Will Putin ever sue for peace in Ukraine?

If the expected new offensive into Ukraine involving up to 500,000 Russian troops fails, will Putin have to acknowledge failure and sue for peace? The answer is bleak. Putin will never accept failure, let alone defeat, and if the upcoming offensive fails to bring about the fall of Kyiv, Putin will just sack the recently appointed supreme commander, the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov, and have another go with a different military chief, perhaps his defence minister, General Sergei Shoigu. The point is that Putin has the overwhelming advantage of superior troop numbers and a much bigger economy than Ukraine's to persist with the war for years if necessary. So he will carry on until the Ukrainian armed forces are literally too exhausted to lift their rifles. In some respects they be approaching that point even now. The Ukrainians will never give up because they are fighting for the future of their country. But countering an offensive of 500,000 freshly-trained troops is going to be a challenge of gigantic proportions, and they are going to have do it without all the new armour promised by the West. They are getting on well with being trained on the British Challenger 2s, but the UK is only sending 14. As for the German Leopard 2s we are talking months away and the US Abrams tanks perhaps a year away. By then, it might be too late. However, Ukraine demonstrated in February last year and during the months afterwards that they had the guts, courage and ability to drive the Russian tanks back and keep them out of Kyiv. Can they do it again? The Russians will surely have learnt from their multitude of mistakes and will do it differently the second time. Under Gerasimov it's likely to be more of a properly combined all-arms offensive with sufficient logistics supplies to keep the tanks and other armoured vehicles on the move, instead of getting stuck with no diesel and no maintenance crews. Assuming most of the western tanks don't arrive in time, the US and other Nato and allied partners will need to fill the gaps in weaponry firepower to prevent Russia sacking Kyiv. That's what the new Russian offensive and Ukrainian counter-offensive is going to be about - the future of Kyiv.