Strategic Forecast: Russia Collapse Risk

Abstract:

This forecast estimates percentage odds for a collapse or partial collapse of the Russian state and economy if Russia’s war on Ukraine continues. It covers vital global interests in context, effects of diplomacy, factors causing collapse, demographic weaknesses, seized asset use, and the unlikelihood that Russia’s feared bombardment tactics will lead to Russian conquest in Ukraine. The thesis here is that Ukrainian liberation and sovereignty will sooner prevent Russia’s collapse by prompting an efficient, internal transition of power in Moscow that conserves resources. An ongoing Russian war for conquest in Ukraine will cause a lack of human capacity to sustain the great power state and economy Russians have come to expect.

Forecast

This forecast assumes consistent European political, military, and economic aid to Ukraine. It rests on the U.S. honoring its pledge to sell European powers the arms needed to replace those they send to Ukraine. It also depends on Ukrainian forces’ ongoing, adaptive military automation and Ukrainian expats returning at a reasonable rate to bolster Ukraine’s defense and morale. Finally, this forecast depends on many promised results-oriented U.S.-led sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and strategic actions to suppress Russia’s war-making capability if Mr. Putin refuses good faith peace and multilateral security guarantees for Ukraine.

The power vacuum after a Russian collapse will degrade Russia’s capacity to defend, secure, and control its weapons, valuable resources, and energy assets. Risk of catastrophic weapons proliferation to terrorists, use of black market weapons in warfare, and related accidents would rise, threatening all nations.

Vital Interests in Ukraine’s Liberation and Leadership

Preventing Russia’s collapse requires Ukraine’s liberation from Russian forces by Fall 2026. This will be of vital strategic interest to the world, including Russia. For the United States, Xi Jinping’s forewarning of an assault on Taiwan in 2027 incentivizes a Ukrainian liberation by Fall 2026 or sooner, as the U.S. deterrent to China increases with only one great power challenge to focus on.

Putin’s Stopgap Gambit Likely Futile

Mr. Putin likely believes in a ‘Trump card” advantage in his war on Ukraine, possibly secured via his special relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Alaska talks of August 15, 2025.  In anticipation of owning Mr. Trump, President Putin had ordered breakthrough operations to obtain more ground as negotiations go on. And Mr. Trump has done what Mr. Putin wanted and advocated for a final peace deal requiring more negotiation time without a ceasefire, pressuring Mr. Zelensky with Ukraine under attack during negotiations.

After the Alaska meeting, however, Mr. Trump led an optimistic meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and European leaders in which he pledged U.S. involvement in security guarantees to Ukraine in any peace deal with Russia. Still, Mr. Trump has said the trilateral meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Zelenskyy, and himself would be the most important one, and if ‘past is prologue,’ it could swing Mr. Putin’s way.

Yet, even if a Machiavellian peace treaty occurs as many observers expect, neither Trump nor Putin can fix Russia’s crippling, cascading human capacity problem. As Putin is unlikely to give up Ukraine or allow foreign powers to help run Russia while his forces take and try to hold Ukraine, Russia’s human capacity problem makes Putin’s target fixation on Ukraine an exercise in national self-implosion.

Factors Portending Russia’s Collapse if War on Ukraine Continues

Risk of Russia’s collapse increases each hour that Putin’s war on Ukraine hollows out Russia’s military-aged population, domestic work forces, and Russia’s grasp on its instruments of power. Brain and body drain from the war, reluctant migrant laborers, and an aging workforce are breaking down Russia’s human capacity to run itself, even if other resources remain. Early signs of breakdown include Russia’s reliance on North Korean troops, foreign mercenaries, oil for Chinese manufacturing, and non-traditional foreign labor. Also, Russia’s military and defense complex has been poaching civilian workers for war jobs.

Also, Putin’s goal of conquering Ukraine is profligate if Ukraine cannot be held. A month into Putin’s aggression, a March 2022 analysis by Seth G. Jones with the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) found that even if Russia conquered Ukraine, it could not garrison more than four soldiers per 1,000 Ukrainians to hold it. This fell well short of the historic force ratios in successfully held post-conquest territories, Dr. Jones studied that averaged 13 occupying soldiers per 1,000 residents, with 20 per 1,000 at higher ranges.

That analysis was three years ago, before Russia’s stunning losses in Ukraine mounted. A June 2025 CSIS update found that Russia’s three-year progress against Ukraine has been slower than many historic, pitched-front wars, with steep losses of troops, tanks, combat vehicles, weapons, and naval and air assets.

