Endless anticipation of WW3(4)

The full scale Russo-Ukrainian war drags on for almost 4 years now. Ukraine’s put up a hell of a fight. I often wonder, would any other modern nation fight as fiercely as we do? No clue. Countless lives lost, homes destroyed, corruption, power outages, tortures, occupied territory, economic struggle and ecology catastrophes. Pretty big price to pay.

What's next in Ukraine?

4 years almost. Now, where are we? Russia still has enough resources to continue its aggression, despite sanctions, low oil prices for Russia's Urals , Ukrainian strikes on the refineries and other strategic objects and fairly slow progress of the invasion.

From what it seems, Russia will continue the war throughout the 2026 hoping they'd be able to gain more territory and Ukraine's defence eventually collapse from destroyed infrastructure, lack of manpower, and stagnating economy.

While it is pretty obvious what they are hoping for, it is also not hard to see it is very unlikely to happen. Even if they'll be able to keep up the current intensity of the warfare, they won't be able to achieve their goals, and Russia has failed to achieve previous goals in this invasion multiple times.
Looking retrospectively, the war doesn't seem to be successful at all, so why bother continuing?

To me, it seems they are going on purely out of confusion. They simply don't seem to know what to do with it. Stopping is as bad or worse as continuing it. The war is not anymore as popular among the people of Russia as it used to be, finances are not great either, and they achieve... what?

Incentives to stop

They have some. Most of it its their economy, which is obvious to the whole world is not doing as good. They are trying to squeeze some money out of the economy, by raising taxes and making regular people's lives even more miserable than they were before. It also supports their recruitment - the worse your civil life is, the more likely you'll sign up for the war to make some serious buck.

Politically, they don't show any seriousness towards ongoing negotiations, hoping to continue the war indefinitely, pushing the economy to its limits in hopes to break Ukraine, while The West just sits there and discusses the "peace deal", therefore, not supplying Ukraine with enough aid to push Russia into a corner, where they are more likely to agree on a freeze of the conflict.

What have they achieved?

Really. The longer I observe Trump's presidency, the clearer is to me the fact that Putin shot himself in the foot with this invasion. Trump was always certain to win the election, as I anticipated, due to the fact he's just nuts. Just as nuts if not more than Xi and Putin. And there is a demand for such a leader in US, and Trump came just in time, while Harris represented a politician from the era that has finally collapsed in 2022, despite many people refusing to believe in this collapse till this day.

Now what? We have Trump going nuts. Venezuela, Greenland, tarrifs and many more things to come I'm afraid. And the sole reason for Trump being the president and acting like that is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And I believe it just might bite them in the ass. They already saw that in Venezuela and Iran, and it seems to be just the beginning. Russia was not ready for such a leader in US, they assumed they can do whatever they want and US would fight to keep the world order. And... they won't. That should be a painful surprise for Putin. They've destroyed the world order with the invasion, lost influence in the world and funnelled all their military forces to Ukraine and failed to achieve any significant results. Sure, territorial gains they've got after 2022 are significant if we were to look at it from Ukraine's perspective, but globally... seems to be irrelevant.

Now it looks like they're trying to buy time for the war to go on and not piss Trump off, aiding him in destroying NATO and EU politically.

And it's just the matter of time when US will point their gun at Russia for real.

Now what?

Post WW2 world is effectively gone now. Trump is just trying to make everybody hear it. And while he is at it, he brings the WW3 much closer. I think we're now in a preliminary stage, where basically everybody realise that it's on.
Currently, it's very hard, if not impossible for me to convince myself it's not on. Do we expect leaders to change and bring back the old way of things? Sounds ridiculous.

Ukraine's bleeding and the whole West just looks at it, while Trump's envoy fly back and forth to negotiations with Russia, while Russians clearly laugh in their faces, imitating the process.

Regardless wether the war in Ukraine is going to stop soon or not, it's on. Finding a way to pause the war in Ukraine at least for some time could delay the big event, but it is inevitable.

What shall be the tipping point?

I don't know. Maybe it is already a very big tipping point. Collapse of Ukraine? Tipping point. Ridiculous peace deal for Ukraine? Tipping point. Taiwan invasion? Might as well be another tipping point.

Listen. Old, ruthless dictator, decided to invade a neighbouring country in Europe, wages war for 4 years, 1m+ casualties, locates his nukes in Belarus, sends drone to Poland and all over the Europe, threatens everybody with nuclear weapons and... nobody done shit about it.

And here you are, just another regular dude. Not only you survive, but you carry this anticipation of a world war and potentially new disastrous events, far more worse than what you've already seen. And this is going to haunt me and many of us at least through the 2020's.

So... good luck.