every week the war continues 1-2k russian soldiers die and far more are wounded. every week loses 100 tanks and 10 aircraft. every day they fire ~20 kalibr or iskanders with little military value in return. those are not just unsustainable expenditures. i won’t be counting dead generals, but the internal repressions are also costly. it’s around a cool billion $ of not immediately replaceable assets. even if they take territory, there are no spoils to be had that measure to that amount.
there are no off-ramps because putin never created any. even abandoning kyiv didn’t create a deescalation. what territory can he even hold next month? will he have to retreat in izyum or kherson to hold mariupol? they have achieved none of their objectives during or since the blitzkrieg. and i posited earlier they currently achieved the objective of holding the water canal to crimea, but that’s relatively minor compared to a city.
in short, russian army will take decades to rebuild. they have no forces to squash another potential uprisings in belarus or kazakhstan or within russia for that matter. russia was nowhere to be found when azerbadjan took nagornyj karabakh.
drawing nato into the conflict by engaging first is a wet dream for russian propaganda. it’s a thing they have been telling all along and it finally has a chance of becoming true. there’s no other single “truth” they ever said that is as big as that. but the biggest “win” it lets putin use nukes with impunity. abject defeat is an existential threat to putin, and it gets played on state tv as an existential threat to russia, making nukes justified.