CSIS also noted signs of Russia’s economic erosion as labor, capital, and other resources are diverted to the war after years of sanctions and nearly 300 billion USD in frozen assets abroad.

The Institute for the Study of War’s (ISW) July 2025 assessment reinforced CSIS’s findings of outsized Russian losses, citing a recent Economist estimate that Russia’s casualties in its Ukraine war ranged between 900,000 and 1.3 million, with troop deaths between 190,000 and 350,000.

For such heavy losses, Russia had advanced very slowly and lost ground until about 6 months ago when Russian forces reportedly pushed gains to an average of 14-15 square kilometers per day for the first half of 2025, according to ISW.

Russia’s battlefield gains have come since the Trump Administration reportedly suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine in early March 2025, after an apparent televised clash with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. Yet, President Trump had recently changed course again, claiming to have lost patience with Putin’s bad-faith peace negotiations and voicing a commitment to sell U.S. weapons to the European Union NATO members to replace those they send to Ukraine.

Against Russia’s ability to sustain its gains, ISW’s July report noted that Russia’s cycle of combat loss had been compounding against itself in forced reliance on under-trained, inexperienced soldiers replacing casualties at the front.

Naval Post-Graduate School Associate Professor Ryan Maness had this prognosis for the plagued Russian invasion and occupation in his August 8, 2025, article at Small Wars Journal:

Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine. Even as his depleted military slowly inches westward in its unimpressive summer offensive, the casualty rate of Russian troops has reached the staggering one million mark in just over three years.

At Geopolitical Futures (GPF), a Russian personnel vulnerability index report covering 2020-2024 spanning civilian sectors in passenger transport, motor vehicle transportation, services, trade, construction, electric power, and manufacturing showed low, low neutral, to high neutral personnel vulnerability scores until roughly mid-2021, when vulnerability in all sectors surged.

By mid-2023, all sectors had high or critical-level personnel vulnerability scores. This trend coincided with Russia’s telegraphed lightning exercises around March 2021, war-avoidant emigration, and the military buildup on the Ukrainian border leading up to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. See the infographic below:

Copyright 2025 Geopolitical Futures. Republished with permission.

Let’s extrapolate. Russia has occupied roughly 20% of Ukraine in three years and six months of conventional combat. Being conservative with approximate midpoints in ISW and Economist casualty figures above, Russia suffered roughly one million casualties with 250,000 dead in three years of war in Ukraine. To achieve President Putin’s imperial ambitions Russia would have to conquer the other 80% of Ukraine.

At the rate of conquest to date, Russia would need twelve more years to take the remaining 80% of Ukraine with intervening culminations of Russian troop formations likely slowing progress while being required to hold occupied areas lest an insurgency

retake them. If it took three years for Russia to amass 1,000,000 casualties and 250,000 killed, the same loss rate over 12 more years suggests Russian casualties could swell to 5 million with 1,000,000 killed. Russia’s human capacity issues are already critical and moving toward a disaster scenario. Even if we cut the extrapolated losses by half, the Russian state and economy cannot afford 2.5 million more casualties with 500,000 more killed.

Hypothetically, even if Russia managed to conquer Ukraine, it would likely need to leave a garrison of between 13-20 Russian troops per 1,000 Ukrainians to hold Ukraine while incurring guerrilla warfare casualties and losses expected from a long Ukrainian insurgency. Ukrainians have been returning to Ukraine since 2023, with an estimated population of 39,134,615 as of this writing. 39,134,615 / 1000 = 39,134.615.

39,000 x 13 = 507,000 total Russian troops garrisoned to cover 13 troops per 1,000 Ukrainians at the low range, and 39,000 x 20 = 780,000 troops total Russian troops per 1,000 Ukrainians at the highest range, using Seth G. Jones CSIS estimates for successful occupation.

When, under these circumstances, would the GPF personnel vulnerability index score now showing critical risk to Russia’s human capacity to run the industrial and tax base go off the charts to reach breakdown-level?

Our estimate that Putin must be defeated in Ukraine by the Fall of 2026 to avert Russia’s collapse implies that if Putin’s war enters its fifth year in 2027, the personnel vulnerability scores in Russia will go from critical to breakdown. This, as two more years of warfare in Ukraine could mean 2/3 of roughly 1,000,000 more casualties, and 2/3 of some 250,000 more deaths at about 660,000 casualties and 166,666 deaths.

None of this includes morbidity and mortality from COVID-19’s ongoing effects, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and the morbidity, mortality, and mental health issues confronting survivors of war. Nor does it speak to the loss of younger generations who would have helped take care of their elders, creating new social spending issues for the government. Nor is there an appreciation for how the tax base will shrink when it is most needed to grow to cover the Russians’ post-war and aging population’s costs.

