Do you want to fight this war to the last Ukrainian, or do you want the war to end soon?
If you want it to end soon, then there are in principle three ways to do that. 1) Ukrainian defeat, 2) Russian defeat, and 3) a negotiated settlement. 1) is undesirable and unlikely given western aid. 2) is impossible to achieve, because it would require direct involvement of western militaries, and we don't want to do that for rather understandable reasons. So we're left with 3) a negotiated settlement.
And to get a negotiated settlement from Russia, you need to offer them something. What they really want is a Ukraine that has to bend to their will, like Belarus does. The specific amount of territory they hold isn't important, the territory is merely a tool to exert control over Ukraine. What Ukraine wants is security guarantees so that they
don't have to bend to Moscow's will. NATO membership would do that, but the rules of membership basically already give Moscow a veto over that. And any other security guarantee is going to be directly counter to what Moscow wants.
Realistically, the only way to end this war soon is to offer Russia
something else, something that would be valuable enough for them to give up their influence over Ukraine. And since we can't offer them the Baltic states in exchange, that something else is going to have to be money, in some form or other. That's all we
can offer Russia, really.
So basically the options are we offer Russia money in some form (and trade is a pretty good form, since it doesn't come out of our budget), or just keep fighting. But Ukraine has already lost a lot of people. And they will keep losing people as long as this war continues. Ukrainian is already facing a
demographic implosion, the longer this war drags on, the worse that implosion will get. The long-term survival of the country depends not only on its future international relations, but just having enough people to make a nation. It's easy to want to stick it to Russia when we aren't the ones dying to do it, but as long as we aren't, this war won't end in what looks like a victory for Ukraine. That's the harsh reality of the situation, and it does no one any favors to pretend otherwise. Now, details matter, and the details haven't been determined. So maybe whatever deal we end up with won't be good, or won't work, or won't be agreed to by both sides. But the fact that we're
trying to reach a deal isn't a bad thing in and of itself. And that includes the fact that part of the deal is inevitably going to look like a reward to Russia. Because it has to, in order to get them to give up on keeping Ukraine under their thumb.
