It's improbable that the Ukrainians will surrender and give up territory. The people running the show are nationalists, extremists. Their game plan is to escalate this to World War III. That's how they intend to win, when NATO joins the fight. The more likely scenarios for Russia are total defeat or constant decades-long war until Russia is totally exhausted (and possible regime change in Moscow) and Ukraine is totally destroyed.
The chances of Ukraine signing anything that would give up even Crimea is very remote. They will fight to take it all back, and they will fight to the end. They will be constantly supplied by NATO so they're never going to run out of ammo or equipment. The numbers are in their favor as well, because the Russians are unwilling to draft more than the standard number of yearly conscripts. Russia is also going to bleed population almost as much as Ukraine as young people flee to avoid conscription and to seek better opportunities abroad. I would expect to see expanding colonies of Russian expats in places like Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Being shot at and your homeland being turned to ruin is a very different type of experience than running away from conscription. There were far fewer American draft dodgers than Vietnamese refugees after all.
Ukraine has already played it's escalatory cards. It is already at total war, normal economic activity has already stopped, normal government processes are already suspended in favor of wartime policy. Meanwhile life in Russia itself is more or less normal. Who is going to get exhausted first?
Russia hasn't played several major conventional escalatory cards yet:
1. Hitting bridges on the Bug and Dnieper
2. Hitting dams, water treatment and conventional power plants
3. Turning off gas pipelines that pass through Ukraine
Any of these will massively reduce the capability of Ukraine to manage all these crises.
Basically I believe the correct policy for Russia is to overwhelm the Ukrainian government's OODA loop by creating too many disparate crises to deal with, through hitting infrastructure.