The likelihood of Russian emigres returning to be conscripted into the Russian military or punished for emigrating is low. And male war deaths mean the single mother population will also increase in Russia as in Stalin’s time, driving more families into poverty that may require state aid. Russian women will then carry a burden to care for the young and old, taking a toll on the people who tend to keep the Russian social fabric together.

With such degrading forces at work inside Russia, we arrived at the 70% risk of political-economic collapse by 2029 if Russia continues the war on Ukraine into 2027.

Moreover, as Russia weakens, per long accepted military doctrine, strategic vulnerabilities attract enemies and opportunists who will rise on a flagging power’s flanks and challenge them when they are weakest. There are a number of areas on Russia’s southern borders in which that could come to pass.

Underlying Historic Population Weakness

Accentuating the risk of Russia’s war-driven depopulation and labor shortages across all sectors of the Russian economy is the birth rate decline in Russia’s ruling Slavic demographic. Government population policies are reportedly not working.

As Russia’s adult population ages, dies, is disabled at war, retires, emigrates, and/or suffers health challenges, the birth rate does not grow or sustain the population. This is another reason that land taken in Ukraine very likely cannot be held mid- to long-term.

Russia’s birth rate has dropped precipitously, according to Russia’s statistical agency Rosstat. According to a Moscow Times report citing demographer Alexei Raksha, “..the first quarter of 2025 likely saw the lowest number of births since the early 1800s, with February marking the lowest monthly figure in over 200 years.”

The numbers look so bad that Rosstat reportedly stopped publishing its monthly birth, death, and population figures earlier this year, according to Moscow Times. The same report noted a drop in male life expectancy “from 66 years in 2024 to 61 in mid-2025.” Such a drop suggests sharp acceleration in population loss.

Russia has also done damage to immigration rates that once filled labor needs due to immigration and conscription policies that shrink immigration numbers.

Bombardment Hopes Misplaced

Strapped for personnel to win his war, some fear that a desperate Putin could bombard Ukraine into the stone age then occupy the rubble, pursuing a different democide approach than Stalin’s, yet mass murder nonetheless. However, this puts Moscow on the hook to rebuild Ukraine to avoid having a failed state on its border while investing heavily to suppress a likely insurgency among the ruins. As occupier, Russia will also be charged with providing services to Ukrainians, committing manpower for both missions as Russia’s home defense and independence weaken.

Russia had once used mass bombardment to flatten Syrian infrastructure and scatter Syria’s Sunni majority that had resisted Putin’s vassal, Bashar al-Assad. Yet after Russia’s bombardment, not only did Syria’s reconstruction not happen, but the Assad regime collapsed in 2024 as the Syrian Sunni majority regrouped its forces and took Damascus. Russia was powerless to stop the reversal as Putin had already sunk Russian military and mercenary forces into Ukraine and Africa.

Frozen Russian Assets

If Putin does not withdraw from Ukraine or bombards Ukraine as he did Syria, the European Union and others will likely not release Russia’s nearly $300 billion in frozen assets, but instead spend it on Ukraine’s defense.

Those holding Russia’s frozen assets should not ration them until Russia collapses and Ukraine is weak, nor hold them as an appeasing incentive for Putin to enter into an unreliable peace agreement with Ukraine. Moscow under Putin would sooner see the money as an incentive to a peace agreement to recover the assets, reconstitute his forces, and renew his war effort.

The frozen Russian assets are better spent on boosting Ukrainian force capability to cut off Russian ammunition sources and supply lines through the winter of 2026, leveraging Russian military culmination and investing in a long-term deterrent against future invasions.

Upshot: Global Risk

Absent global aid and pressure to oust Putin’s forces from Ukraine, the odds that Putin will drive Russia to collapse and failed state status will rise.  China, India, the U.S., and the E.U. have vital interests in preventing a collapse and helping ensure that Russia’s weapons and instruments of power are secured against proliferation.

Recommended Collective Action: Prevent Russia’s Collapse

Absent a fair, just, and enforceable treaty ending the war with deterrent security and arms guarantees, an expedited international push to help Ukraine liberate itself from Russian troops by Fall 2026 has the best chance of saving Russia from its leadership-driven collapse. The international goal should be to support Ukraine consistently in its task of rendering the Russian military unable to continue in Ukraine, thereby shortening the war.

Those with leadership potential in Russia who are familiar with President Putin’s profligacy with Russian and Ukrainian lives, assets, and opportunity costs need a catalyst to oust Putin’s regime. An accelerated liberation of Ukraine could do it.

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