The Threat List

Status:Conflict

The Threat List
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Eastern EuropeConflictSince 2022Deep-sourcedmedium confidenceSourcing reviewed 2026-09-12

Russia-Ukraine War

The largest interstate war in Europe since 1945, with mass casualties, displacement and global food and energy shocks.

Severity score

87.6

Catastrophic · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

How this is ranked

What this is

Russia invaded Ukraine at scale in February 2022, following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas. Casualty figures are treated as state secrets on both sides and independent estimates diverge sharply; the ranges below reflect Western intelligence and open-source assessments of combined military and civilian dead. Beyond the battlefield, the war disrupted Black Sea grain exports and European energy markets, drove food price spikes across import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East, and caused extensive destruction of Ukrainian housing, energy and industrial infrastructure.

Score breakdown

Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.

Loss of life

88

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

91

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

91

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

77

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

87

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.

Recent coverage

Audit trail

Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.

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