Is the West’s Master Plan Flawed?

In the New York Times Spencer Bokat-Lindell wonders whether arming the Ukrainians will actually end the war in Ukraine:

As Noam Chomsky recently put it in an interview with The Intercept, there are, broadly speaking, two ways for a war to end: The first is for one side to be destroyed; the second is for the two sides to negotiate a settlement.

At the moment, the prospects for a negotiated settlement look grim, as Ishaan Thanoor explains in The Washington Post:

• Negotiations have stalled, and after Ukrainian forces sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in April, Putin reportedly “lost interest in diplomatic efforts to end his war.”
• The Ukrainians, Thanoor writes, “say that Russian atrocities against their civilians make any prospect of territorial or political concessions impossible and that, with support from abroad, they are beating Russia on the ground.”

Chomsky, for his part, believes that Russia’s military is simply too strong to lose; in the absence of a settlement, Ukraine will be destroyed.

He goes on to claim that Washington has never been interested in diplomacy:

“We can’t know for certain whether more rigorous U.S.-Russia diplomacy — including discussions surrounding NATO expansion and Ukrainian neutrality — might have succeeded in preventing Russia’s invasion,” writes Alex Jordan at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “We won’t know because it was — according to White House officials — never really tried.”

and that NATO’s objectives aren’t entirely clear:

NATO itself also needs to clarify its objectives, what it is willing to compromise on and how, argues Rajan Menon, a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Does NATO want to maintain sanctions indefinitely to diminish Russia’s power, or are there conditions it could meet to lift them? “It is within Putin’s power to wind down this war,” he writes, “but what NATO does matters as well.”

NATO’s plan is predicated on the assumptions that 1) the Ukrainians can prevail on the ground and 2) that if the war is made expensive enough, Russia will sue for peace. What if those assumptions are false?