We wanted to look at the future of the war. Will it escalate — with the use of chemical or biological weapons, or expanding into attacks beyond the border of Ukraine? Or might the two sides reach a ceasefire? Fifteen forecasters with exceptional track records gathered to discuss these three questions:

1. Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
2. Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?
3. Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
Median forecast: 12%

The use of proscribed weapons of mass destruction — by either side, although most people think Russian rather than Ukrainian forces are more likely to deploy them — would mark a significant escalation in the conflict, and a further breach with international laws and norms.

All forecasters think this outcome unlikely, although there is a reasonable spread — one puts it at a 1% chance, while another goes as high as 23%. It’s worth being clear that 12% is not a trivial chance: if the use of chemical or biological weapons would have serious repercussions, such as bringing Nato forces into the war (or simply killing large numbers of people with the weapons themselves), then that level of risk would be worth taking seriously. That said, there are chemical weapons and chemical weapons. Poison gas dropped on a city is very different from phosphorus weapons used against combatants.

One forecaster, who puts the outcome at 14% likely, reasons that Russia clearly has no moral problem with using chemical weapons. Putin’s regime has used them for targeted assassinations before, as in Salisbury. But it hasn’t deployed them in battlefield situations, even during the siege of Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, “which would have been an ideal tactical condition to use them in order to kill or force out deeply entrenched opposition forces.” “I don’t think anyone wants to really escalate in this direction,” the forecaster writes, “but I can see some borderline cases of phosphorus use.”

Another points out that there are issues with resolving the question. There are rumours that Russia already has used chemical weapons in Mariupol, delivered by a small drone — but “given that the source for these claims was the Azov Battalion and the inability of any external observer to verify them, it’s hard to give them much credence”. They note that more clear-cut uses of chemical weapons in Syria remain controversial. So the chance of the question being resolved positively are somewhat smaller than the chance of chemical weapons being used.

Most of the forecasters feel that the upsides of using these weapons were low. “I don’t think chemical weapons or typical bioweapons are very tactically useful”, writes one. “It’s fairly likely they didn’t use them in Mariupol, a long and bloody siege; it raises the question ‘Where else might they use them?’”, writes another. And they feel that the downsides are large and obvious: not simply the risk of blowback from Nato, but the cost elsewhere. “Some level of semi-explicit Chinese political support is required [for Russian war aims], and this gets harder to maintain if WMDs are used”, they write. “It would also make it harder for European states to push Ukraine to accept a ceasefire that cedes Crimea and Donbas.”

That said, forecasters whose estimates were on the higher end pointed out that expecting Russia to make sensible, rational decisions was not always a smart bet. “There are far more negative political ramifications for using chemical weapons than tactical or terror gains from them to make it a good decision”, one writes. “But I’m not lower than 15% because Russia has already made many bad decisions.” Escalation of the war via proscribed WMDs would indeed be risky, writes another, but: “Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a fairly risky decision, so it seems that he is certainly willing to take measures that Western geopolitical analysts previously thought were extremely unlikely.”

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Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?

Median forecast: 21%

While the use of WMDs would represent an escalation, the war could go the other way, and begin to wind down. But while the forecasters felt that was more likely than the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, they all — even the most optimistic — still feel that it’s an unlikely outcome. The highest probability given was 30%.

For a ceasefire to become a realistic possibility, one points out, at least one side in the conflict would have to see diminishing political support for the war. Similarly, they would have to see some sort of tactical advantage in ceasing hostilities for a period. But it is doubtful whether Ukrainian public opinion will shift, at least until the winter, if limited gas supplies and damage to electricity generation lead to widespread energy shortages. (As a second forecaster writes: “The will of the public in Ukraine is definitely not in favour of accepting Russian aggression at this time.”) Despite heavy Ukrainian losses, they have manpower reserves, a constant flow of Western weapons, and training support to use those weapons.

On the Russian side, “casualties seem to be running at an unknown but politically manageable level, and the Russian state has the financial resources to shore up at least temporary population support with higher levels of social spending,” the same forecaster writes. The regime is insulated from the worst of the political consequences of casualties since most of the urban warfare has been fought by troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics rather than those recruited in Russia itself. And Putin’s industrial base should be able to support the warfare we’re currently seeing — “slow concentrated troop movements preceded by the application of massive artillery bombardments, the kind of thing the Russian military is good at” — for “many years to come”, even with Western sanctions.

