FEBRUARY 2025
Machine Learning Meets
War Termination
Using AI to Explore Peace Scenarios in Ukraine
By Ian Reynolds and Benjamin Jensen
Introduction
Talks to end the war in Ukraine are in motion. As the Trump administration seeks to keep its promise
to end the war in Ukraine, negotiators must consider long-standing research on war termination and
peace negotiations. Despite calls for a swift ceasere, this body of work shows that peace talks tend to
take longer than initially anticipated. War is an extension of politics, and negotiations are shaped by
a broad range of factors beyond simply tallying battleeld successes or assessing when combatants will
exhaust their resources.
A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), drawing on data from the
Uppsala Conict Data Program (UCDP), found that 60 percent of all wars conclude through some
form of compromise. While wars can end in various ways, a negotiated settlement remains a distinct
option for Ukraine. Therefore, identifying the factors that inuence the complex process of war
termination is essential for understanding how negotiations between the United States, Russia, Ukraine,
other key states in Europe, and the broader international community may unfold.
War negotiations are inherently complex, marked by uncertainty, competing interests, and shifting
variables. While articial intelligence (AI) can help navigate this complexity, its eectiveness depends
on proper application. Large language models (LLMs) are generalists, but their outputs can be
rened using techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), few-shot learning, and
chain-of-thought reasoning. The key lies not only in the model itself but in the quality of the data
and the sequencing of questions. By curating datasets focused on historical peace negotiations and
structuring prompts to reect real-world decisionmaking, AI moves beyond simple summarization
to become a tool for systematically analyzing war termination and the challenging path toward a
negotiated settlement in Ukraine.
