This series—led by the Futures Lab and featuring scholars across CSIS—explores emerging challenges and opportunities likely to shape peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. All contributions in the series can be found by visiting Strategic Headwinds: Understanding the Forces Shaping Ukraine’s Path to Peace.
Russia is currently winning the war of materiel in Ukraine, but Ukraine’s backers will eventually be capable of far outproducing Russia. This prospect may cause Russia to fear that Ukraine may seek to revise the terms of a war-ending agreement once its backers are closer to their productive potential, incentivizing it to prolong the ongoing war or begin a new round of fighting once a ceasefire has given it the time to rebuild its strength. Negotiators can increase the probability that negotiations will be more than a minor episode in a continuing war by seeking a demilitarized zone and international peacekeeping force.
Russia currently produces more relevant military materiel than Ukraine or its supporters, which has given it a major advantage in the war. But Russia has taken extreme action to do so. Its factories are running 24/7, and it plans to spend a record 13.5 trillion rubles of spending on defense in 2025, which will account for one-third of the federal budget. Following a war-ending agreement, Moscow may wish to move away from a war economy. But Russia might also fear that Ukraine will grow in strength once the fighting lets up while its backers like China and Iran abandon supporting it due to other demands on their militaries.
Such a fear is rational: Ukraine’s backers have much greater industrial potential than Russia. Ukraine’s top 10 supporters produce 20 times as much manufacturing value as Russia (Figure 1), including both commercial and defense output. How much commercial capacity can be converted to military production and how long such a conversion would take are unclear, but such an extreme disparity suggests that Ukraine’s backers will eventually be able to massively outproduce Russia’s arms industry if they choose to mobilize their economies, as the United States and many of Ukraine’s other supporters are already beginning to do.