There is, writes one forecaster, “some fairly low chance the Ukrainians could come under pressure from the central Europeans to move towards peace” as the economic consequences of the war continue to bite, and as concerns grow about a widening of the war. “But I’m reasonably pessimistic, as I think Ukraine will have to be in a different position or hold quite a different mentality to be able to give up any of its land for a ceasefire to hold,” they continue. “I think the Ukrainian leadership will pretty much fight until they are not supported by the West.” The West’s stockpiles of weapons and munitions are depleting, but there’s plenty left in reserve, especially if you include lower-tech weapons than those currently being sent.

In the credit column, the political leaders might not be implacably opposed to a ceasefire. Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he wants the war to end, notes one forecaster, “and seems somewhat willing to compromise for that to occur”. Meanwhile Putin “could be open to a deal taking place if he still has some way to save face and convince Russians that it was still a victory, such as the capture of a small but strategic piece of territory”. “Six months is a long time”, writes one forecaster, and the political and military situations could change dramatically. But nonetheless, it remains unlikely. “I could see a small-scale ceasefire for a couple of cities for a short humanitarian window — early March had one for two cities”, says another. “But a full-country ceasefire would be a much less likely scenario.”

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Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Median forecast: 8%

Not long ago, it looked as though there was a chance that conflict would expand. The Russian port of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea is cut off from the rest of Russia by a 40-mile stretch of Lithuania known as the Suwalki Corridor. In June Lithuania said it would restrict exports of goods into Kaliningrad through its territory. Russia responded with threats to seize the Corridor and join its territories together.

That seems to have eased off. “The chance of something going wrong in Lithuania seems much lower than it did a couple of weeks ago,” one forecaster says, “but it was a good example of how things can escalate due to nested games and mistakes. There is plenty of scope for conflict spillovers and accidents as well as intentional escalation.”

Nonetheless, the forecasters think most of the Russian rhetoric is “chest-thumping without action” and that “actually Russia is very careful about going to war with Nato.” If they were to do it, Lithuania is the likely starting point, but “it would be a massive escalation and I think both sides really want to avoid it”.

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Still, there are other ways for the question to be resolved positively other than a deliberate action in a Baltic state. One would be a stray missile hitting a Nato country. Another would be the accidental shooting-down of a passenger plane. Then there are other conflicts Russia is embroiled in. “Russia and Turkey have a ceasefire in Syria”, notes one forecaster, and Turkey is a Nato member. But that is also doubtful: “There have been no deaths caused by Russian soldiers on Turkish soil. A Turkish F4 was shot down by Syrian forces in 2012, but that incident was over international airspace and did not involve Russia.”

Russian attacks on military bases near the Ukrainian city of Lviv could also lead to the question being resolved positively. Lviv is 70 kilometres from the Polish border and there are military bases within 10 kilometres of that border, at least one of which has been attacked already. A missile launched from the Black Sea that misses its target could conceivably hit Poland.

The forecasters agree that intentional escalation seems far too risky to occur. “If this were to happen, I think it would either be the result of an accident or because a small amount of Russian forces or a Nato member’s forces attacked the other side without permission”, writes one. Even that is dubious, but if it were to happen, “I think both leaders would try to de-escalate just because the ramifications would be too terrifying (a nuclear exchange) if they didn’t defuse the situation.” Taking that into account, one forecaster points out that, “One and a half years are an eternity here, and the situation could change”, so they kept an 8% chance to represent the uncertainty.

…

The most likely outcome is that the war does not escalate either with the use of chemical and biological weapons, or the deaths of significant numbers of people on Nato soil through Russian action. That’s mainly because the risks of widening the conflict would be significant and the benefits nebulous for all parties. Doubt does remain though. We know that the Russian leadership has been willing to make high-risk decisions in the past, not least launching the invasion in the first place.

On the other side, an imminent ceasefire is also unlikely, because public opinion in both Russia and Ukraine would be against it, and both countries have the manpower and resources to continue fighting, Russia through its own industrial base, still producing though affected by sanctions, and Ukraine with Western support.

***

A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.

A year into the war in Syria, in 2012, President Obama declared that chemical weapons attacks there were a red line that, if crossed, would trigger “enormous consequences”. When the White House concluded “with high confidence” that Bashar al Assad’s forces were responsible for a Sarin attack that killed 1,429 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama was placed in a bind. If he didn’t do something, it would look like a capitulation. But any reprisal risked drawing the US into another Middle Eastern war and jeopardising the nuclear deal with Iran that was the linchpin of Obama’s foreign policy agenda. That was where Moscow came in.

