Everything I've read and seen over the last several months says the Ukrainian offensive will be more like the "Battle of the Bulge" or the "Frühlingserwachen" at the end of WWII.

Support for the war here in central Europe (Poland and the Baltics excepted) continues to decline in the public, even if the politicians still proclaim unending fealty to US proxy war goals.

Military aid continues to ebb, even as promises for ever more high tech weapons continue to flow.

This invasion never should have happened, and we should have allowed Ukraine and Russia to settle this in March 2022 in Istanbul. Ukraine is paying the price (as planned by the US), and unless they negotiate sooner rather than later, the odds that a viable rump Ukraine will remain after the war will continue to dwindle.

This is not WWII. Putin is not Hitler. The US is not the industrial giant it was 80 years ago.

I'm afraid the war is far from over. The result however, will not be any different than expected by nearly all western think tanks - and President Obama. Russia will win because they will always have escalatory dominance over the west in Ukraine.

That doesn't mean Russia is all-powerful and can or will even try to go farther than Ukraine. It just means what Russia has made clear since WWII. Russia sees an adversarial military and government in Ukraine as an existential threat. They are reacting accordingly.