Putin's pullback from Kyiv now appears to be real. The war now shifts to the east and south and from now on becomes the narrow dirty lebensraum war of Russia's limited capabilities. Village for village, metre for metre. The big question remains how high the morale of Russian soldiers still is. Some predictions say that troops withdrawn from the north would be hard to motivate to attack again in the east.
The momentum is switching towards Ukraine. How much? That remains to be seen. Can Russian mercenaries still make a difference? But how high is the morale of Syrian mercenaries or of those Wagner "musicians"?