When Carlo Masala set out his hypothetical “Russian victory” in Ukraine, he defined it narrowly: not a march to Kyiv, but Moscow retaining the territories it already occupies.

That premise matters because it aligns with the kind of “freeze” or armistice outcome that can be framed as de-escalation while leaving the underlying strategic problem unresolved.

The book began as a German bestseller—Wenn Russland gewinnt: Ein Szenario—and has since appeared in English translation. The 22 January 2026 review by The Economist described the scenario as “chilling, yet plausible”, and argued that imagining how the West could lose is a practical step towards avoiding that outcome.

Masala’s core contention is less about predicting an exact sequence than about exposing a mechanism: once borders can be changed by force and then stabilised through diplomacy, every actor recalculates risk. The scenario begins with a settlement that ends major combat but leaves Ukraine weakened, politically fractious, and economically strained. In Masala’s telling, the political stress of a war-ending deal would be followed by elections in which wartime leaders, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy, might not survive the ballot box. That is not presented as a moral judgement, but as a plausible political consequence of a settlement widely experienced as unsatisfactory.

A second mechanism is alliance contraction. If Washington concludes that the “Ukraine chapter” is closed, the incentive to keep substantial forces and matériel in Europe falls. Masala’s scenario then runs through a familiar security logic: Russia uses the respite to reconstitute combat power and test the limits of Western cohesion, first with deniable pressure and then with a limited territorial bite.

The flashpoint he chooses is Narva, a border city that allows a hybrid operation to be staged as an “internal disturbance” rather than an interstate attack. The method is deliberately ambiguous: armed groups presented as civilians, information operations to muddy attribution, and a tempo designed to force Western decision-making into public dispute. The practical target is not simply territory. It is the credibility of NATO commitments—especially whether Article 5 can be triggered quickly when the facts are contested and the attackers are not wearing uniforms.

That strand of the scenario intersects with a live debate at the start of 2026: how reliable the United States would be in a sudden European crisis, and how far European states should move towards strategic autonomy. The immediate catalyst, unusually, has been the Arctic. At World Economic Forum in Davos, Donald Trump used a high-profile address to set out priorities that included Greenland, with reporting and commentary noting the reverberations in Europe and within the alliance.

In parallel, US and Danish officials have acknowledged “technical talks” involving Denmark and Greenland on Arctic security, following political turbulence over Trump’s past annexation rhetoric. European reporting has described the episode as a stress test for transatlantic assumptions, and an accelerant for arguments about European capacity-building.

Masala’s warning lands in that environment. The point is not that Greenland and Ukraine are strategically identical, but that alliance politics is increasingly transactional, and that public signalling can have second-order effects. If a major ally demonstrates that it is willing to use coercive language towards a partner on one issue, it becomes easier for adversaries to ask whether Washington will be risk-acceptant on another—particularly one as escalatory as a direct confrontation with Russia.

The scenario’s third mechanism is nuclear shadow. Masala assumes that once a territorial seizure inside NATO becomes a subject for debate rather than immediate reversal, Moscow gains leverage by raising the cost of response. Threats of limited nuclear use, or even simply the reminder that escalation ladders exist, can be used to widen political division inside democratic systems. The result is not paralysis everywhere, but enough hesitation to create faits accomplis.

A fourth mechanism is linkage. Masala’s scenario is European in its main line, but it assumes that crises do not occur in isolation. If Europe is pulled into an acute Baltic emergency, other theatres move. Xi Jinping, in this logic, does not need to coordinate directly with Moscow for interests to converge; he merely needs to identify the moment when US attention and allied bandwidth are constrained. The Taiwan and South China Sea calculations then become part of a wider pattern of simultaneous pressure, even if each actor pursues its own objectives.

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The value of the book, and of the recent press attention around it, is that it translates a strategic argument into a sequence of decisions that can be examined: what counts as victory; how deterrence fails; how ambiguity slows response; and how domestic politics inside alliances can become the decisive terrain.

What follows from that logic is less a set of remedies than a warning light. If European governments want to avoid being pushed into improvisation under acute time pressure, they need usable capabilities and agreed command arrangements in place before a crisis breaks. That points to closer European defence integration, regional groupings able to act at speed, and tighter coordination among Ukraine’s backers, including through the Ramstein-format contact group. The argument is that preparedness is not a replacement for the transatlantic alliance, but insurance against political discontinuity in Washington and hesitation inside Europe.

Masala’s scenario is a constructed future. Its purpose is not to predict a date and a place, but to show how “ending the war” on paper can create a permissive environment for the next contest. In early 2026, as questions about European autonomy and US priorities are debated more openly than in previous years, that is the part of his argument that is easiest to test against events.