If Russia Wins. A thriller? Or something else?

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays from South Africa

Welcome to 2026! I wish all our readers the very best for the New Year. May it be healthy, happy, and lucky for you!

A new year always has its fleet of “What will happen this year?” articles. The predictions are usually wrong, often because they are too conservative one way or the other. Nevertheless, being human we lap up any predictions, especially if they make us feel better.

Carlo Masala

Carlo Masala is a professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr University Munich, but has held senior positions at the NATO Defence College. Two years ago he became director of the Centre for Intelligence and Security Services at the University of the Federal Armed Forces. This guy knows his stuff. His book If Russia Wins rapidly became a best seller in Germany and the Netherlands and is now being distributed worldwide in English.

Let’s start with what If Russia Wins is not. Despite a shout out that it “reads like a thriller,” it doesn’t. It doesn’t even read like a novel. There are essentially no characters. There is a family in Mali that we care about briefly, but they rapidly disappear into the churn of the plot. Actually, there isn’t really that much plot either. There is a powerful premise that leads to a scenario with seriously interesting ideas. To be fair, the full title of the book is If Russia Wins: A Scenario. Although it’s fiction, it doesn’t claim to be a novel. It’s a scenario that’s dressed up as fiction to make it more approachable for the general reader. The narration features clangers like “you could hear a pin drop.” This is not your next-best-read.

The book is exactly what it says it is – a feasible scenario following a Russian victory in Ukraine. By Russian victory, Masala means that the West agree to, and Ukraine is forced to accept, essentially what Russia now says it wants – recognition of its claim to a large block of Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO, and weak guarantees for the security of the rest of the country. Masala postulates that the West then supports reconstruction in both the remaining Ukraine and what becomes part of Russia. 

Next, Putin stands down and replaces himself with a handpicked deputy who is put forward as a reformer and with whom the West is more comfortable. What follows is a poker game. Russia knows it can’t defeat NATO, but also knows that NATO won’t know how far it is willing to go. That is a great set up for a thriller, but the author wants his scenario to play out too quickly. Soon Russia grabs Narva, a small town in Estonia on the transparent pretext that the Russian-speaking population there is being suppressed. Estonia is a NATO member and its president asks that Article 5 – that an attack on a NATO country represents an attack on all NATO members - be invoked.

On the left bank, Narva.
To the right, Russia

Here is the core of the scenario. Is the West willing to go to war over “a small town in Estonia”? If so, what form will that war take? Will it be a “conventional war" of the type fought in Ukraine? What happens if Russia starts to lose? It has at least 6,000 nuclear weapons. Russia's bluff is that it has very limited objectives and no desire for war with NATO, but it is willing to go the whole hog if its interests are in real danger. Who will blink first? [Spoiler alert – it isn’t Russia.]

There is a nice twist that the Russians send a nuclear submarine to Hans Island, a small uninhabited island, once in dispute between Canada and Denmark, and put up a flag before heading off. The point is not that they care about the island, but that the submarine is able to get that close to North America without being detected.

Probably the most interesting part of the book is the Afterword, where Masala explains the development of his premise and why the scenario could play out in the way it does. He’s at pains to point out that this is not intended as prediction or even as the most likely scenario. The point of these war scenarios is to see how to avoid them if possible. Already European rearmament is a big step in that direction he says, but he notes that he finished the book just as Donald Trump took office in the US for his second term. Certainly, he could fit the bill for the (unnamed) US president in the author's scenario.

Last weekend’s developments in Ukraine’s peace talks may pre-empt all of this, or maybe just fast track it. If the US is really proposing to give an Article 5 style guarantee to Ukraine, then Putin doesn’t need to risk an altercation with Estonia…

Samuel Charap is distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at Rand. Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. They also know their stuff. Take a look at their reaction to these latest developments in this Washington Post article from last Friday.

We may need that good luck in 2026!