated this month in Munich: “Germany will increase its defense expenditure to 2 percent of gross domestic product on a permanent basis.” But his government failed to meet that objective last year, and it will likely fail again this year and next year. Germany now spends the second-largest amount of all governments supplying Ukraine’s defense, but it still spends less on a per capita basis than countries that are smaller and less affluent. Germany finally sent tanks to Ukraine earlier this year, but those donations have proved easier than genuine reform at home. Although Berlin has made good on its promise of a boycott of Russian fossil fuels, its contribution to NATO’s “Very High Readiness Joint Task Force”—a German-made infantry fighting vehicle called the Puma—floundered. In training exercises, the Puma earned the nickname Pannenpanzer, or “breakdown tank.”

A year ago, Scholz announced a special investment fund of more than 100 billion euros to strengthen the German military, but less than a third of those euros have been assigned to contracts. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently aired concerns that Germany’s stockpiles have been depleted by its generous transfers to Ukraine. These comments strain common sense when most of the “special funds” remained unspent until December, when lawmakers finally approved the first procurements. This month, Scholz also abandoned plans to establish a National Security Council, a body that would have been well suited to manage an expanded role in the defense of Europe.

The lumbering pace of change that Germany has adopted to improve its military competence has immediate consequences for the war in Ukraine. It gives Putin leverage by demonstrating that the continent’s wealthiest society lacks the tenacity to stand firm against revanchism. Fewer than 1,000 miles separate Germany from Ukraine’s borders, and Russia still governs a chunk of the former East Prussia—Kaliningrad Oblast. Berlin can’t project power in these close geographic quarters merely with words.

In Europe more broadly, the implications of a shrinking Zeitenwende are just as dire. As Germany shirks on military modernization, it makes way for governments seeking a greater say. Shortly after Brexit, French President Emmanuel Macron articulated a new guiding principle for his country—“strategic autonomy,” the idea that the continent should conduct its external relations independently of American designs. Macron has championed the idea particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, during trade tensions, and following Russian nuclear threats. His controversial one-on-one calls with Putin since Russia’s invasion imply that Macron feels fit to lead negotiations with Russia on Europe’s behalf. After all, France is the European Union’s sole nuclear power, controls the bloc’s most powerful military (underwritten by a potent defense industry), and has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Yet this vision of Europe’s future sounds obtuse given that, without the United States, Europe’s response to Russia’s most recent incursions would be woefully inadequate. European forces rely on American infrastructure to coordinate basic tasks. NATO, which binds the United States to European security, bolsters that work. Scholz can’t seem to decide where Germany fits in. He placates French counterparts preening about the EU’s supposed geopolitical self-reliance. But his government also always defers to America’s stabilizing position. If Germany were to spend more on defense, it would have the authority to advocate for a position somewhere between France’s vision of autonomy—epitomized by Macron’s 2019 declaration that NATO was becoming “brain dead”—and its own preference historically to work with the United States to promote Europe’s security.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Tanks for Ukraine have shifted the balance of power in Europe]

Of course, a stronger German military will take time to mature. Reaping its dividends will take even longer. Abandoning that job prematurely, however, will leave the larger threats posed by Russia and its imperialist ambitions unanswered. Although Scholz’s predecessor, Angela Merkel, has remained reticent on the conflict, she astutely typecast Putin last year by saying, “Military deterrence is the only language he understands.”

Germans explain their difficulty in increasing defense spending by pointing to bureaucratic hurdles. These excuses have become less credible as the war in Ukraine has dragged on. The chancellor is willing to sidestep procedure when tending to Germany’s economic interests. He tried to preempt debate in his cabinet when selling a significant share of a terminal in Hamburg’s port to a Chinese-owned company last fall, for instance. (He renegotiated the sale only after public furor.) The same urgency seems to fail him when fulfilling his declared goals of military modernization.

