International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, Balkans and around the world. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura, Professor of International Politics and National Security at the Faculty of Law, St. Andrew’s University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku), and a member of the IFIMES Council, has prepared an article entitled “The Emerging Endgame of the Russo-Ukrainian War.” In his analysis, Dr. Matsumura examines the structural factors shaping the future trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian War, with a particular focus on demographic pressures, changing transatlantic support dynamics, and the strategic limitations of asymmetric warfare. The article assesses how these factors may influence the conflict’s potential endgame and the prospects for a resolution by 2026.
The Russo-Ukrainian War, initiated by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, has long been characterized in policy and media discourse as an intractable conflict of uncertain duration. This paper challenges that conventional thesis by examining the underlying structural determinants of state capacity and war-continuation potential. By analyzing three critical vectors—Ukraine's catastrophic demographic contraction, shifting transatlantic burden-sharing dynamics, and the strategic limitations of asymmetric deep-strike warfare—this study argues that the conflict has entered its terminal phase. The analysis demonstrates that while Ukraine's tactical innovations, specifically long-range drone warfare, inflict operational friction on Russian infrastructure, they represent desperation measures rather than strategic turnarounds. Consequently, the ultimate trajectory of the conflict hinges less on battlefield maneuvers than on the political and economic endurance of European states—principally Germany, as US support diminishes, signaling an impending endgame by late 2026.
Since the escalation of hostilities in February 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian War has generated a dense fog of information. Information operations conducted by Western, Ukrainian, and Russian actors have saturated public discourse with competing narratives, presenting significant methodological challenges for objective strategic analysis. Western narrative framing has consistently highlighted Russian operational blunders, logistical bottlenecks, and domestic discontent.[2] Conversely, Russian state narratives emphasize material superiority and the inevitability of Ukrainian collapse. Disentangling objective military realities from strategic communication requires looking beyond tactical daily shifts and focusing on the underlying structural components of national power.
In a protracted armed conflict, victory is rarely decided by initial operational brilliance. Rather, it is determined by the balance of structural endurance across three primary determinants of war capacity: the demographic base, fiscal and industrial strength, and external patronage. The demographic base dictates active manpower pools, labor force retention, and socio-political cohesion. Fiscal and industrial power determines defense production capacity, fiscal solvency, and energy security. External patronage provides necessary material and financial aid, political alignment, and operational support. When two belligerents enter a war of attrition, the side with superior material and human reserves holds a decisive structural advantage, provided its political regime can withstand the socio-economic friction of war. This paper evaluates the trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian War through this structural framework. By synthesizing open-source demographic data, financial tracking of international assistance, and military-historical analogies of asymmetric warfare, this study demonstrates that Ukraine's structural capacity to sustain state functions and military operations is approaching a critical threshold.
Military history demonstrates that force generation capabilities are fundamentally bound by demographic realities. A state cannot field or sustain an army if its active population base suffers severe, unrecoverable contraction. In the case of Ukraine, demographic degradation was an acute structural vulnerability long before the 2022 invasion.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited a population baseline of approximately 51.89 million. Over the subsequent three decades, the country experienced continuous demographic erosion driven by compounding factors, including high post-Soviet mortality rates, a severe drop in total fertility rates falling well below the replacement rate of 2.1, massive labor emigration toward Western Europe and Russia, and chronic economic instability coupled with institutional corruption. Between 1990 and 2000, Ukraine lost roughly 2.7 million citizens, bringing the population down to around 49 million. This structural decline persisted through the political crisis of the 2004 Orange Revolution, bringing the total down to roughly 46 million by 2010. Following the 2013–2014 Euromaidan revolution and the loss of effective control over Crimea, the population shrank further to 45.3 million in 2014, and subsequently dropped to 43.5 million by 2021 due to pre-invasion economic displacement.[3] This trajectory indicates that even prior to the major hostilities of 2022, Ukraine exhibited demographic indicators characteristic of fragile or severely stressed states.
