Wouldn't get any argument here on any of this. I intentionally didn't bother mentioning U.S. as any kind of reliable guarantor under the vulgar talking yam and his court of black hearted lickspittle grifters and diaper changers.

That's kind of what I'm getting at. Russia is tapped out - they cannot do any better than what they are doing right now. Trump was the last big card they had to play. His role is to destablize NATO, make the allies care more about themselves than Ukraine, and thus remove their support. Ukraine is suffering, but - that is Russia's doing, and was inevitable. Ukraine can probably continue to trade land for time for a while before they get into past viable state limits. Ukraine can outlast Russia in this current form of the war.

The grimmest, hardest part might still be yet to come for the Russian - Occupation. The entire point of stealing/conquering land is to get benefit from it in the future. It's in Ukraine's interest to keep russia paying for their crimes, as long as they can support it with an increasingly automated defensive strategy. Russia has taken to absurd statements in the last year, such as "wherever a russian soldier places his foot, that is ours". That's an idiotic statement, and not how war works. In war - you get to keep and hold what you can keep and hold. The end. If russia is finding that's insidious process of pushing small infiltration teams into pounded rubble until they are sniped, shot, shelled, droned etc is not a great long term occupation strategy, they might rightly conclude that abandoning their plan for total conquest and trying to re-write the rules of war is the way to get a settlement you don't really deserve on a military basis. Then pivot to their strategy of corrosive disinformation and grey area shithousery to try and weaken Ukraine and it's supporters.

Things are really, really, really historically bad for Russia - now, and going forward. If they could be doing better, they would be. This is the point - this is it. They're harping more about settlements than Ukraine is. And Trump, being equal parts loud and dumb, always tries to hamfist negotiations with leverage he doesn't actually have. He's already cut all U.S. support, and that has not produced even a blip of progress for the Russians' 2025 version of their rag tag shit band of low functioning, thieving, cannibalistic goblins they call an army. This stupid war is on an epic scale of historic imperial self-owns, like when the Persians decided to go show that uppity brat Alexander of Macedon who the big dog of the age was.

I think Ukraine's going to keep quiet, keep fighting and understands fully that if you want to truly neuter the Russian war machine, it has to keep bleeding. We'll likley never get a satisfying view of Putin crying into his pillow at his monumental failures, or seeing him full of bullets or strung up like Mussolini, Gaddhafi or Caeucescu, but all in all....Ukraine has won it's freedom. That's more than most serious minded people thought was possible 4 years ago.