Russia volunteered to oversee the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program in a deal that would allow the White House to save face without threatening its pivot towards Iran. It might have seemed like a win-win proposition. But Russia was hardly neutral: Moscow was both a key ally of Iran and of the Assad dynasty, and saw its role in the Syrian war as the way to acquire its long-sought-after naval base on the eastern Mediterranean. “Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran,” explains Levant analyst Tony Badran. Making Moscow a “peacemaker” meant that, “for all the moralising rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained [Obama’s] principal partner in the Syrian arena”.

American rhetoric on Syria was anti-Assad and pro-democracy. It emphasised funding “moderate rebel” groups fighting against the government while protecting humanitarian interests and pushing for a negotiated end to the war. But those goals were incompatible with the other US aim, which was to protect the Iran deal at all costs, a goal which, as Obama put it in 2015, “allows those who are allied with Assad right now — allows the Russians, allows the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”.

Normally, wars end when one side gives up or the parties reach a compromise that spares them further losses and satisfies enough of their interests to be worth taking. But whose interests were being served in Syria, where the US, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states all played a role and had “equities” to protect?

Syria, the bloodiest war of the modern era, provides the perfect example of what can happen when a series of poorly considered but urgent-seeming interventions by outside powers turn a local conflict into an international battleground. Something remarkably similar is now happening in Ukraine. In Syria, it took roughly two years before the local dimensions of the conflict were overrun by flows of foreign fighters, money, and weapons pouring in across its borders. A smaller version has unfolded rapidly in Ukraine.

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In Syria, American strategic incoherence — effectively supporting both sides — made the conflict more transactional and open-ended. Blurring the local stakes invited a greater number of outside countries and substate groups to enter the war and pursue their own interests, creating a seemingly intractable multiparty conflict that was eventually settled through Assad’s Russian-backed campaign of brutal attrition war. It also emboldened Russia, which recognised that by treating Syria as a bargaining chip in its new partnership with Iran, Washington had set the precedent for a new era of great power conflict. Larger countries, it seemed, could carve out their claims from smaller nations with little fear of reprisal from the US led “international community”.

Less than a year after entering Syria, in February 2014, Russia launched its initial invasion into Ukraine targeting Crimea and the Donbas. Encountering little resistance, Russia stepped up its campaign in Syria, where in September 2015 Putin ordered airstrikes to rescue his embattled ally Assad. Of course Putin declared that these were “preventitive” measures, necessary to “destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupy, not wait for them to come to our house”. The same rhetoric is now used to justify the assault on Ukraine, another preventative war according to Putin, but this time a campaign of “denazification” and “demilitarisation”.

Play the full sequence out from 2013 to the present and Russia’s arrival as a “peacekeeper” in the Syrian war, becomes the first step in a series of expansionist military interventions that led to the invasion of Ukraine last month. The experience in Syria, which intensified after 2015, provided the Russian military with “priceless combat experience”, according to the Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. Russia’s repeated attacks on anti-government rebels and Syrian civilians gave its military the chance to test out “more than 320 types of different weapons” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu bragged last year.

While Ukraine’s relationship with the US is far stronger than American ties to Syrian rebel groups, there are parallels. Washington has been dangling Nato membership in front of Kyiv for more than a decade, despite having no intention of ever bringing Ukraine into the alliance. The coy approach to Nato membership, in which no concrete steps were taken but the offer was never taken off the table, appeared to provide Ukraine’s political leadership with a symbolic chip to play while putting Moscow on the defensive. That strategy has backfired, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently acknowledged in an interview in which he said that Nato leaders told him directly, “you’re not going to be a Nato member, but publicly, the doors will remain open”. This in-between status had set the stage for Russia’s invasion, Zelenskyy said.

As deals such as the Nord Stream II pipeline — hence Europe’s energy dependency on Moscow — made the limits of the West’s commitments to Ukraine clear, the gamesmanship over Nato helped shift Putin onto the offensive in his pursuit of restoring a “Greater Russia”. In a replay of Syria, the US aggravated a conflict in which it has no immediate security interests by making promises it had no intention of keeping, causing Ukraine to dangerously overestimate the level of support it could count on in the event of a Russian attack. And once again, as the Biden administration tries to revive the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Washington is using the same diplomatic doublespeak, sanctioning Russia for its role in Ukraine and warning about chemical weapons, while simultaneously offering the Russians sanctions relief to support the new Iran deal.