The 2022 invasion transformed a gradual demographic decline into an acute structural crisis. Millions of refugees fled into Europe, while millions more came under Russian occupation in the eastern and southern oblasts, reducing the World Bank's estimated total population within recognized boundaries to 37 million by 2023.[4] By 2026, statements from Ukrainian policy officials—including Minister of Social Policy Denys Ulyutin—indicated that the population residing strictly within territories controlled by the Ukrainian government had dropped to a critical low of approximately 25 million.[5]
This dramatic contraction—representing a reduction of over fifty percent from the 1990 baseline—has severe operational consequences for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. First, the pool of draft-eligible males, historically concentrated in the eighteen to thirty age cohort, has been severely depleted. To maintain frontline units, the Ukrainian state was forced to enact strict legal prohibitions on male emigration and progressively expand conscription to middle-aged and older cohorts.[6] Second, a shrinking domestic labor base diminishes state tax revenues, destroying internal fiscal sustainability and making basic civil governance entirely dependent on foreign subsidies. Third, the psychological and social burden of high casualty rates relative to a small remaining population erodes long-term domestic political cohesion. Compared to Russia, which possesses a population base roughly four to five times larger and has successfully leveraged financial incentives and regional recruitment to maintain force generation, Ukraine faces an unbridgeable structural imbalance in human resources.3. Transatlantic Realignment and the European Burden
As internal economic capacity collapses under demographic strain, war maintenance becomes entirely a function of external aid. The continuity of Ukraine's defense rests on foreign financial support, military hardware transfers, and intelligence integration.
According to data compiled by the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, the composition of international assistance to Ukraine underwent a fundamental structural pivot between 2022 and 2026.[7] Under the Biden administration from 2022 to 2024, the United States provided approximately forty-five to fifty percent of all military and financial aid to Kyiv, with European donors supplying the remaining half. However, following the political realignment of the second Trump administration in 2025, American direct security assistance decreased precipitously, reaching functional zero by 2026 as US grand strategy reoriented toward domestic industrial policy and Indo-Pacific deterrence. Consequently, European Union members and allied European nations were forced to absorb almost the entirety of the burden, assuming ninety to ninety-five percent of all financial and military assistance. Among these donors, Germany emerged as the primary backer, bearing a disproportionate financial and industrial share of the effort.[8]
This requirement to finance Ukraine’s state budget and defense apparatus has placed immense socio-economic stress on Western European polities. The prolonged economic costs, ranging from energy price inflation to fiscal realignment away from domestic welfare, have accelerated political volatility across the continent. In the United Kingdom, the political turbulence of recent years saw four consecutive Prime Ministers—Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer—depart office, driven significantly by compounding domestic economic pressures exacerbated by the war's spillover effects. The subsequent ascension of leadership focused strictly on domestic economic rehabilitation, exemplified by figures like Andy Burnham, reflects a voter mandate prioritizing internal recovery over foreign commitments. Similarly, in the core European economies of France and Germany, globalist administrations there have faced rising electoral resistance, economic stagnation, and severe budgetary shortfalls. The industrial capacity required to sustain an artillery-intensive war of attrition is lacking in European defense industrial bases, which were systematically downsized during the post-Cold War era. European states thus face a strategic paradox in that they lack the military-industrial capacity to replace American security guarantees, yet fear the geopolitical ramifications of a Ukrainian defeat. This dynamic threatens to turn the ongoing conflict into a functionally German-led war, as Berlin remains one of the few continental capitals with the fiscal standing to sustain aid, even as its own industrial base contracts.
In response to growing conventional inferiority and manpower shortages, Ukraine has increasingly pivoted toward asymmetric strategies, most notably long-range strike capabilities utilizing uncrewed aerial vehicles.
