The energy crisis in EU and UK is becoming unsustainable. Energy bill price rises are going to see huge numbers of people plunged into absolute poverty. Every day there are tales on the news of people's gas and electricity bills going up by 100s of percent.
This is only going to get much, much worse, as we head into winter. When the dead bodies of pensioners who died of hypothermia, because they couldn't afford to turn on the heating start piling up. When businesses [already barely recovering after Covid] start going to the wall in their thousands [their energy costs are not capped, so their bills are going up by astronomical amounts]. Those same western governments are either going to have to reach into their coffers and pay out billions to subsidise gas and electricity prices to help their economies [and populations] survive ...or they're going to have to back-pedal on this suicidal sanctions war with Russia.
Since we know how governments hate having to give money out, I predict that the rhetoric on the war in Ukraine is going to change over the next couple of months. I've already seen a couple of opinions expressed in the media along the lines of 'Ukraine should negotiate a settlement, as they can't win' and I expect this opinion to be expressed more frequently as winter draws near.
In fact, this could explain why the Ukrainian side seem to be mounting a bit of an offensive at the minute. Maybe their leaders also realise that their supporters in western governments are starting to lose the will to keep up their self-harming sanctions.
It's funny really; we hear a lot bout how Russia's battle plans are a huge failure because they thought they'd steamroller Ukraine into submission in a couple of days. But the same could be said about the western response. It seems clear that western nations thought that this massive sanctions campaign would destroy the Russian economy in a few weeks and force their withdrawal from Ukraine. In fact Russia seems to be weathering the storm and now the sanction-imposers themselves are starting to suffer the backlash.