Shortly after admitting that his government had not spent 2 percent of its GDP on defense last year, the chancellor wrote a 5,000-word article in Foreign Affairs aiming to elaborate on what he had meant by the word Zeitenwende in his Bundestag speech. Instead, he redefined the term. Rather than a roadmap for his government, it became a worldwide phenomenon. All states, he wrote, have to contend with a “new multipolar world,” an era in which “different countries and models of government are competing for power and influence.” His crisp statement a year ago about how Germany could overcome obstacles had morphed into a lengthy meditation on their intractability. Diluting the original Zeitenwende will not wash away what catalyzed it.

Although the minimum age is 18 in most European countries, there are many exceptions.

Betrayal has formed part of European politics since polities started forming -- just ask Julius Caesar, who asked "Et tu Brute?" as his friend stabbed him for the good of the Roman Republic.

Substitute Manor Solomon scores for the third consecutive game as European hopefuls Fulham fight back to claim a Premier League draw against Wolves.

Sometimes the best way to understand what’s possible is to ask impossible questions.

One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want.

The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecast a decisive Russian win against Ukraine.

Let’s examine each of these insights in turn.

Beware the fog of war … termination.

First, a meta-point: This exercise is really hard. “No one, including me, has any strong confidence about how or when the war will end,” Dan Reiter, a political scientist at Emory University who wrote an entire book about how wars end, told me.

[Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory]

Wars “proceed in phases,” with “offensives and operational pauses, cycles of increased or decreased intensity in fighting,” and so on; it is perilous to “extrapolate from whatever period you’re currently in and imagine that this will represent the future trajectory” of the conflict, cautioned Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses.

There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances. To put a twist on an old Yiddish expression, people predict, and war laughs.

Prepare for a protracted, protean conflict.

Amid an apparent Russian offensive and anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensives in eastern Ukraine this spring, U.S. officials are reportedly conveying an urgent message to their Ukrainian counterparts: The next several months are crucial to tipping the war in Ukraine’s favor, given that ramped-up Western military assistance can’t necessarily be sustained. Ukrainian leaders and a number of prominent experts argue that Ukraine could actually win the war as early as this year if the United States and its allies speedily provide the types of additional advanced weaponry, such as fighter jets and long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, that Kyiv is requesting.

If the Ukrainian military were to use such weapons to cut off the land bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, Moscow would have a harder time supplying troops and civilians in Crimea and keeping control of it, argued John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work). That, in turn, could pressure Putin to strike a peace deal or even bring about new Russian leadership, Herbst told me.

Many experts I consulted, however, advised girding for a struggle that could last a lot longer, even if the war in its more acute form resolves sooner.

The conflict is “already a long war when compared to other interstate conflicts, and wars of this kind tend to cluster as either being relatively short—lasting no more than weeks or a few months—or averaging several years in duration,” Kofman told me. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average.

Any apparent conclusion of the conflict might give way to a reopening of the war in the future, Kofman noted—particularly if the current wave of fighting subsides because of “a premature cease-fire with none of the fundamental issues resolved, and both parties simply use the time to rearm in the hope of returning to the battlefield.”

The forecasting firm Good Judgment’s superforecasters, a global network of about 180 experts in various fields with a strong track record, tend to “see a long slog coming” in Ukraine, CEO Warren Hatch told me. Some of the superforecasters, however, point to key differences between this war and past conflicts that they believe could produce a faster resolution—including the degree to which the West is arming Ukraine and punishing Russia economically.

As of this writing, the superforecasters had assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario of Russia and Ukraine not agreeing to end the conflict before October 1, 2024, the furthest-out date among the multiple-choice options presented. Good Judgment also posed my questions to its network. When the superforecasters were asked to name the year in which they expected Russia’s war against Ukraine to end, the median answer was 2025, with a minimum of 2024 and a maximum of 2037.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]

The Russian journalist Maria Lipman, now a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, observed that at the moment, “neither side seems to have a clear advantage on the battlefield,” and “neither Ukrainian nor Russian leadership is willing to start peace talks.” This leads Lipman to an endgame scenario that some other experts recently have invoked: an armistice akin to that between North and South Korea, with the United States and its allies supporting Kyiv as they do Seoul.

