In the weeks since the Trump administration’s push to negotiate a ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv stalled, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine passed the three-and-a-half-year mark. Russian troops are continuing their offensive in central Donbas, which Ukrainian forces have managed to slow at the expense of their defense in other areas. Meanwhile, Ukrainian cities are facing an increase in deadly Russian missile and drone strikes, as Moscow targets Ukraine’s energy grid ahead of the cold winter months. With Kyiv’s air defenses under pressure and the frontline becoming increasingly fluid, it appears as though Vladimir Putin remains steadfast in his belief that Russia can outlast and overpower Ukraine. But how much longer can the Kremlin sustain its war machine?

In an interview with The Naked Pravda, Dr. Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow in the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), broke down a new report about the mounting costs of Russia’s war effort and outlined four possible scenarios for the war’s future trajectory. The following Q&A, based on that interview, has been edited for length and clarity.

Listen to The Naked Pravda’s full interview with Dr. Maria Snegovaya here.

— How would you describe the current situation on the front line and on the diplomatic front?

— It’s been three and a half years of this very bloody war of attrition, the bloodiest in Europe since the end of World War II. It has led to tremendous costs on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, and unfortunately, there is no end in sight. After some initial breakthroughs in early 2022, Russia was pushed back by the Ukrainian army, and it adjusted to a war of attrition on both the economic and military fronts. As of now, Russia is progressing very, very slowly and losing about 100 to 150 troops per square kilometer, which is a horrendous number, really — the highest among most of the wars that Russia has fought. Nonetheless, the political logic in Russia is such that it keeps pushing further, hoping that eventually Ukraine’s defenses will collapse.

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Russia currently occupies approximately 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, and it appears that its originally announced goals — that is, the occupation of the rest of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and maybe the remainder of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions — have remained more or less unchanged. Perhaps even more importantly, in his public statements, Vladimir Putin keeps referencing the “origins of the conflict.” That means that, unfortunately, Putin remains quite committed to trying to revise international security, limit Ukraine’s sovereignty, and “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine, and the war will not end anytime soon.

— In your report, you write that despite the mounting economic costs and heavy military casualties, Russia continues to believe that it’s winning the war of attrition. What sustains that belief?

— First of all, the Russian political system and Russian power circles are not known to adjust their prior [assumptions]. And if they were able to do that, maybe the 2022 war would have never started, because Russia’s 2014 aggression already demonstrated how biased and misguided some of the Kremlin’s beliefs about Ukraine were. Ukrainians did not welcome the Russian army, and the Kremlin faced a lot of issues [trying to] inflame many of the regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

read more about the donbas war

• Ten years ago, Donbas An OSCE observer reconstructs his experience on the ground in Luhansk at the outset of Russia’s war
• Who decided on the boundaries of the ‘Russian World’? A brief history of Donbas separatism
• From ‘frozen’ conflict to full-scale invasion How has eight years of war changed Ukraine’s Donbas? Meduza asks human rights expert Varvara Pakhomenko.

You’d think that after failing to achieve the goal of trying to subjugate Ukraine and pull it back into Russia’s sphere of interest, there would’ve been some reconsideration in Kremlin circles. Instead, in 2022, we saw the Kremlin double down on the same goals, this time implementing a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, seemingly anticipating that Ukrainians would welcome the Russian army.

Obviously, that didn’t happen, but even that did not alter Moscow’s strategic logic. It did alter Moscow’s tactical approach, and the Kremlin made a lot of revisions to its planning to make this war more sustainable. But the strategic goals have remained the same, and more or less the same dynamic has unraveled ever since. Unfortunately, it seems that the Kremlin leadership, in its current state of mind, is unable to radically alter its approach and worldview unless it faces truly radical consequences and is unable to continue, and that has not happened yet.

— How long can Russia realistically afford to continue the war at its current pace if it’s not going to revise its overarching strategic objective?

— Russia has been borrowing very actively from its own future in order to invest in the war. Nonetheless, the resources are still basically there to sustain the war for at least two or three years unless things change quite dramatically.

The economic growth the Kremlin induced through spending on the military-industrial complex is now basically gone, and we’re likely to see stagnation or even a recession in the Russian economy. Nonetheless, the resources are still there to just keep issuing more tanks, missiles, and drones, and to inflict significant damage on Ukraine. Especially given that much of the Kremlin’s strategy relies on drone attacks, and it has really boosted its drone production. As long as sanctions are relatively weak, Russia will circumvent them and continue to accumulate significant resources from selling its energy.

read more about drone warfare

• The weapons of tomorrow The ‘drone revolution’ rewrote the battlefield in Ukraine. Will they upend the West’s way of war?

