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I think Putin must have expected Ukraine to beg for peace on his terms so that he could annex the three disputed enclaves and neutralize Ukraine — the desire to install a puppet government was the ultimate goal but even if that had to be taken off the table, Ukraine is holding out on accepting the other terms. Putin has no actual reason to maintain forces in portions of Ukraine not part of the three enclaves so he is inching forward to keep the pressure on Kiev to settle with him on his terms. Sooner or later the international community will start to get nervous about escalation and put enough pressure on Ukraine to settle that it will happen, and this will end. In any case, I don’t think NATO itself ever wanted to include Ukraine, that would only make sense if they could include Russia and Belarus at the same time, which in the world to come might be a smart move on everybody’s part. China and global Islam are forces that are not friendly to Russia long-term and Russia has nothing much to fear from the NATO partners militarily, the disputes are cultural and social. Being part of a military alliance does not commit you to sharing those values if you don’t wish to do so, and who knows, this might be high-water mark for woke socialism in the west and the pendulum might swing back.

We should have gotten Russia more firmly into the western camp back around 2000 when the opportunity was there. This war is partly a symptom of that failure although nothing really excuses the blatant violations of international law. Putin has some time to pull back from the brink on this, and actually we caught a break with Biden in one way, a guy who can do nothing is probably exactly what we want in this particular situation, if not in most others. If we do nothing we can’t make a fatal miscalculation, so long as total annexation of Ukraine is not on the table, and if it is, then what would anyone have ever done to stop that? There is no point in saying “we won’t stand for this” if in fact we will sit for it.

This. We had a chance to integrate Russia as a real partner but we were cheap and our politicians were focused on short term political interests.

We needed giants like George C. Marshall but we got pygmies like Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Zelenskyy isn't a fool: he knows the "offer" for him to withdraw to Poland was to enable the West to arrange a capitulation and render the current Ukrainian government as irrelevant as the Polish government in exile in London in 1945.

Zelenskyy knows where Yalta is: Ukraine used to own it.