I would caution about making predictions as to when the war will end. There are too many factors that could go either way. If Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” is decisively defeated and if the Russian MoD decides to launch its own offensive, then yes it is not unlikely that we will see it end by winter. If on the other hand Ukraine manages to preserve a part of its combat strength, their morale does not collapse and Western aid keeps trickling in, they may have just enough to keep dragging this out for another year or two, though the pace will accelerate as their losses mount.

I would not be surprised if Russia keeps this glacial pace of advance going for quite a while longer than most people would expect, because it seems to me that their first priority is not ending the conflict but achieving their larger geopolitical goals, which is the terminal weakening of NATO such that it will either dissolve or be forced to retreat to 1997 borders.

The thing to understand is that somehow - and this will be an interesting thing for future historians to research and try and figure out how the imperialists miscalculated so badly - Russia has managed to “play a Uno reverse card” and turn Ukraine into a quagmire and a black hole of resources, not for Russia as Washington had planned, but for the collective West.

This conflict is not only weakening the whole of NATO but has become an obsession for Washington and drawn all of their attention there to the detriment of all of their other plots around the world, including in the middle east and possibly even Taiwan. We see that there is a faction of the neocon establishment that desperately wants to end the Ukraine misadventure so they can focus on Taiwan instead, but they are simply unable to find a way to extricate themselves and instead are drawn deeper and deeper in.

Using a metaphor that the libs will understand we can say the “eye of Sauron” is fixed on Ukraine and unable to look away. The West has trapped itself by its rhetoric and by entangling itself in this conflict to the point where the loss of Ukraine would be a catastrophic defeat for NATO. They have fallen victim to the sunk cost fallacy and they just have to double down on a losing bet.

This has opened up the board for the anti-hegemonic forces of the world that are interested in replacing the post-1991 unipolar US/Western dominated global system with a multipolar one to really start putting all the pieces in place. We see increasing de-dollarization in international trade, we see anti-hegemonic blocs like the BRICS and the SCO expanding, a lot of very exciting things are happening and a big part of the reason why is precisely because Washington is neglecting so many of the other fronts.

As cynical as it sounds and as awful as it is to the innocent people caught up in this conflict, Russia’s strategic calculus may be that it is beneficial for their long term plans to keep going at the current pace and not do anything too spectacular.