“One may imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War,” with “the warring sides remaining not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on alert, but more or less securely divided,” Lipman told me. Still, she said, whatever border is drawn between Russia and Ukraine is likely to be far longer and harder to secure than the one dividing the Korean peninsula. And Russia, as a much larger country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a significant economic player, “is no North Korea” and “can’t and will not be isolated,” she noted.

Michael Kimmage, a historian of U.S.-Russian relations at the Catholic University of America who served on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 2014 to 2016, told me,  “The one thing I feel comfortable predicting” is that what’s now playing out on the battlefield in Ukraine will prove “a generational conflict” featuring tensions and hostilities over the next two to three decades, even if the current hot war wanes. It will be a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, “but nested within another conflict between the United States and Russia that’s really over Europe at large.”

The closest analogue is the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union took nearly 20 years—until the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis—to establish “rules of the road” for how to contain and manage the entrenched, multifaceted conflict between the two superpowers, Kimmage argued. In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict. Even as they steel themselves for a long-term contest with China, Americans could find the conflict with Russia becoming more present in their life than it is now—in the form of, say, more Kremlin cyberattacks or election interference, or even direct military confrontation with Russia in a war zone like Ukraine.

Still, Herbst, of the Atlantic Council, noted that the United States is spending only a bit more than 6 percent of its defense budget ($50 billion a year) to support Ukraine militarily and economically, relative to the trillions of dollars that the United States spent over the course of the Cold War. “If leaders explain the stakes and the costs, this is a manageable burden,” he told me.

Keep an eye on whether other countries accept Russia’s claims to empire.

Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian army who now studies the future of warfare, put it plainly: The war is most likely to end “when Putin realizes his imperial fantasies are not possible, and that his army cannot deliver him the victories [on] the ground he needs.”

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, also pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial aspirations as a key indicator to watch, but added that these could be thwarted by developments off the battlefield. She doesn’t foresee a durable end to the war in Ukraine until “the world” (here she especially has in mind countries other than the United States and its European allies) “is no longer of the view that Russia deserves a sphere of influence and has a right to empire.” Only in such a scenario, Hill explained, will the Kremlin be prevented from overcoming Western isolation by deepening its diplomatic, economic, and military ties with other countries, and feel international pressure to engage in serious negotiations to end the war through some international framework.

Persuading countries in regions such as Africa and the Middle East to deny Russia its imperial schemes will require a major shift in how the United States and its allies describe the stakes of the war and even in how they articulate their broader worldview, Hill argued. Rather than framing the war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies or East versus West, U.S. and European leaders should make the case that the Kremlin, in its thirst for empire, has “violated the UN Charter [and] international laws” that keep other countries safe as well.

U.S. officials also might need to move away from the strategic paradigm they’ve embraced in recent years of “great-power competition.” This framework, Hill maintained, risks implying that the fates of nations around the world are subject to face-offs among the United States, China, and Russia—and it can shape geopolitical realities rather than merely describing them as they are. The United States might have to push to reform outdated elements of the world’s security architecture, such as the UN Security Council, so that they no longer reflect a bygone era in which a small group of big powers got to determine the course of international affairs.

Anticipate a messy, provisional peace advanced by a group of global actors.

Many experts I consulted were pessimistic about the prospect of a negotiated settlement to end the war in the foreseeable future. But a couple offered scenarios for what such a settlement could look like, portraying them as more guesswork than predictions. Both scenarios involved the mediation of other world powers. Neither featured a tidy, satisfying resolution.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cut the baloney realism]

Mathew Burrows of the Stimson Center, a former top U.S. intelligence official focused on strategic foresight and global trend analysis, sketched one potential path in which a stalemate leads to a brittle, occasionally violated cease-fire mediated by actors like the United Nations, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Eventually, perhaps if U.S. commitment to Ukraine fades or Putin is weakened by significant opposition during Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, there could be a difficult, lengthy push for a sturdier peace deal involving bigger concessions, with Ukraine encouraged to negotiate by Western and Southern European countries and Russia pressed to do the same by the other “BRICS” nations (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa). That effort would require extensive U.S. involvement as well, and could serve as a springboard for China to assert itself as a diplomatic power, as the United States did during peace talks after World War I.

