End of 2026 Russia is going to be crumpled on the ground with Ukraine kicking them in the face to wake up so they can negotiate a ceasefire but Russia is way too fucked up to do anything coherent but lay there in the mud moaning in pain while taking drunken swipes with a knife at Ukraine in attempt to press the attack.

I do not honestly think Russia is capable of continuing to fight that long, especially if we are talking about large mechanized assaults, certainly not at this rate of attrition and also the rate Russia is training Ukrainian personnel to be ruthlessly effective at repelling their mindless assaults as their own soldiers learn nothing and then die.

Not to mention Ukrainian/European military technology is pulling far ahead of Russia while Russia doubles down on trying to make iterative improvements to fundamentally obsolete equipment and doctrine.

It will be a disaster for Russia if they continue to insist on losing for that much longer.

Some years back we had a company in Denmark called Nordic Feather, a very old company with a stellar reputation in every respect.
But suddenly one day, the CEO committed suicide apparently out of the blue. And after that it was revealed that he had been cooking the books for years, and the company had basically been bankrupt for a couple of years. But had been held up on bank loans and credits that were issued on false information.

Russia is in a very similar position today, the country has been cooking the books for years, and may in fact already be bankrupt. The budget for 2025 was made with an expected manageable deficit, but military expenses have been exceed by some 20-30% and income from oil and gas is only about half what they expected in the budget, because both sales and prices are down.

Where the Russian economy was in a weird limbo from 2022 to 2024 with a simultaneous combination of symptoms of recession and overheating, the overheating part is now long gone here by the end of 2025, and only the recession symptoms are left.
Increasing bankruptcies, and examples of mass factory layoffs, decreasing tax revenues and purchasing power.
Purchasing power is now so weak, it has actually caused inflation to go down on food!
Allegedly increased reports of infrastructure failures, are caused by shortage of skilled workers, and shortage of parts they used to import, and even sometimes caused by failures due to workers working on extreme overtime schedules.

I’m hoping the Russian economy and infrastructure will be so seriously strained by the end of winter, that the Russian federation collapses politically. For it to actually collapse economically will take a while longer. Russia has been selling a lot of gold and diamonds to keep things together economically. But Russia is REALLY close to be out of options, and when that happens, there will be no money for the government to pay for anything, we may see running the money press resulting in hyper inflation as the final attempt to extend the lifespan of the current government (Putin).
But for sure Russia has already been running on borrowed time for a while now.

Unfortunately, no matter what agreements are signed, it is highly unlikely that Russia will honor the terms. Putin has made it abundantly clear…he doesn’t believe that Ukraine has the right to exist as an independent nation.