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I'll offer my perspective.

First: Ukraine "surviving" is not enough. They have to come out of this stronger than they were. EU membership seems likely, which will make them wealthier than Russia and cut Russia off from Western trade further.

Second: Russia has, IMO, already lost. Their economy is bricked beyond belief. They cannot even sell gas domestically.

The land they've conquered is broken and destroyed, with the population mostly gone. They gain resources they already owned, in land that must be rebuilt. That's not an ideal war result, is it?

Russia can't afford to build up infrastructure in their own country, but they'll magically rebuild Ukraine? It's a laughable concept.

Russia's black sea fleet is toast, their oil production is toast, their foreign reserves are toast, their assets are seized by western countries, and they still haven't conquered the Donbas.

*ETA -- Russia can only "win" by taking over the whole of Ukraine and gaining 10m+ new civilians, new resources they didn't already own AND gain back market access to the west within a time frame of ~5 years. Otherwise, the costs of the war massively exceed the gains of the war.

Military conquest of another country simply does not work anymore. The mechanisms put into place after WWII to isolate the offending country from the world economy make it a worthless move.

Xi wants Taiwan, but that is CCP heritage grudge and eliminating a sector of people who could have a legitimate hereditary claim to power in China, itself. Plus, the problem - again - of a comparatively wealthy democracy of the same people with generally higher standard of living fairly close is an irritant. We'll see if he ever really tries to go through with it (we should certainly act and prepare like he's going to any day now). But he seems to want China to become dominant through being an economic powerhouse... perhaps he - like Putin - thinks if he can get prominent countries so tied up and locked in to China's economy they will not be able to do anything about it?