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Meanwhile, foreign fighters are arriving to support both sides of the conflict. Ukrainian officials put the number of volunteers who had arrived in the country at 20,000 by the second week of March. Russia appears to be following the playbook used by Iran when it imported thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, and other Iranian-backed militias including the Fatemiyoun Army, made up of Shia ethnic Hazaras from Afghanistan, into Syria. Last Sunday, Chechnya’s Putin-loyalist authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a message online saying that he was in Ukraine and claiming to have deployed 10,000 Chechens soldiers to join him in the war there. There are additional reports, so far unconfirmed, of Russia hiring as many as 20,000 Syrian soldiers to fight Ukraine.

The numbers on both sides may be exaggerated, but thousands of foreigners pouring into Ukraine is one sign that the process of internationalisation that took years in Syria is happening now in mere weeks. As the conflict globalises it becomes harder to resolve — there are now many parties who feel they have a stake, instead of only two — and more susceptible to unpredictable escalations.

The size and fervour of the online war complicates matters further. Syria may have been the first “very online” war but the phenomenon has gone into overdrive in Ukraine. While twitter users splintered into bitterly opposed factions during the war in Syria, today Western social media is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. Some of this consensus is surely a result of the bans and blocks that silence “pro-Russian” accounts or those spreading misinformation; but the structural inducements to social conformity on social media play a role as well. As the emotional drive to support Ukraine automatically filters out “bad” news, it could have the perverse effect of discouraging a settlement. If Ukraine is really crushing the Russian invaders, as the generally optimistic accounts of the war on social media suggest (in contrast to the consensus among military experts), it reduces the incentives to make difficult compromises necessary to end the war.

At the moment it appears that the shared desire to avoid a siege on Kyiv, taking tens of thousands of lives while levelling the city, may create the pressure necessary for both parties find that settlement. But that scenario shouldn’t blind us to the parallels with Syria. The dangerous combination of Russian belligerence and US strategic incoherence is once again on display. But Ukraine carries a far greater risk of existential catastrophe because it involves a nuclear-armed Russia that is now at war, not only with other states but with decentralised digital networks.

The spontaneous boycott against all things Russian, which has included bans on ballet performances, university courses on Dostoevsky, and ordinary Russian civilians ability to use their bank cards, provides an example of a digital network in action. No individual organised the boycott or delivered instructions on what was to be banned. The boycott spread  like other online “cancellation” campaigns, rapidly scaling up through the hyper-connectivity of digital social networks in a self-perpetuating phenomenon. These networks are borderless, leaderless, and operating at speeds far exceeding the capacity of individual actors to calculate their consequences.

“The legacy state is becoming a laser pointer,” the cryptocurrency pioneer Balaji Srinivasan observed. “The centralised entity points, the decentralised actors shoot.” But what if the laser pointer is wielded by a leader with an unsteady hand or an actor unsure of their goals? Could the state accidentally provoke a digital swarm attack that triggers a nuclear war?

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“Prior sanctions regimes took years to get to the place that we got to in just a few days,” Ari Redbord, a former sanctions official in the US Treasury Department told me. He described the level of sanctions placed on Russia as “the nuclear option”. Redbord was only talking about official government measures. The “nuclear” economic strike of state sanctions only accounted for the official measures in what was a far larger economic attack on Russia that also includes the actions taken by dozens of private corporations. Once the first corporations such as Google, Mastercard, and Visa began taking steps to cut off and penalise Russia, it triggered a cascade with no clear goal or end point. Suddenly, companies which didn’t take action against Russia were seen as suspect. So far, little attention has been given to the consequences of the cascade but the global economy may be feeling the repercussions into the next century.

Sanctions have pushed Moscow closer to China while also threatening the dollar’s continued dominance. “We have entered a geopolitical depression that will have massive economic and financial consequences well beyond Ukraine,” says the economist Nouriel Roubini, in an essay pointing to the prospect of stagflationary recession and the increased probability of a hot war between major powers over the next decade.

There is reason to hope that the war in Ukraine will not be as drawn out or catastrophic as Syria. But even if settlement is swiftly reached, the impact of having disconnected the Russian economy from the rest of the globe will have a profound long-term effect on global stability. It would be a good time for great powers to step back from the abyss and recognise the danger of globalising local conflicts. There are only so many chances to learn that lesson in wars with nuclear powers.