Reiter, the scholar of how wars end, provided another rough outline: If Russian and Ukrainian offensives this spring fail to result in a clear military victory for either side, a neutral country such as Brazil or India could broker secret peace negotiations. Ukraine and Russia might be more receptive to these diplomatic efforts than before—Putin on account of an exhausted Russian military, Ukrainian leaders out of concern about the war’s mounting economic and humanitarian toll and the slackening of Western military assistance. The talks could yield a shaky cease-fire in which Russia consented to remove its forces from Ukrainian territory (a commitment that all parties think the Kremlin will probably renege on by maintaining a military presence in the country’s east) and Ukraine vowed to reestablish a water supply to Crimea without recognizing Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The agreement also could include a tacit understanding that Ukraine would not formally join NATO. Such a deal could provide Putin with a “fig leaf” to “declare victory for domestic political audiences” and enable Ukraine to begin postwar reconstruction, Reiter reasoned. But it would leave the core issues of sovereignty that triggered the war unresolved.

Don’t expect the war to end in a mushroom cloud.

Over the past year, there has been an ebbing and flowing fear of the war in Ukraine ending apocalyptically, with Russia resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, stirred most recently by Putin suspending cooperation in the nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States known as New START. But many experts I turned to were not seriously concerned about such an outcome.

[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]

In explaining why, Reiter pointed to “the heavy diplomatic costs of [Russia] using nuclear weapons, the lack of military utility of using nuclear weapons,” and the risk that such use would “increase NATO military involvement” in the war. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale, told me he stands by an assessment he made in October in which he similarly argued that a Russian nuclear detonation was highly unlikely. “We are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending,” he wrote at the time. More likely, Snyder argues, Putin is trying to instill fear in order to buy his military time and undermine international support for Ukraine.

And don’t assume that the war will conclude with regime change in Moscow.

When my colleagues at the Atlantic Council and I recently surveyed more than 150 global strategists and foresight experts about what the world could look like in 10 years, nearly half of the respondents expected Russia to either become a failed state or break up internally by 2033, presumably driven at least in part by Putin’s disastrous war against Ukraine. But even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall.

In his October assessment, Snyder floated one scenario in which Ukrainian military victories prompt a power struggle in Moscow that leads Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, as Putin and his rivals judge that the armed forces loyal to them are most useful on the homefront. But what Snyder envisions is Putin prioritizing his political survival in Russia over his personal and ideological designs on Ukraine, not necessarily Putin’s removal from power.

Kofman, at CNA, considers “leadership or regime change in Russia” to be “unlikely in the near term,” and pointed out that “a change in leadership will not necessarily lead Moscow to end the war.” Kimmage, at Catholic University, estimated that the odds are “one in a thousand or one in a million” that a new Russian leader will emerge who is willing to withdraw Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, subject Russian perpetrators to war-crimes tribunals, and pay reparations to Ukraine—all objectives Kyiv has articulated.

Lipman, the journalist and scholar, expects “a long period of decline or decay in all spheres of life” for Russia, but she currently doesn’t foresee political upheaval. Putin’s “grip on power has grown even tighter and his authority even more unlimited” over the past year, with broad “public acquiescence” to the war and Russian elites still relying on Putin for “security and stability,” she noted. “Will the situation change to a point when taking the risks to oppose Putin may appear justified? That’s something very hard to imagine, looking from today. Right now, pledging full allegiance certainly appears to be a safer strategy.”

Kimmage, for his part, worries that the United States and its allies might expect a “Hollywood version” of the war’s ending, featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “the David who’s going to beat Goliath.” The danger, he said, is that “if there’s too much of an expectation of quick-fix, instant-gratification heroism … we’ll end up getting frustrated with Zelensky and the Ukrainians” and then could wind down support for their struggle. Zelensky “deserves all the praise he gets, but the script is not written. And the script is not destined to have a happy ending. And it’s not destined to have a happy ending soon if there is a happy ending,” Kimmage explained. “We have to build a narrative of the war that’s durable enough that it doesn’t depend on that happy ending.”

The European Commission has banned TikTok from official devices because of concerns about cybersecurity, a move sharply criticized by the company in its latest run-in with Western governments over how it handles user data.