In the trenches of eastern Ukraine, Ivan Skuratovskyi's calm verges on numbness — even after a sniper's bullet recently killed one of the 50 or so men under his command. AP Domestic
Story HighlightsU.S. officials estimate the invasion could cause major loss of life and injury.
Concerns that Russia's invasion will prompt a refugee crisis have worried world leaders for months.
Russia's incursion could make other NATO countries nervous, especially former Soviet Baltic states.
President Vladimir Putin ignored months of intensifying warnings by President Joe Biden and other Western leaders that Moscow would face "swift and severe costs" if Russia invaded Ukraine.
Now, as the Kremlin reaches into Ukraine, Putin's policy seems likely to come with significant costs, chiefly for Ukraine itself.
"Peace on our continent has been shattered," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday. "This is a deliberate, cold-blooded and long-planned invasion. Russia is using force to try to rewrite history."
While predicting the consequences of conflict is notoriously difficult, here are some probable outcomes – for U.S. and European security, for global energy flows, for a potential wave of Ukrainian refugees and in terms of sanctions expected to target Putin and his inner circle that could turn Russia into a pariah state in the eyes of the West.
Ukraine resists
Ukrainians inside and outside the military have told USA TODAY in recent weeks that Putin won't take their country without a fight, even if it means prolonged street-to-street battles and a bloody insurgency supported by ordinary citizens.
For weeks, the U.S. and other NATO countries have been sending weapons, advisers and troops to Baltic states, Poland, Romania and other nations close to the hostilities.
But they've sworn off direct fighting in Ukraine.
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Much now depends on the scale and scope of Russia's invasion, which is still being assessed. Russia on Thursday launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine, hitting cities and bases with airstrikes or shelling.
In the days ahead of Moscow's assault, U.S. officials estimated the invasion could cause major loss of life, serious injury and capture, with Ukraine suffering as estimated 5,000 to 25,000 troop casualties, while Russia's better trained and better equipped military could see 3,000 to 10,000 casualties.
Civilian casualties could range from 25,000 to 50,000.
Oleksii Arestovich, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Thursday at least 40 people had been killed and dozens others wounded in the attack so far.
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"Doomsday scenarios often speculate that Russia will try to occupy the country, topple the capital and kill tens of thousands of civilians. I do not believe that these scenarios accord with Putin's track record," said Max Abrahms, a specialist in international security studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
"Putin is not a strategic dunce or a martyr," Abrahms told USA TODAY. "Even when he authorized Russian military intervention in Syria's civil war in 2015 (credited with turning the tide in President Bashar al-Assad's favor), he did so in a way that would not lead to a quagmire."
Concerns that Russia's invasion will prompt a refugee crisis across Europe have had world leaders worried for months.
British, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have all warned of a "humanitarian disaster"; 3 million to 5 million Ukrainians could try to flee their homes, and many are likely to try to escape via neighboring Poland, which is starting to see people cross the border.
According to figures from Ukraine's interior ministry, about 1.5 million Ukrainians are already internally displaced after fleeing the 8-year-old Russia-backed conflict in Ukraine's Donbas region and after Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014.
"It is frightening to imagine what scale the refugee crisis could reach in the event of escalating hostilities in Ukraine," said Agnès Callamard, human rights group Amnesty International's secretary-general. "It will be a continent-wide humanitarian disaster with millions of refugees seeking protection in neighboring European countries."
Reporter's notebook: Walking with migrants during Europe's refugee crisis
A refugee crisis in Europe beginning in 2015 triggered by Syria's civil war roiled the continent for years as European capitals either struggled to offer protection and security to those who needed it, were accused of letting too many asylum-seekers in, or evaded public calls to do more for refugees fleeing war zones across the Middle East.
The crisis is widely blamed by political scientists for being one of the catalysts that led to a rise in right-wing, anti-immigration political populism which saw the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the same year President Donald Trump was elected.
Security order tumult
Washington and its allies have repeatedly publicly committed to an "ironclad commitment to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," though that commitment does not extend to fighting side by side with Ukrainians, only equipping and training its military and imposing financial and economic sanctions on Moscow.
