I wanted to come back to this point because we in the West are still trying to read Putin's mind. Personally I don't trust him at all. He has tried to play us for suckers for years. I don't think we can trust anything he says. He lies all the time. Just like his foreign minister. Every time I think of his supposed conditions for ending the war... Neutrality, a promise never to join NATO, giving official recognition to Russian sovereignty over Crimea, recognizing the eastern regions as either independent countries or newly acquired Russian territory... It all smacks of appeasement and defeatism.
What Putin really wants in Ukraine is to take over the whole country again and absorb it back into the Russian sphere. That means all the way to Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak borders. Or, short of completely reabsorbing back into Mother Russia like the old Soviet Union days...he wants to install a puppet government in Kyiv that will always do whatever he tells it to.
That was the goal of the invasion. He had this insane deluded idea that a lightning fast Russian blitzkrieg would tear into the country, that Ukrainians would welcome them with open arms, drop their weapons, treat the Russians like liberators instead of invaders, storm Kyiv right away in 2 or 3 days, either kill Zelensky or send him other supposed cowards, fascists and "drug addicted" top leaders in the government fleeing to Warsaw or London like scared rabbits, etc. As he stewed for months in his more isolated Covid paranoia, and steadily nursed his grievances over Ukraine, I think he actually started to believe his own propaganda, lies and wishful thinking about the ease of retaking all of Ukraine back into a newly reborn Soviet empire.
Although pretty much nothing went according to plan for the Russian invasion, I am extremely skeptical that Putin would end the war with virtually nothing more than the status quo ante before he invaded. He already controlled Crimea by force. The eastern regions of Ukraine were already pretty much separated from Ukrainian government control and receiving Russian aid. And Ukraine was not a member of NATO. So for Ukraine to just say they won't try to retake the eastern regions and will end any hostilities there, they'll officially recognize the Russian takeover of Crimea and promise not to join NATO...and the whole war will be over... I don't buy it at all.
Again there is that Munich analogy of the folly of appeasement. Hitler convinced other major European countries in September of 1938 (one year prior to World War II) to let him just have the German border areas of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland. Of course the one country that wasn't given a vote, was Czechoslovakia! So Czechoslovakia had its border areas dismembered in order (so it was thought and hoped) to avoid any future wars in Europe. Hitler promised with this agreement never to seek any other future changes or additions (by force or war) to the borders of Germany.
By March of 1939 Germany rolled into the capital of Prague, with the Nazis more or less taking control of the whole country. This was in direct violation of the Munich Agreement. (That's an oversimplified version. But it suffices.) World War II actually started 6 months later with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (just off the plane in London) upon his return from the "Munich Peace Conference". In the conference Britain had agreed to and signed the Munich Agreement giving the border areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler's Nazi Germany.
