Kramatorsk/Slovyansk are much bigger than anything that was fought over thus far and that would be an extremely costly battle. Ideally for the Russians is they get them without a battle or next best is they create another horse shoe around them and once again slowly weaken the defenses. But IMO that would take awhile and i don't think they'd want a huge bloody battle over these that would probably result in six figure losses.
They are threatening Dnipro and Kharkov now though, the calculus then becomes is if Ukraine doesn't yield Donetsk, Russia just keeps pushing in other areas and could very well end up with 1/3 of Kharkiv & Dnipro. NATO is a dead aspiration but the militarization of Ukraine is continuing and idk how that's solved here. I long thought Europe's economy coming under strain would be the catalyst here. Countries like Germany, Poland, etc are already tired of all the endless hungry mouths. At some point the liability becomes too great. What's the ROI here for Germany? Your energy costs are through the roof, you now have a few million Ukrainians on welfare, you will be asked to pony up billions on reconstruction and wtf do you get in return?
Fresh meat for our brothels, and an opportunity for our outdated industrial model surrounding cars with combustion engines to pivot to military production.
But on a more serious note: energy costs in all of central and eastern europe are through the roof, as they are in the UK and Italy. And ending the support for Ukraine right now wouldn't bring them down all that much either, at least not in the short and medium term. The goose was cooked in this regard as soon as this war broke out. But hey, I'm sure the Russians would also rather have their European and Western Siberian gas fields pumping and raking in revenue instead of sitting idle, so it's not like the fallout from this war was only a disaster for us. That they might link their Eastern Siberian gas fields with China in a couple of years doesn't change the fact that they lost the main customer for their western fields.
Also note that the economic strain on Germany is not exclusively due to the fallout from the Ukraine war - it's also due to longstanding structual issues (infrastructure, aging demographics, a lack of innovation etc.), due to Chinese EV manufacturers eating our lunch, and increasingly due to AI adversely affecting the job market.
Either way, the German and European economy is stagnant, rather than in a sharp recession. Not good, but also not the end of the world. With the growing number of cracks showing in the Russian economy, I'm increasingly confident that Ukraine's European partners could economically outlast Russia if push came to shove. The bigger issue is whether Ukraine can hold on. Imho, it would be smart for all sides to wrap this fucking war up relatively soon...