No one wins ever in appeasing a tyrant. It is though that ever worked and did not lead to a major war before.

“*Meet me in the middle.” said the unjust man

You take a step forward and he takes a step back

“Meet me in the middle.” said again by the unjust man*

You do realise that more Ukrainians will die in the future if you are truly concerned? It is obvious that Putin will use any lull to lick his wounds and attack again. He lied multiple times. Why And more importantly, the longer the war drags, the more it becomes more disadvantageous for Russia, even if Ukraine could not win back their territory. Look, sure Russian economy has experienced growth, but as with any economy on a war footing, their economy is already overheating as inflation is rising. The Russian Central Bank increased their interest rate to 21%; ninety-eight percent of all Chinese banks are refusing to give loans to Russia for fear of secondary sanction; there is labour shortage which increases wage on the private sectors as they have to compete with army wages set by Kremlin; and as the war drags on, more Russian men and women are either fleeing or dying which hurts the Russian economy. Now, with manpower shortage, Russia is now relying on North Korean soldiers because he fears further mass mobilisations will cause political chaos. And even so, there is already a growing political rift among the Russian oligarchs and we see the cracks growing and growing the longer the war takes. Not to mention releasing and pardoning Russian prisoners for war effort is already causing rising crime rate to soar and social backlash to communities who received former convicts turned recruits.

No one except armchair generals playing Starcraft, Hearts of Iron or Company Heroes is expecting Ukraine to pull a gamey, miraculous military victory and then march to Moscow. Seeing as letting Putin gain any sort of concessions is any victory to him and will use the lull period to recuperate to attack again, the liberal democratic world should not allow that to happen. Ukraine knows this. They are fighting for their own survival and have nothing to lose so they keep going. You could easily Google to see how many Ukrainians are still willing to fight-- even if they don’t retake Crimea or other territories. That’s why they attacked Kursk in spite of Putin’s nuclear threat. To them, submitting to Kremlin is as good as being nuked because they will face genocide regardless. So they took the gamble, and lo and behold the nuke threat turns out to be just another bluff like the last ones.

However, any ongoing war is always unpredictable. No one expected Ukraine to still keep fighting. No one expected them to retake much of Kharkiv, Kherson and Donetsk. No one expected Russia to still stand following the humiliation. If Putin is somehow able to keep his power and much of his current gains in the foreseeable future, the best that Ukraine could do is to serve him a humiliating political defeat à la North Vietnam against the US by making Putin pay for every inch of the ground gained. But Putin’s gains could likely be reversed, when he’s gone, because the long term social and financial consequences of invading Ukraine will take effect in the coming generations. Russia will become less of a great power than it was before 2022.

I completely agree that ideally there should be peace, but there needs to be guarantee that Ukraine will not be invaded ever again by duplicitous Russia. Either let Ukraine join NATO or repossess some nuclear weapons.