Ukrainian researchers Elena Davlikanova and Victoria Vdovychenko have released a groundbreaking study that explores various potential scenarios for Ukraine’s development by 2032, marking a decade after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The Ukrainian World Congress is publishing the summary of the study, with the full text available at this link.
For a decade now, Ukraine has been entrenched in Russia’s unprovoked genocidal war with no sustainable peace in sight. Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the creation of quasi-republics in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, their subsequent integration into the Russian Federation alongside other occupied territories, and the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia’s ambitions to reclaim its sphere of influence and reshape international order have become unmistakably evident.
Numerous attempts by world leaders to ignore or appease these ambitions have proven futile, pushing Ukraine into a protracted struggle for survival. This conflict, however, not only shapes Ukraine’s destiny but ultimately defines the fate of global democracy. That is why it is essential to overcome the limitations of conventional thinking in an era where the world has entered a phase of dramatic and accelerating change.
In 2021, many analysts dismissed the possibility of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while in 2022 some confidently predicted its collapse within days. These miscalculations reveal the inherent challenges of forecasting in a world increasingly shaped by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Events once deemed implausible – such as Ukrainian Armed Forces involved in direct confrontation with North Korean troops in the Kursk region – have now become a grim reality.
Thus, we embarked on an intellectual experiment to examine a wide range of potential scenarios for Ukraine by 2032, including both those that seem plausible and those that currently appear implausible. As a result, we developed a dual-layered framework of 20 scenarios: 10 focused on global interplay and 10 examining Ukrainian domestic developments. Our aim is not merely to chart linear trajectories but to capture the clash of diverging rationalities driving the decisions of major global and domestic actors and the multifaceted forces shaping unprecedented developments.
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