I’ve literally listed the demands on my original comment. Russia wanted Ukraine to be neutral, to abandon pursuit of NATO membership, and to respect Minsk agreement it is signatory to. These are in no way unreasonable demands.

The reality of the situation is that the longer this goes on the worse the deal is going to get. Once Ukrainian army collapses, then Russia will simply be able to dictate whatever demands they want.

Meanwhile, western media has been churning out propaganda such as the articles you linked for two months straight now. Now we’re slowly seeing the mood change as it becomes clear how the war is actually going.

Here is FT reporting on how things are actually going https://www.ft.com/content/f299cb83-9f12-484b-8839-12ec96c87a72

In what is likely to be a brutal and bloody onslaught on Ukraine’s east, the Kremlin’s aim is to secure the whole of Luhansk and neighbouring Donetsk. Together they are known as Donbas, a vast region of which roughly a third is already controlled by pro-Kremlin separatists since a Russian-fuelled insurgency that followed the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Standing in Russia’s way are the troops of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO), some of Ukraine’s best trained and most battle-hardened soldiers, who have been dug into defensive positions for much of the past eight years. Around 40,000 troops were stationed there before the conflict exploded in February, about a quarter of the Ukrainian army, and they will have since been reinforced.

If Russia is able to make major gains in the north and south of Donbas, it could cut off the JFO from western military reinforcements and potentially encircle and trap a significant chunk of the Ukrainian army — an outcome that would undermine efforts by Kyiv to defend a potential renewed Russian assault on western Ukraine.

Ukraine’s military successes in the first two months of the war came from using guerrilla style tactics and the innovative use of short range anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons supplied by the west. But that approach is less likely to work in the more set-piece battles many expect in Donbas.

“A solid line of armoured infantry at the sharp end, and then behind them, safe and protected, all the artillery, rockets and whatever else they fancy lobbing with utter impunity at the Ukrainian defences,” the official adds. “That’s a very, very different prospect to what the Ukrainians have dealt with so far.”

To sum the above up, best Ukrainian troops are pinned in Donbas and Russia has a terrain advantage while pro-Russian forces control large parts of the territory. What Russia is doing currently is shelling and bombing Ukrainian positions to soften them up before the actual troops move in:

In preparation for the onslaught, Russia began a process of intense shelling and missile strikes on April 18 in south eastern Ukraine and along the Black Sea coast. The US Pentagon has described this as a shaping operation designed to disrupt the flow of western weapons and other logistical support to the Ukrainian army — especially of fuel.

Ukrainian forces on the Donbas front line, which stretches some 300 miles, north to south, describe relentless attacks by Russian howitzers, mortars and multiple rocket launchers, as well as by helicopters and low-flying planes.

Not only that, but Ukrainian forces are seriously outnumbered and the fact that they’re running out of ammunition indicates that they are in fact cut off, or to put it in other words surrounded:

Ukrainian forces, potentially outnumbered three to one by the Russians according to western defence officials, have meanwhile run low on ammunition and other weapons.

Here are some further revelations from FT:

“Alternatively, they could take bite-size chunks out of the Ukrainian front line by encircling pockets of troops in strategic areas, cutting them off with electronic warfare and using artillery to stop reinforcements, and then squeezing them in small cauldrons,” Cranny-Evans adds.

That would follow the pattern of Russia’s onslaught in the besieged city of Mariupol, where troops divided it into different areas and squeezed each one tightly so that, as Putin put it on Thursday, “a fly can’t get in”.

Ominously, a similar process happened in Donbas in 2014, when Russian-backed separatists encircled Ukrainian fighters in the city of Ilovaisk — and then, after they surrendered, reneged on an agreement that would have let them withdraw unharmed along humanitarian corridors. Survivors later described it as a “massacre”.

The approach of breaking up the enemy force and then creating cauldrons has been the tactic Russia used very successfully ever since WW2, and we recently saw it work in Syria pretty much the same way it’s working in Ukraine now.