In late 2025 and 2026, Ukrainian forces conducted deep-penetration drone attacks reaching up to 2,500 kilometers into the Russian interior. These operations achieved notable tactical successes by striking Russian strategic aviation assets on northern and western airfields, disrupting oil refineries and storage infrastructure, and demonstrating vulnerabilities in Russian air defense coverage. To maximize cost-efficiency and evade radar detection, these campaigns incorporated low-cost materials, such as specialized vinyl structures, simplified directional controls, and high-altitude meteorological wind currents like the prevailing westerlies, allowing them to transport explosive payloads over vast distances at minimal cost.[9]
While these drone campaigns are framed by Western observers as a decisive turn in the war, historical analysis suggests caution. Asymmetric deep-strike weapons deployed by an attrition-bound state often represent a symptom of strategic desperation rather than a path to victory. A clear historical parallel can be drawn to Imperial Japan’s Fu-Go balloon bomb campaign against the United States mainland between 1944 and 1945. Backed into a corner by economic blockades, industrial ruin, and conventional military defeat, Imperial Japan deployed over 9,000 low-cost paper and konjac-fluid adhesive balloons carrying explosive payloads across the Pacific Ocean using high-altitude jet streams. Although approximately 300 balloons reached the American mainland, achieving psychological visibility, the campaign yielded negligible operational results and failed to alter the outcome of the war.[10]
In a similar fashion, Ukraine's current low-cost drone and balloon hybrid strikes impose operational friction and yield significant media coverage, but they face inherent strategic limitations. The fundamental limitation of asymmetric deep-strike campaigns lies in the distinction between operational friction and territorial control. Long-range strikes do not alter the balance of forces on the contact line, as wars of attrition are ultimately won by occupying terrain and destroying enemy formations rather than inflicting localized infrastructure damage. Furthermore, while inexpensive drones impose financial costs on Russian repair infrastructure, they cannot halt ground operations supported by heavy artillery, gliding ordnance, and superior air-to-ground fires. Much like historical long-range bombardment campaigns, these operations serve an essential role in maintaining domestic morale and demonstrating relevance to foreign donors, but they lack the operational punch required to break a strategic stalemate.
As the war approaches late 2026, the convergence of demographic exhaustion, European fatigue, and strategic asymmetry points toward a definitive terminal phase. The broad structural parameters indicate that a Ukrainian military victory, defined as the restoration of its 1991 borders, is structurally improbable.
With the United States disengaged, European leadership faces a critical decision point among three distinct paths. The first path is sustained indirect assistance, which involves continuing the current model of military funding; however, given Ukraine's demographic depletion, hardware transfers cannot resolve the fundamental shortage of frontline combat personnel. The second path is direct military intervention, which would require deploying European forces to enforce security zones or operate logistical hubs within Ukraine, carrying a severe risk of direct NATO-Russia escalation while lacking domestic political support within European capitals. The third path is a managed settlement, which requires acknowledging material limits and facilitating a negotiated outcome that accepts territorial loss in exchange for residual security guarantees. Given the economic fragilities across the Continent, European governments will eventually be forced to adopt a managed settlement. The timeline for this transition depends on how long German leadership can maintain domestic political support for funding the conflict.
The diplomatic maneuverings surrounding the conflict highlight its global linkages. German diplomatic initiatives, such as high-level summits with East Asian partners like Japan,[11] frequently aim to enlist non-European industrial economies into supporting European security structures. However, nations such as Japan operate under strict strategic imperatives. Under leadership closely aligned with Washington’s strategic pivot, such as the administration of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, East Asian partners prioritize Indo-Pacific deterrence over European security commitments. Consequently, European efforts to build a global coalition to sustain the German-led effort in the Ukrainian war economy face strict structural limits.
The assertion that the Russo-Ukrainian War is an endless conflict misunderstands the mechanics of strategic attrition. Wars end when one or both belligerents experience the structural exhaustion of their war-making capacity. Ukraine's severe demographic decline, combined with the loss of direct US military aid, has transferred an unsustainable burden onto European states. Tactical innovations in drone warfare, while technically impressive, cannot offset the fundamental collapse of national force generation capacity or the industrial asymmetry favoring Russia.
