What AI Can Tell Us About Putin’s Next Steps in Ukraine
Be prepared for attacks on Kharkiv and Gazprom’s fighters joining the war.
Artificial intelligence has been an extraordinarily useful tool in anticipating Russian aggression against Ukraine and making sense of the tumult facing the country, with all of the war’s implications for the global order. As we described in Foreign Policy, AI-based models provided a particularly chilling and clear prediction that Russia would invade at a time when the likelihood of war was still being contentiously debated in Washington and other Western capitals.
Artificial intelligence has been an extraordinarily useful tool in anticipating Russian aggression against Ukraine and making sense of the tumult facing the country, with all of the war’s implications for the global order. As we described in Foreign Policy, AI-based models provided a particularly chilling and clear prediction that Russia would invade at a time when the likelihood of war was still being contentiously debated in Washington and other Western capitals.
A year and a half later, we are using our AI digital nervous system to provide the same kind of valuable foresight into the ongoing war, using mathematical modeling, deep learning, and the latest breakthroughs in large language models. AI is helping us to cut through a kaleidoscope of disinformation and make new predictions about the path ahead, informing and aiding Western policymakers as they try to make the right decisions.
This article is a companion to the Summer 2023 print issue of FP. Read more from the issue.
What do the various metrics analyzed by our AI-assisted models tell us as we head into the summer?
In short, we see a long, bloody slog ahead, featuring paramilitary operations on both sides and a battlefield marked by trench warfare reminiscent at times of World War I and other early 20th-century conflicts—even as we anticipate more and more of the high-tech, modern kinetic operations many associate with the 21st century. The present and future staring us in the face are daunting: trench warfare, a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and drone attacks from both sides. It’s a previously unseen combination of old and new, and the new is getting tested.
Our company’s AI platform—called Guardian—successfully predicted two of Russia’s previous military shifts during the war, and we now expect a third Russian shift that will last through October. Our October 2022 model correctly indicated that Russia would concentrate military aggression in three western oblasts through the winter and early spring, in addition to Moscow’s attempted ground offensive in the southeastern Donbas region. By January 2023, our model predicted a continuation of aggression in Ukraine’s southeast, but it also alerted us to a convergence of Russian aggression in Ukraine’s north—specifically, in the Kyiv region in late spring and early summer. The predictions held. In December 2022, Russia intensified its missile and drone attacks on Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts, two of the three western regions for which Guardian had flashed warnings in October 2022. And in May, Russia attacked Kyiv at least nine times, including four massive missile launches.
Our latest AI-powered analysis anticipates similar Russian concentration on the south and north through October. Of all Ukrainian regions and time frames, Guardian registered its highest count of high-confidence indicators in Kharkiv oblast through October. This is the region from which two Ukraine-aligned paramilitary groups reportedly launched cross-border incursions into Russia’s adjacent Belgorod oblast. This prediction may indicate that Russia will conduct more retaliatory attacks against Ukraine and the paramilitary groups in Kharkiv oblast.
We also see a new Russian paramilitary group playing a starring role in the fighting. By late 2023, Potok—a new private military contractor run by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy giant, to support global Russian military objectives—will very likely be able to deploy from the renovated Levashovo air base near St. Petersburg, Russia, where Gazprom is headquartered. We assume Gazprom does not have any other legitimate use of a renovated Levashovo air base and that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will still be ongoing by the time Levashovo becomes fully operational later this year.
This may well have been part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scheme all along. In August 2019, he authorized the Russian defense ministry and Gazprom’s transport subsidiary, Gazpromavia, to use Levashovo air base. Sometime between June and August 2021, Gazprom personnel commenced redevelopment construction, as envisaged in Gazprom’s 2020 annual report, thereby partially corroborating an earlier Guardian prediction. By the spring of 2022, personnel had renovated the approximately 9,000-foot-long runway, and by fall, the new adjacent taxiway had been completed with the new apron still in progress. The runway became operational over the late fall and winter. At the current pace of construction, we expect Gazpromavia to complete all outstanding construction by late fall. The partial operationalization of the renovated runway this year coincides with the creation of Potok in early February—just three days after Russia authorized the creation of new private security firms. There are indications, based on interviews with Wagner Group mercenaries and Potok members captured in Ukraine in late spring, that Potok was already militarily involved in Bakhmut. We also see an increase in the presence of Gazprom personnel at Levashovo.
How will that impact Russian aggression? Once the Levashovo air base becomes fully operational, Potok will be able to operate and deploy globally at the orders of the Russian government. This will become more important as Russia struggles politically and militarily to reassert operational control of Wagner, which has been its primary private military contractor up to now. What’s more, if Potok positions itself to replace Wagner, it could create the conditions for an oligarch-backed political struggle. This would contribute to the growing political instability in Russia that has resulted from the Wagner Group’s outsized influence.
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These findings should be sobering for anyone hoping for a speedy military victory for Ukraine, pointing instead to a sustained conflict fought by a growing number of mercenary proxies on a complex battlefield. But we should also prepare ourselves for ongoing high-tech kinetic attacks from both sides. Our platform provided early warning for drone exercises at a St. Petersburg base, which were followed by alleged Ukrainian drone attacks on St. Petersburg. In February, we foresaw a reasonably high probability of a Russian military event in and around St. Petersburg between then and July. Before the calendar flipped to March, Russia instituted a temporary airspace ban around St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport. Russia’s defense ministry later announced that it had been conducting drills around the airport; unconfirmed media reports showed up on civilian Telegram channels of unidentified flying objects, speculated to be drones or fighter jets, near the airport and city at the time of the airspace ban. We can only expect more of this activity in the coming months. This conflict remains a high-tech war of attrition.
All of these AI-assisted predictions and interpretations based on data may prove imperfect, but they should not be dismissed as science fiction. A familiar adage holds that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But if we harness data from the past—more than a decade’s worth of historical data that went into our machine models—we can perhaps help policymakers disrupt a violent and dangerous future, bending it to the United States’ and its allies’ advantage.
Diplomats, soldiers, military planners, and countless other partners in the United States, Ukraine, Europe, and elsewhere will shape the final outcome of Russia’s barbaric war, but we’re sifting data in California to empower them. But even with AI-enabled understanding, it takes confidence and courage to act in time to change events. And all the experts and policymakers who spent a lifetime studying Russia, Ukraine, statecraft, and war remain essential—and in some ways are more important than ever. But we already have the ability to use AI to augment human intelligence, diplomatic efforts, and military planning to pressure-test assumptions, project forward, and predict events. AI won’t determine the course of the battle in Ukraine, but it will expand Ukraine’s and the West’s options, increasing the freedom of action to make decisions at the speed of relevance. AI predicts, and the brave fighters for Ukraine’s freedom can use it to write the final story.
This article for FP Insiders was published concurrently with the authors’ essay on the fast-growing role of AI in national security, featured in the Summer 2023 issue of Foreign Policy.
FP LIVE | JUNE 28: Who will win the AI race? How will it impact global trade, sanctions, and great-power competition? Join Paul Scharre, the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, in conversation with FP’s Ravi Agrawal as they discuss “The Scramble for AI,” the cover story in FP’s Summer 2023 print issue. Register to join.
Stanley McChrystal is a retired four-star U.S. Army general and an advisor to Rhombus Power. He led Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008 and U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. He is the author of My Share of the Task and a co-author of Team of Teams, Leaders, and Risk: A User’s Guide. Twitter: @StanMcChrystal
Anshu Roy is the founder and CEO of Rhombus Power.
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