[In terms of] the social dimension, unfortunately, the Russian public continues to demonstrate resilience and acquiescence to this horrible war, despite tremendous accumulating costs — including about 1 million casualties and significant economic costs. The only notable shift in Russian public opinion we can trace is growing support for peace talks, which by late August 2025 had reached about two-thirds of Russian respondents across multiple surveys. However, there’s a caveat here: these groups would like to just freeze the war as is, while maintaining the occupied territories without necessarily making any concessions. That is unlikely to be acceptable for the Ukrainian side.

There are potential fracture points going forward. When the Russian public starts feeling the cost of the war on a personal level — be it drone attacks, attacks on refineries that lead to higher gasoline prices or shortages, or maybe a more direct link between sanctions and the war’s economic costs — then they actually become way more skeptical about it. And in some ways, that’s exactly what we saw in the late Soviet period, when the Afghanistan war became very unpopular, in combination with a major economic crisis. However, while things certainly don’t look great for Russia, we are far from a serious economic crisis at the moment. So that means that, unfortunately, public opinion will probably continue to acquiesce to this war, especially given the intensified domestic repressions in Russia and the crackdown on independent media that allow the Kremlin to control the propaganda coverage of this war.

There is also a demographic dimension. The Kremlin has shifted to a so-called volunteer recruitment model, offering very, very generous [enlistment] bonuses and maintaining a sustained rate of 30,000 to 40,000 “volunteers” per month, which is approximately as many people as the Kremlin loses on the battlefield. This makes the war sustainable for the Kremlin, given that it more or less replenishes as many [soldiers] as it loses. The question is how long this will continue. The general price tag per volunteer has been increasing, and some analysts suggest that [this means] it’s actually becoming more difficult for the Kremlin to attract additional volunteers. However, given the distribution of resources in Russia — where huge demand for labor is concentrated in big cities but there are many rural areas with relatively high unemployment, where people looking for ways to make money are potentially available for recruitment — at least as of now, there’s not enough evidence to say that the Kremlin has fully run out of that reserve.

read more about russia’s losses

• The deadliest year yet A new investigation from Meduza and Mediazona shows Russia has lost more than 200,000 soldiers in its war against Ukraine

And last but not least, there’s the military-industrial complex. There’s a lot of information showing that the Kremlin may be running out of its Soviet [weapons] stocks (including tanks) that it relied on at the start of the war. Having said that, it’s also important to keep in mind that a lot of investment has been directed toward rebuilding Russia’s military-industrial complex. The Kremlin is still producing a relatively substantial number of missiles and, most importantly, drones. Even with its Soviet stockpiles being eroded, the Kremlin maintains the ability to inflict significant damage on Ukraine through these horrible, atrocious, [air] strikes against its civilian population, and through other means.

So, from all of these perspectives, you’ll see that, unfortunately, the Kremlin has resources and will probably keep pushing to gain the advantage and achieve its original goals in Ukraine.

— Your report outlines four scenarios for the trajectory of the war that you see as the most plausible. Scenario #1 is a Russian breakthrough and the collapse of the Ukrainian military. What would bring about this situation, and how likely is it in your view?

— This scenario was perhaps more likely at the start of Trump’s second term, when there was widespread talk about cutting off all lethal aid to Ukraine or pushing it onto European allies. Under this scenario, a drastic reduction in Western support would give Russia an advantage that could be reinforced if Ukraine’s air defenses falter or if European unity is undermined —for example, by the rise of populist actors across Europe unwilling to provide additional support for Ukraine.

The Kremlin is certainly actively betting on this scenario, hoping to exhaust Ukraine, cause the frontline to collapse, and eventually achieve Ukraine’s capitulation. However, that would require a significant weakening of Ukraine’s [armed] forces, and that’s unlikely to happen overnight. It would also probably necessitate some strategic miscalculations on the West’s part. And while we certainly saw some elements of the transatlantic alliance weaken, overall, it appears that, with European allies significantly increasing the pressure on the U.S., it has so far been able to survive.

