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Okay, the answer to this is actually pretty simple.
In short, the fear of all the Western players is nuclear escalation. There are three ways this likely happens. One: Ukraine starts winning the war, and Putin is pushed into a corner. Two: Russia starts winning the war and gets too close to NATO countries, which leads to direct conflict with NATO, which Russia cannot hope to win without relying on nuclear weapons. Three: regime change in Russia. Putin is a known entity, but anyone who takes his place, especially in the context of a coup, would likely be more radical. Putin already keeps a lot of radicals around who are openly calling to use tactical nuclear weapons, and in a regime change scenario we have no idea who would end up on top.
Once you have this framework, everything NATO and the Biden admin has done is obvious. They can't let Russia win the war, but they also can't let Ukraine win the war. So what's the solution? Slowly degrade Russia's capacity in a way that doesn't destabilize the country, until eventually their economic and domestic issues become so serious that Putin thinks it's better to come to the negotiating table.
What are the problems with this? We're seeing them right now. Firstly, Russia is not as alone on the world stage as Western leaders thought. Putin has in fact built a coalition of autocratic states that are backing his play. North Korean arms and troops are now directly participating to cover the manpower losses in the Russian army. Iran likewise has fully aligned with Russia. This threatens to make the Ukraine war into a world war without the West changing their policies.
Second, the West does not understand the Russian people. Russia is perhaps the most fatalistic country in the world, and also one of the most resilient. The Russian people can handle a lot of suffering and punishment. Poorer Russians are quite happy to roll the dice as assault soldiers in a war where they will very likely die. For Westerners, a mortality rate of 5% in our military would be shocking - nobody would sign on. But a poor Russian with no other path to prosperity (many of them actual criminals freed from prison for this chance) will sign on to a 50% chance of death, shrug his soldiers and say "maybe I'll get lucky". Russians are also quite patriotic, and willing to suffer to see their country succeed. Combine this with the increasing levels of information control (it is, for instance, illegal in Russia to speak poorly of either the government or the military) and you'll see why there is no public outcry against the war - Putin's popularity has actually increased as the war drags on, despite signs that the Russian economy could well collapse within a year. In other words, there is no pressure on Putin to change. Quite the contrary, things really seem to be going his way.
Western countries, if they were able to continue the current levels of support, might have been able to continue the war at the current level for another year, at which point there's a real chance the Russian economy would fall apart. This was essentially the Biden strategy. However, Ukraine is almost at the end of it's rope. They cannot recruit enough to sustain the fight, as anyone who was going to volunteer did so two years ago. And many Western publics have gotten tired of spending boatloads of money on a strategy that has not been explained to them, that in fact looks like a black hole of taxpayer funds with no end in sight.
And so, I'm somewhat hopeful about Trump coming in. I think he can credibly threaten to change the status quo. The way I imagine it is: he proposes a cease-fire deal, which both Russia and Ukraine must refuse based on their geopolitical needs. Then, because Russia turned it down, this gives Trump carte blanche to increase support, not just in materiel but in the permission to strike into Russia that Biden has been refusing for the past two years. In other words, Trump may have the freedom to actually apply pressure to Putin in a way that the Biden alliance has steadfastly refused to do out of fear of escalation. I may be wrong, and Trump will swing the other way and force Ukraine to roll over and surrender. But I personally doubt it. I don't think he wants to go down as a deal-maker who lost a negotiation with Putin. I think he's fundamentally a bully, and will effectively use the power of the US to force Putin into a negotiation where Trump comes out looking like the winner. As far as I can tell, that's what the MAGA people mean by peace through strength.
What signs?
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%! If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings (as opposed to negative approval ratings).
https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/directors/eds23/brief/russia-was-classified-as-high-income-country
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/russia-war-income?lang=en
Even the Carnegie Endowment is struggling to find much bad to say about Russian wages growth. If Biden had delivered positive real wages growth over his term, I think he would still be in office today. Just look at the chart on page 25. Apparently the crushing impact of Western sanctions in 2022 was less harmful to the Russian worker than whatever was going on in America (or the UK, Germany, Australia...) with inflation. And in 2023 Russia left the US in the dust in real wages.
https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40dgreports/%40inst/documents/publication/wcms_908142.pdf
China's struggling, failing economy was massively outperforming the vibrant, dynamic US economy in 2022 and 2023, presumably it's still doing so. Real wages, real GDP per capita are rising much faster in China and Russia. They're rising from a lower basis level but are rising fast nonetheless. Yet all we see in newspapers and television is stories of disaster, stagnation and decline over there.
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