President Zelensky has said that he intends to not stop fighting until Ukraine is whole including Crimea given that you've put a 20% chance on Putin using nuclear weapons if president Zelensky's actually trying to pursue his stated goals. I don't know whether Zelenski's talk right now about taking back Crimea is rhetoric or whether for a domestic audience or whether he really means it but if Ukrainian forces are ever in a position to take back Crimea they may never be.
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.