The October 2022 warning that the war in Ukraine could last years

How long did the Russo-Ukrainian War appear likely to last by October 2022?

The conflict was moving beyond the early six-day and six-month horizons toward a war measured in years.

A viewer describes Russia's invasion plan as unrealistic and inflexible, with severe human costs. The response uses a ladder of six hours, days, weeks, months, and years to show how a failed short campaign can become a prolonged war. By October 2022, the assessment was that the conflict was moving toward the six-year end of that scale. This was a contemporary forecast rather than a retrospective verdict, and it warned that a long war would change many other things.