The endgame of the Ukraine War will not be decided by a dramatic breakthrough on the battlefield, but by political decisions in European capitals acknowledging structural realities. Whether through a formal cease-fire, a frozen conflict, or a negotiated settlement, the structural trajectory indicates that the operational and political outlines of the war's conclusion will become clear by the end of 2026.
About the author:
Prof. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics and National Security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, and was a 2024 ROC-MOFA Taiwan Fellow-in-Residence at NCCU-IIR Taiwan Centre for Security Studies in Taipei. He is Member of IFIMES Council.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Osaka, 5 August, 2026
[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has Special Consultative status at ECOSOC/UN, New York, since 2018 and it’s publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”, link: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en
[2] Even a prominent Russian IR scholar at a major mainstream thinktank for foreign and security policy analysis recently takes a similar position. See, Andrew Korybko, “A Third Leading Russian Expert Shared A Surprisingly Candid Take About His Country,” EESTiEEST, May 24, 2026, link: https://eestieest.com/a-third-leading-russian-expert-shared-a-surprisingly-candid-take-about-his-country/.
[3] Online World Bank Databank, link: https://databank.worldbank.org/embed/ukraine/id/9ed32f1f?utm_source=openai.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Katerina Melnychenko, “’It’s a disaster’: Ulyutin assesses the population of the territory under Ukrainian control,” The Public, May 11, 2026, link: https://thepublic.info/en/news/ce-katastrofa-uliutin-ociniv-naselennia-pidkontrolnoyi-ukrayini-teritoriyi?utm_source=openai.
[6] David L. Stern and Serhiy Morgunov “Ukraine moves to cut off consular services for military-age men abroad,” Washington Post, April 23, 2024, link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/23/ukraine-consular-services-men-abroad/?utm_source=openai. “‘Lorenzo Tondo, “I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription,” Guardian, June 29, 2024, link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/29/i-am-not-made-for-war-the-men-fleeing-ukraine-to-evade-conscription?utm_source=openai.
[7] Ukraine Support Tracker: Military aid holds steady as focus shifts to drones, link: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/ukraine-support-tracker-military-aid-holds-steady-as-focus-shifts-to-drones/.
[8] Christoph Trebesch and Taro Nishikawa, “Europe Steps Up: Ukraine Support After Four Years of War,” Keil Policy Brief, No. 203, February 2026, various pages, link:
https://www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/fis-import/dd24a73f-4270-46c5-9c40-bcc9df4f1672-KPB2023_EN.pdf.
[9] Igor Kossov, “Weaponizing the Westerlies: Ukrainian balloons sow havoc over Russia,“ Euromaidan Press, May 15, 2026, https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/15/weaponizing-the-westerlies-ukrainian-balloons-sow-havoc-over-russia/. Howard Altman, “Ukraine’s Explosive-Laden Balloon Operations Against Russia,” TWZ10, April 25, 2024, link: https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukraines-explosive-laden-balloon-operations-against-russia.
[10] Francine Uenuma, “In 1945, a Japanese Balloon Bomb Killed Six Americans, Five of Them Children, in Oregon, “Smithsonian Magazine, May 22, 2019, link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon-bomb-killed-six-americansfive-them-children-oregon-180972259/; Johnna Rizzo, “Japan's Secret WWII Weapon: Balloon Bombs,” National Geographic, May 28, 2013, link: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130527-map-video-balloon-bomb-wwii-japanese-air-current-jet-stream; and, Lissa August, “The Forgotten History of the Japanese Balloon Bomb That Killed Americans in World War II,” Time, May 15, 2023, link: https://time.com/6276685/japanese-balloon-bomb-history-world-war-ii/.
[11] Ayaka Kudo, “German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to Make 1st Visit to Japan in Late Oct.,” Japan News, July 15, 2026, link: https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/politics-government/20260715-338277/.
