@LukeAlmighty @dubbub @Terry Ukraine is materially and manpower wise completely out-classed. Most of its material assets were donated by increasingly pissed off Western taxpayers to boot. It's unsustainable.

Throwing away precious reserves on a pointless raid-in-force into essentially worthless borderland was retarded.
They lacked the air superiority and reliable logistics/reserves to support an attempted Blitzkreig. A strategy that is almost a century old now and was largely considered defunct before the Cold War even began in earnest. And that is even assuming they had a proper sized force. As we're seeing their headlong advance has already been stalled and rolled back. Now they're trying to dig in. These forces will like the rest of the AFU, be pinned down and degraded just in time to see Russia's main forces in the Donbass spread out into open, unprepared country heading towards Zaporizhzhia, at which point the occupied tiny portion of the Kursk region goes from strategically irrelevant to strategically precarious (for Ukraine) to say the least, since that's rare forces that could be better spent trying to cover the approaches deeper into Ukraine.

The time for Ukraine to use its military to improve its negotiating position was sometime between the start of the invasion and when Avdiivka fell.

Ukraine's one advantage is it had enough manpower to drag things out, and yes, bleed Russia bit. That advantage is now all but gone. The country's population has dropped (for all reasons) so much that it's up there with Black Death effects on Europe as a whole in scale.
Ukraine is staring down a full blown unironic volksturm scenario. Old men and little boys. Oh and women, yay Liberalism!

There will be no negotiations with terms favorable to Ukraine, and Zelensky is the epitome of a retarded Jew if he thinks otherwise.