Putin has not suffered or is not at risk of popular unrest that there is enough popular support for what he's doing to sustain it. Putin has significant flexibility in framing an endgame as a victory you know probably more so than Zelensky does. Overall I think western public opinion towards Ukraine has held up better than many analysts were expecting. China doesn't matter a huge amount but the Chinese government does have some influence over its own internal political life.
To mark a year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Galen Druke brings back two experts who first joined the podcast when the war began. Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and author of the book “Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.” James Acton is a physicist and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Together they describe why the war has not turned out as originally expected, what the risks of escalation are today and how the conflict might come to an end.