Exactly right again! So why are you not getting it?

Yeah, I'm curious about that also. He's got several of the pieces, but he's not putting them together properly.

Small countries don't get the large countries to leave by throwing them out. They get the large countries to leave by continuing to inflict non-trivial casualties and damage to the large countries, so that the large countries are better off leaving than staying.

Exactamundo. (stealing from Simon Phoenix)

And, as you say, that is what Ukraine is doing. Other than that incursion into Russian territory around Kursk (that took Russia months to push out), Ukraine is just subjecting the Russians to a meat grinder.

No. He's gambling on people in the West giving up on Ukraine, so that they lose a fight that they could have won. Putin can't win in Ukraine as long as the West keeps giving them guns and money. So he's just trying to persuade folks in the West to stop doing that.

Exactamundo, again. And many NATO countries will NOT cease providing materiel. Poland, for example, in relation to their size is a MAJOR contributor to the defense of Ukraine. Many NATO nations have a lot to lose if Russia succeeds, so they are doing what they can to prevent it.

Short of using a nuke, Putin is doomed. It's merely a question of how badly he is going to lose.

The ONLY scenario I can see (and I haven't read anything about this, so it may be too outlandish) is if Putin stages a 9/11 event in his country. Similar to the apartment fire he staged as justification to invade Chechnya. If he managed to stage a -for example- VX attack in Moscow, and convince the Russian people that Ukraine did it, they would likely get behind the kind of mobilization that Putin would need to really finish off Ukraine. Short of that, he will get too much resistance (or even open revolt) to dedicate that much of his economy to a war effort. Their economy is already creaking from the strain as it is.