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Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
It's probably going to come down to which society can hold on the longest. It will be won or lost at the street level and not on the battlefield. The military victories and defeats obviously play a part in that, but it's not the whole part.
It's a lot harder on Ukrainian society due to the vast majority of the attacks and virtually all the civilian losses being on their soil. On the other hand while Russian society isn't witnessing the horrors, they could start tire of it because many people in Russia might not see the value in it like Ukrainians whose existence depends on resisting.
I wonder what happens if Putin dies before it is over. There are other hardliners in Russia who could take over, but none of them have the hold over the country, and specifically the oligarchs like Putin has. A lot of powerful people in Russia are losing money over this war and if they choose not to support Putin's successor, it could stop the whole thing.
Ukrainian society could start to crack as well though. Some Ukrainians particularly in the western part of the country, could start to wonder if keeping territories that have been ethnically cleansed of Ukrainians is worth it in the long run. If you welcome those Russian settlers back into the Ukrainian body politic, it just perpetuates a vector for Russian influence in Ukraine, and probably future conflict. In the past, the solution would be to take the territory back with such force that you do the same thing to the enemy population that they did to you at the start of the war to balance it out. Modern sensibilities do not reconcile with that concept anymore though, but it used to be the way to achieve long term peace. Nowadays the approach is to just kick the problem down the road and hope that "peace keepers" can keep it in check even if the regions don't function well.
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I think the war ends if Putin dies, for all the reasons you stated. Different factions will be too busy fighting for a share of the power to even care about Ukraine. And whoever ends the conflict likely becomes super popular in Russia, and probably endears himself to the West too. Might begin the long road to normalizing relations again.