It's extremely unpredictable. I could list a variety of improbable outcomes, but people would find some of them distressing, so they would heavily downvote my comment, so I won't. In 02022 HN is not a place where issues like this can be debated, because people downvote and flag things they disagree with or that upset them.

Maybe it never was. Hair-trigger responses promote emotional reactions rather than careful reasoning, and two hours to edit and 14 days to reply is certainly not enough for the best ideas to arise. Even the previous four hours to edit and 28 days to reply fell short. And there's a strong negative correlation between comment length and comment score, while, as pg pointed out in 02009, there's a strong positive correlation between comment length and comment quality.

However, I do want to point out that if we get "Ukrainian victory", "Total Ukrainian victory", or "Total Russian victory" (which seems unlikely, if only because millions of Ukrainian insurgents would have safe havens in neighboring NATO nations), that's only the beginning. In any of those three cases the world order definitely will not settle down to anything similar to how things were two weeks ago. Obviously this holds a fortiori for "Global thermonuclear war".

You can download most of my previous notes in Dercuano: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano. For the time being there's a copy on the web at https://dercuano.github.io/.

Specifically:

My notes on the Ukraine issue from 02016 are at https://dercuano.github.io/notes/wwiii-genesis.html ("World War III is starting (?)") and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/state-of-the-world.html.

In 02013 I prognosticated gloomily about where an international order based on states and warfare will lead us in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/critical-defense-mass.html, along with some alternative dystopias.

In 02014 I wrote about how pervasive surveillance would change politics in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/surveillance.html, but I didn't foresee the central role censorship would play in directing social movements in what were still at that point liberal democracies. (Recall that this was a year before Trump's candidacy.)

In 02018 I described the world situation from the viewpoint of a fictional extraterrestrial plant species in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/2017-sap-allocation.html. Unfortunately I didn't finish the story, but several people have found it hilarious. It only mentions Ukraine briefly.

The energy market is a huge factor in the current conflict, because Russia supplies a significant amount of Europe's energy, entirely in the form of fossil fuels; those exports are about 40% of Russia's total exports (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exports_of_Russia); and those exports are exempted from the various economic sanctions. Dercuano contains extensive calculations on the renewable energy transition, starting in 02008 with https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html, notably including an outline of what will and won't happen from 02014 in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-future.html and a case study of Japan in 02017 in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/japan-energy-autarky.html, and continuing through to Dercuano's publication in 02019.

These all calculate that the transition will not happen until the late 02020s or even 02030s, putting the rest of Europe in a very difficult position if Russia turns off the tap. But when it does happen, Russia's exports will drop by US$220 billion a year, 40% of its present exports and 13% of its GDP. Even over the course of a few years, that will be a heavy shock to its economy.

The sequels to Dercuano, including notes on historical political instability with reference to the pandemic and on China's energy use, are Derctuo (02020, http://canonical.org/~kragen/derctuo) and Dernocua (02021, http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua). All of these are in the public domain.