The Atlantic experts gave the Ukrainian conflict decades more

Edition of The Atlantic interrogated leading Western historians, political scientists, former officials and geopolitical forecasters on the question of when the Ukrainian conflict might end. As the author of the material Uri Friedman notes, experts urged not to wait for a dramatic finale, such as a nuclear explosion, and to prepare for the possibility of a long confrontation that changes shape. According to experts, the conflict could last a decade or more.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars have ended in less than a year, and if such wars continue for more than a year, they last more than ten years, on average. This was brought to the attention of Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian armed forces at the Center for Naval Analysis. He added that any end to such a conflict could lead to renewed hostilities in the future.

The head of the forecasting company Good Judgment said that superforecasters from a global network of about 180 experts in various fields assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario that Russia and Ukraine would not agree to end the conflict before October 1, 2024. They see the earliest date for the end of hostilities in 2025, and the furthest – 2037.

A researcher at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University called this scenario: “One can imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War, when the warring parties remain not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on the alert, but more or less securely divided.”

Michael Kimmage, historian of US-Russian relations at the Catholic University of America: “The only thing I can predict is that what is happening now on the battlefield in Ukraine will be a “generational conflict” with tension and hostility over the next two to three decades, even if the current hot war subsides. It will be a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but nested within another conflict between the United States and Russia, which is really about Europe as a whole.”