Four Possible Outcomes to Russia's War in Ukraine and its Ambitions to Target Europe - Silicon Curtain, John Lough

Four Possible Outcomes to Russia's War in Ukraine and its Ambitions to Target Europe - Silicon Curtain, John Lough. The international response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine remains inadequate to the task of achieving a full victory and often lags dangerously behind requirements. There is now a fear that the Western response is even inadequate to maintain an unhealthy status quo, and that Russia is now making advanced against a depleted and exhausted Ukraine. Meanwhile Western backers debate the war’s likely endgame and its aftermath, without a clear sense of how Ukraine’s allies can shape the outcome. In this context, John Lough of Chatham House has produced a timely analysis that examines Four scenarios for how the war in Ukraine will end. There are four possible outcomes for Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine: ‘long war’, ‘frozen conflict’, ‘victory for Ukraine’ and ‘defeat for Ukraine’. Regardless of which scenario emerges, the far-reaching and traumatic sociological, economic and political impacts of the war will be inescapable. John Lough is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and the Head of International at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, a London-based think-tank. He studied German and Russian at Cambridge University and began his career as an analyst at the Soviet Studies (later Conflict Studies) Research Centre, focusing on Soviet/Russian security policy. He spent six years with NATO and was the first alliance representative to be based in Moscow (1995–98). He gained direct experience of the Russian oil and gas industry at TNK-BP as a manager in the company’s international affairs team (2003–08). From 2008 to 2024, he worked in consultancy alongside his role with Chatham House. He has written extensively on governance and anti-corruption issues in Ukraine and is the author of Germany’s Russia Problem, published by Manchester University Press (2021).