Going off the headlines in MSM you would think Ukraine is on the verge of victory so this is an enlightening update. Appreciate it.

I think the efforts of the MSM were initially like a nuclear bomb of propaganda for the first week or two, with the Snake Island thing and the Ghost of Kyiv, and then it settled down into a Great Wall, where no opinion even vaguely critical of Ukraine could penetrate. This has only really broken a bit in the last week or so, with a slate of articles suggesting that Ukraine might not actually win this. But today, there's a return to the old narrative. I ultimately think that they'll push the pro-Ukraine narrative right up until the last Ukrainian soldier dies defending the last Ukrainian city, if it comes to that. They report Russian advances as losses, but those losses are getting suspiciously closer and closer to Ukrainian cities...

This is what I’ve been wondering about. Since neutrality doesn’t seem to be on the table are they just going to go for the whole thing?

There's been a whole saga over the last few months about what exactly Zelensky and his party are going for. Zelensky himself isn't a very helpful source, as he jumps between "We will need to negotiate with Russia to end this war" and "We will retake Donbass and Crimea no matter what!" on consecutive days. I think there's a good case that he and his party are being controlled by the West - there was an example about how the timing of Ukraine withdrawing from negotiations was at the exact same time that Boris Johnson went to go visit and talked to Zelensky. Since Istanbul in March(?), there hasn't been any serious attempt at restarting negotiations. The West has gradually shifted from "Ukraine will obviously win this war" to "Okay, Ukraine might not win, and besides what even is victory? But we need to continue giving them weapons so that they can have the best negotiating position possible." The obvious problem with that is that Ukraine continues to lose territory every day, and they aren't really getting any stronger compared to Russia, so if that remains the official policy, the war will never end unless Ukraine is fully annexed, or at least the government is captured and a puppet government is put in its place.

Russia likely wants Novorossiya, which is a region that broadly constitutes the east and south of Ukraine. Odessa, Myklolaiv, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkiv. Maybe Dnipro, maybe not. You can freely speculate whether Russia will actually get all that before Ukraine capitulates, or whether Ukraine will never capitulate and Russia will just continue advancing towards the west and north. Medvedev just said “Who said Ukraine will exist on the world map in two years?” in response to the US proposing a Lend-Lease program that will last until 2024. Is that just a threat to scare them into surrendering? Is that a promise? I don't know.

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