"Stalemate," is that right, Chief? "Unsustainable"? Putting aside the bullshit conditional "coulds" your x-perts are telling you those are reasonably likely. Go ahead Chief, susplain:

 ...

“I don’t think Ukraine forces can push Russian forces out of Ukraine, but I also don’t think Russian forces can take that much more of Ukraine,” said Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine who is now a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

An assessment Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) went further. “Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war,” it said. The conflict, it said, has now reached “a stalemate.”

Define "defeat".

Events on the battlefield could yet tilt in a different direction: for example, if the Russians succeed in capturing the besieged and desperate city of Mariupol, freeing up their forces to bolster their offensive elsewhere.

...in a widely shared March 14 article, a retired U.S. general and a European military academic argue that the Russian force is close to reaching what military strategists call the “culminating point” of its offensive, meaning that it will have reached the limits of its capacity to wage the war it set out to prosecute.

“The Russian war of conquest in Ukraine is now entering a critical phase; a race to reach the culminating point of Russia’s offensive capacity and Ukraine’s defensive capacity,” wrote retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French, who chairs the Alphen Group think tank in the Netherlands. They advocate a sustained effort by the United States and its allies to provide military supplies to Ukraine in hopes that Ukrainian forces can take advantage of this “window of opportunity” to win concessions at the negotiating table.

So that was the 14th. This is now March 21 in Ukraine, one week later. We have done what the authors suggest, Volo has recently called for direct negotiations with Putin. But Putin has stiffed him and in the last few days Mariupol has looked further and further gone and Russian hypersonic missiles have devastated Ukrainian barracks and military supply stores. The reporting I have read in the New York Times is that Russia has made real, albeit small progress just in these last days. Have the events since March 14 tended to validate or tended to refute the authors' judgment? Not a rhetorical question, I do not know, and do not have a feel.

“I believe that Russia does not have the time, manpower or ammunition to sustain what they are doing now,” Hodges, who is now with the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, said in an interview. The assessment assumes, he says, that the West continues to step up military support for Ukraine, thereby enabling Ukrainian forces to sustain the tempo of their resistance.

Well, we are doing that.

“It would be a big mistake to think that Russia cannot sustain this war,” he said. “They can’t now, but they could fix it” by adjusting tactics and bringing in reinforcements. ..."Unless the Russians can really improve their game and start rotating [troop] formations into the front line, this particular force is facing a problem.”

U.S. officials decline to make public predictions about the course of the war...

Appeals to China for military assistance, a so far fruitless attempt to recruit Syrians and talk of bringing in reinforcements from other parts of Russia and the breakaway territory of South Ossetia in Georgia have not yet produced evidence that fresh troops are on the way, the officials say...

 “Just that they’re talking about resupply and re-sourcing tells you they are beginning to get concerned about longevity here,” said a senior U.S. Defense Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects.

“It’s quite extraordinary, three weeks in, that they are still having these same logistical and sustainment issues, and that they are considering additional ways to overcome these shortages from outside Ukraine,” the official added.

The Russian troops that initially surged into Ukraine from at least four directions had expected to be welcomed as liberators [which got Sergei locked up] and came unprepared for a long fight, officials and experts say. Instead, the Russians encountered fierce resistance, and now they are strung out along multiple fronts, bogged down in manpower-intensive sieges and without preplanned supply lines to sustain a protracted war, the officials and experts say.

The current map of the battlefield points to the scale of the difficulties, Lee said.

It was clear from the way Russian forces moved in the first hours of the war, he said, that their key objectives were to take Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, link up the occupied Donbas region with the port city of Odessa along Ukraine’s southern coast, and — most crucially — capture the capital, Kyiv, with a lightning push from the north.

More than three weeks on, Russian troops still haven’t achieved any of those goals.

...
The Russians’ hopes of encircling Kyiv, let alone capturing it, are starting to recede, Lee said. Russian forces remain stuck about 15 miles outside the city, and though U.S. officials say Russia is moving rear forces toward the front in anticipation of a renewed push on the capital, the front line hasn’t shifted.

 

Okay, you've convinced me. How does this end? Going on the assumption that this is going to be stalemated, is that the end? Is stalemate an end? Russia can't extend their conquest, Ukraine can't kick them out, is that sustainable? I sincerely do not see how an occupying force half in and half out of an invaded country can be The End. 

...

As Russia’s offensive capabilities slow, the risk is high that civilian casualties will mount. A stalemate is likely to become “very violent and bloody,” the ISW assessment said, because Russian troops are more likely to rely on the bombardment of cities to apply pressure.

 

And they have and they have. Has that changed anybody's calculus?

...

Ukraine is unlikely to have the capacity to push Russia out of the territory it has taken so far, officials and analysts say. But the Russians’ current difficulties open up the possibility that the Ukrainians could at least fight them to a standstill, thereby exerting pressure on Russia to accept a negotiated solution.

Talk about that: what does a "negotiated solution" look like to both invader and invadee when the invader is half in and half out?  "Okay, burglar, you can keep the downstairs but we keep the upstairs?" Does Russia get to keep the territory it has already conquered? Do they just keep fighting?

...

Meanwhile, Russians are dying at a rate that is increasingly unsustainable, Lee said. Although Russia still has vast reserves of manpower, it has already committed the bulk of its combat-ready forces, and they are the ones that are almost certainly bearing the brunt of the casualties, he said.

 

...

Western intelligence estimates say it is likely that at least 7,000 Russians have been killed and as many as 20,000 injured...“That’s a huge loss, and you can’t readily replace that,” he said. Russia can bring in new conscripts or call up more reservists, but that will dilute the capabilities of the overall force, “and that is not in Russia’s interest,” he said.

 

Ukrainian forces have been taking casualties, too...The longer the war drags on, the more perilous their position will become, too, and the greater the chance that Russia will overcome its initial mistakes, said Jack Watling of the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

 

But, he noted, the Ukrainian forces appear to remain highly motivated, while there are clear signs that morale continues to diminish among the Russian troops, he said. Russian forces continue to surrender, abandon their vehicles and show few signs of initiative in the areas they do control...

There are signs that Russia is running out of precision missiles, U.S. officials say, which means Russian forces will also increasingly resort to the use of “dumb bombs” indiscriminately dropped on civilian areas in an effort to cow them into submission.

The main question now has shifted from how long it would take the Russians to conquer Ukraine to “can Ukraine fight Russia to a stalemate?” said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They’re doing pretty well at the moment.”

 

“The next two weeks are going to be pretty decisive,” Watling said. The war won’t be over in two weeks, he predicted, and all the signals from Moscow suggest the Russians are more likely to double down than climb down, making the war more deadly for Ukrainians even as it moves at a slower pace.

 

Then what will be decided in the next two weeks?!

“The odds are stacked heavily in the Russians’ favor. This is their war to lose. The reason they are not achieving their objective is largely about their own incompetence, their lack of coordination,” he said.

“What this really comes down to is whether the Russians are going to get their act together.”

That's what it comes down to? The operative definition of "stalemate" is unless and until Rooski gets its act together?