To those worried Putin is going to end it all in a ball of fire: don’t be. Why would he, when the war gives him all he needs?

holy crap that's actually sort of genius
It makes so much more sense now why the front lines in Ukraine are in a stalemate.
Putin's strategy is probably to keep the lines stable but not advance very much, because the object of the war is not only the subjugation of parts of Ukraine, but also to implement further "wartime measures" of authoritarianism at home against the Russian people.
Putin wants to keep the Russian people whipped into a frenzy of patriotism for Russia and disdain for the "Ukrainian Nazis" he is allegedly fighting. And as the war goes on, he can identify those who are opposed to it and likely to be his political opponents in the future and drive them out of the country, imprison them with the myriad laws outright banning opposition to the war, or otherwise silence or dispose of them, further securing his grip on Russian society. If people are caught up in the current "Two Minutes' Hate" with Ukraine, perhaps they might be less inclined to notice or acknowledge the effects of the Putin regime on their own country as it slips further back into Stalin-style totalitarianism.
After all, "our toilets don't work, but at least Krimnash!"

It all clicked for me when I read an archconservative Russian oligarch quoted in a newspaper as cheering about the fact that the 3-day “blitzkrieg” on Kiev didn’t work. If the war had been won quickly and painlessly, the oligarch explained, then the war-related “transformations” that have taken place in Russian society over the past year could have never happened.

Most seem to think the war is merely about conquering territory and other traditional strategic objectives. They’re not thinking cynically enough.

The war sustains the key pillars of Putin’s increasingly despotic rule: nationalist fervor, painting NATO as an existential threat, and identifying/driving out/eliminating political dissidents. Same reasons the totalitarian Kim regime has never agreed to a peace deal with South Korea.

And if Korea is any example, then this state of perpetual warfare can be maintained for a long, long time.

Putin might accept Ukraine and the West’s complete and total capitulation as an alternative to this war of consolidation, but short of that, there’s no peace deal to be had.

That’s a depressing conclusion, but it’s also hopeful in another sense: regardless of Putin’s saber-rattling, nuclear weapons are off the table, since their use would destabilize Putin’s personal rule to an unacceptable degree, and he knows it.