More importantly, European countries seem to have realized that the war represents an existential risk not just for Ukraine, but for the E.U. and European security more broadly. Accordingly, this scenario doesn’t seem very likely at this particular moment. But the Kremlin certainly continues to bet on it, hence the continued pressure on Ukraine and the West.

— Scenario #2 is a prolonged low-intensity conflict, otherwise known as the “forever war” option. How would this differ from the current state of the war?

— This is perhaps one of the most likely scenarios that, in our opinion, is not sufficiently talked about.

The low-intensity “forever war” we describe in our second scenario presumes that the front is more or less stabilized, with much of the action continuing through artillery shelling, drone warfare, and deep strikes, without decisive offensives.

read meduza’s latest battlefield update

• A high-stakes gamble Ukraine has successfully slowed Russia’s advance in central Donbas — but at the cost of its defenses elsewhere

Right now, Russia is still implementing an offensive, trying to achieve a significant breakthrough into Ukrainian territory. But under scenario two, Russia realizes that it’s unable to achieve a major breakthrough and basically switches to terrorizing Ukraine, primarily through airstrikes. Having come to terms with the fact that it’s unable to achieve its territorial goals in Ukraine, Russia’s long-term goal would be to prevent Ukraine from joining the E.U. and NATO and turning it into a so-called limbo state with a weakened economy, less Western support, and no possibility of attracting foreign direct investment.

Unfortunately, this would be relatively cheap for the Kremlin to achieve, especially given the current [rate of] drone production. And, as we argue, this is something Western allies should factor into their plans to support Ukraine.

— Scenario #3 envisions Moscow agreeing to a ceasefire. Why might Russia decide it wants to stop fighting?

— Both a [ceasefire] and a lasting peace settlement would presume significantly intensified pressure on Russia and some sort of change domestically. Primarily, an economic crisis that would undermine Russian morale and essentially expose to the elites, society, and even Putin himself that [the military] is unable to achieve a major breakthrough amid intensifying domestic costs.

Right now, one reason the Kremlin can keep pushing forward is that it’s not facing significant domestic resistance. Society is accepting this reality, and the elites are acquiescing and deliberately being made beneficiaries of this new status quo through the distribution of assets and whatnot.

The ability to push the Kremlin towards a ceasefire will only be achieved if there is a significant increase in the costs of continuing this war. As we argue, this will require Kyiv to “escalate in order to de-escalate.” That may involve intensified drone strikes on Russian refineries or long-range missile strikes into Russia, and a really serious toughening of sanctions that would lead to a radical decline in economic revenues and force the Kremlin to make some serious trade-offs (maybe at the expense of salary increases or spending for its key constituencies).

read more about public opinion in russia

• ‘What war?’ Independent sociologists spent four weeks in Kursk, studying how Russians near the front lines cope without getting political

This strategy assumes that Russian morale is fragile. Unfortunately, we usually tend to underestimate Russian resilience analytically, and it’s not very clear how to get to that particular destination. But one thing is certain: to increase the possibility of a ceasefire, the pressure on the Kremlin should be increased quite significantly, and Russians should feel the cost of the war domestically.

— Scenario #4 is a full-blown peace agreement, and you write in the report that this seems the least likely because it would require a major crisis inside Russia. What do you mean by a major crisis inside Russia?

— This scenario is broadly modeled on other periods when Russia fought unsuccessful wars. Usually, those preceding some revolutions, or the collapse or radical weakening of the existing regime. In the 19th century, the early 20th century, and the late Soviet period, there was an economic shock so pronounced and so deep that Russia basically had no more resources, and domestic turmoil and public dissatisfaction eventually turned toward the regime, basically forcing it to make major concessions in its ongoing war.

It’s important to keep in mind that we are dealing with a very aggressive regime that is not driven by pure rational logic. For example, the Kremlin is currently sacrificing Russia’s future for the sake of this very unsuccessful war, without a clear, tangible outcome. But nonetheless, given the nature of the Russian leadership, Russia [would need to suffer] a major blow for the current dynamic to be radically altered in favor of Ukraine.

And of course, it’s important to also keep in mind that many Russian/Soviet wars ended with the natural passing of the aggressive leaders who started the war in the first place. Like, for example, the Korean War in the case of Stalin. A rotation in the leadership — [such as] the natural passing of Vladimir Putin — would certainly enhance the possibility of this scenario.

Listen to the full interview

Interview by Eilish Hart