Something the fresh european patriots overlook is that the parts of Ukraine Putin managed to hold on to overlap very closely with the areas most hostile to the rehabilitation of Ukrainian nationalism/most positive to Russia (at least to some largely imaginary Russia which defeated the Nazis but wasn't really communist, i.e. Putin's Russia).

If it's that costly to hold onto areas where most people actually like Putin relatively speaking, how much more expensive wouldn't it be to hold onto areas to where people hate him?