Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
How naive can you be?
See what Ukraine is doing right now, and add more weapons and money.
They won't 'defeat' Russia in the sense of Ukrainian soldiers marching down Red Square in Moscow. But they will make Russia lose the war.
> Do you think Putin given his ego, after all he's put his country and reputation through, is just gonna walk back and admit defeat if you throw enough EU money and Ukrainian bodies at him?
If the alternative is being deposed at home, yes.
Putin is not a God, he is a man. The circumstances of that are extremely unpredictable.
Russia is almost certainly not going to deploy nukes over Ukraine. The cost/benefit is just not there: they won't help take or hold territory, and they invite strategic retaliation from more actors than just Ukraine.
So. Putin's political position is not unassailable (remember how touch-and-go things were with Prigozhin? How hardly anyone stood up to him?). If holding Ukraine becomes genuinely untenable, he'll have to make some excuse to leave, or fall. It's even possible he'll die of old age or pneumonia and be replaced by a more reasonable psychopath.