Still, Russia's incursion could make other NATO countries in Europe nervous, especially the former Soviet Baltic states that joined the military alliance in the past two decades, as Russia possibly looks to consolidate its military and cultural sphere of influence around its borders, said Andris Banka, a Latvian-born professor of international politics at the University of Greifswald in Germany.
"The Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are stuck in unfavorable geography as they are almost completely cut off from their NATO peers and share considerable borders with what they perceive to be a threatening revanchist power," Banka said.
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The invasion also could lead to an increase in defense spending by the U.S. and NATO, effectively bolstering an alliance whose eastward expansion has long troubled Putin. The Pentagon has already announced it put 8,500 forces on "heightened alert" in the event they are needed as part of a 40,000-strong NATO Response Force and Biden has sent 3,000 soldiers to Poland to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank.
NATO will hold an emergency meeting Friday after countries closest to the conflict –Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland – requested consultations under Article 4 of NATO’s founding treaty, which can be launched when "the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the (NATO) parties is threatened."
"A Russian invasion of Ukraine will come as a shock to leaders in the West who believed the post-Cold War European security architecture was a permanent state of affairs," said Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington dedicated to introducing more military restraint in U.S. foreign policy.
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"Unfortunately, Russia never bought into this order and indeed felt excluded from it," he said. "NATO itself will survive and indeed has taken appropriate defensive measures over the last few months to strengthen deterrence."
Abrahms, the Northeastern University security expert, said Russia's invasion of Ukraine "has given the NATO alliance its clearest raison d'etre since the Cold War."
Russia is one of the world's largest suppliers of energy, and it could seek to withhold supplies to Europe while attacking Ukraine or in retaliation for sanctions.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has already put a halt to its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, designed to pump Russia's natural gas under the Black Sea to Europe.
The Biden administration has said it has been working with its European partners and the region's energy suppliers to come up with contingency plans for alternative energy supplies. A number of countries including South Korea and Japan have signaled they may be willing to help.
The U.S. does import Russian oil and gas but has large strategic reserves. But higher global energy prices could impact gas prices at the pump. Both oil and gas prices soared Thursday.
Cristian-Dan Tataru, an expert on Russia at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, wrote in a recent research paper that in addition to energy supplies, the conflict could result in a potentially worrying food crisis for places such as Lebanon and Libya, which get half of their wheat imports from Ukraine.
Sanctioned: Putin's inner circle
Western powers have threatened "unprecedented" sanctions on Moscow.
Biden said Tuesday that the “first tranche” of sanctions would cut off Russia from Western financial institutions, and beginning on Wednesday the U.S. imposed sanctions against individual Russian “elites” and their family members.
Sanctions from European leaders have targeted Russian lawmakers, financial institutions, Russia's airline industry and some wealthy associates of Putin.
The U.S. president said the sanctions are designed to "cut off" Russia from international loans and other forms of financial assistance they rely on. Penalties also target Russian "elites" and their family members who profit from its military adventurism.
This is not unprecedented. Scores of Putin's former and current political associates have been sanctioned by Washington and it allies. Heads of state such as Syria's Assad and Zimbabwe's late leader Robert Mugabe have also seen their riches, foreign assets and ability to travel sanctioned.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine and paved the way to provide the separatists with military support. (Feb. 22) AP Domestic
But sanctions extending to Putin himself would be a first, though their effectiveness would be unclear. Independent reporting in Russia has appeared to establish that Putin is one of Russia's wealthiest individuals, but no one knows where he keeps his money.
Putin's official annual salary is about $150,000, a relatively modest sum for a man routinely seen wearing $60,000 watches. Various watchdogs, investigation groups and anti-corruption campaigners have estimated his actual personal wealth to be somewhere between $70 billion and $200 billion.
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"The Kremlin is well positioned to survive (any targeted sanctions). Russia's foreign currency reserves and history of fiscal discipline, combined with continued high prices for the commodities Russia exports, will likely be sufficient to cushion the blow," said Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King's College London.
"If sanctions are more of the kind we've seen imposed on Iran or North Korea, that would be a very different story," he said. "The U.S. and Europe have been careful since 2014 to impose sanctions on people and companies close to the Kremlin, but to minimize the direct impact on ordinary Russians and on the Russian economy as a whole."
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side effects of the war between Russia and Ukraine.