Forecasters were also asked two pairs of questions about wider regions, the oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia:
Will Russia be completely driven from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts before 1 April 2023?
Will Russia lose all of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts before 1 April 2023?
What effect would the realisation of these scenarios have on the chance of a nuclear attack over the subsequent 30 days?
Driving Russia entirely out of the Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, in the south of Ukraine, seemed unlikely to most forecasters — with an aggregate forecast of 31% — but it would be a major humiliation if they were. “If Zaporizhia and Kherson fall, Putin is also likely to have few days left,” wrote one. “His troops would be thoroughly demoralised. I would suspect that he would want to make a desperate last stand at the border of Crimea.”
Whether it would increase the risk of nuclear weapons was unclear. “Again, this comes well after the point at which a tactical nuclear weapon ought to be used,” wrote one, although another felt that one might still be used “to deter any further Ukrainian gains in the (more important to Russia) territories of the Donbas and Crimea”. The aggregate forecast of the probability of a nuclear attack in the following month was 3.2%.
The loss of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — in the east of Ukraine, bordering Russia, filled with Russian-speaking ethnic Russians, and the parts that Russia initially occupied in February — would be especially damaging to Russia’s self-image. “The loss of them would be catastrophic for Putin,” wrote one forecaster, “because it would signal that he could not even hold territory where many of the locals may not oppose his forces”.
Again, though, it was considered unlikely that both oblasts would be recaptured by Ukraine in the next six months, forecasted to be 18% likely. The risk of nuclear weapon usage 30 days after the realisation of this condition, 1.2%, was deemed to be lower than the baseline risk of 1.3%. “By this point”, according to one forecaster, “Russia will have essentially lost the war, and would have no incentive to launch a nuclear weapon.”
Turning toward the leadership of the countries directly involved in the conflict, we asked the forecasters whether either Vladimir Putin or Volodomyr Zelenskyy leaving office would affect the chance of a nuclear attack.
The chance of Zelenskyy leaving office was considered low — 5%, — without much variance. The only plausible reason the forecasters thought he would leave was if he was killed. If he was killed by a nuclear blast, that might make a second attack more likely, but in general it wasn’t thought that it would increase the risk: “If Zelenskyy dies then everything is up in the air,” said one. “Seems Putin no longer needs to resort to nuclear weapons.”
The chance of Putin leaving office, on the other hand, was thought to be higher — 10.5% — and with much greater variance, with one forecaster as high as 38%. If he leaves, it will not be in triumph. “If Vladimir Putin leaves office, it is likely due to a massive and humiliating defeat in Ukraine,” said one forecaster. It would also mean, they felt, that a nuclear detonation would be less likely. “The cases where Putin leaves office will almost universally involve the invasion being regarded as a complete failure,” said one, “and any replacement is almost certainly not going to escalate it”. They put the chance of a nuclear strike in the month after Putin leaves office at 2%.
A more complex scenario is one in which Putin faces a coup attempt. Forecasters were asked:
Will there be an attempted coup to remove Putin resulting in more than five arrests before 1 April 2023?
The forecasters again thought this to be unlikely but not vanishingly so: 15% (with significant variation — one put it at 33%). But they were unsure about whether it would raise or lower the risk of a nuclear blast: some felt it would make Putin edgy; others felt it would make him less willing to do anything that would further undermine his standing, such as starting a nuclear war.
While the forecasters considered a broad range of factors that affect escalatory scenarios (from Russian military doctrine to the chance of nuclear launch orders being disobeyed), we have not identified any highly probable scenarios that turn the possibility of nuclear escalation into an inevitability. However, our forecasters clearly associate major losses in Russian-controlled territory with a higher chance of nuclear escalation. Ukrainian recapture of cities in the Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts, for instance, may coincide with increasingly desperate responses from Russia.
It’s important to note that this is only forecasting the chance of at least one bomb going off, somewhere in Europe. The obvious follow-up question would be: if one does, what are the likely outcomes? Will it lead to reprisals by NATO and the West on Russia? If so, will they be conventional or nuclear?
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A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.
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