Yeah, I agree that’s probably how this is going to play out; Ukraine cedes some territory to Russia and is allowed to join NATO, hopefully safeguarding it against further Russian imperialism in the future.
In the meantime, we should of course keep supporting Ukraine as much as we can to give them as strong of a position in these potential future negotiations as possible.
We’ve caught on to how this works now. I anticipate about two more iterations of tedious, drawn out flip-flopping and misinformation during the remaining steps before we are either finally let in or the whole thing fizzles out.