If you remove everything that is not totally central and indicative of future events from what is going on with the Ukraine war, I think the reading of the war, filtered through the Institute for the Study of War's summary, boils down to a fairly simple reading with three basic points.
A ceasefire isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Russia is doubling down, and Ukraine is not inclined to trade territory for peace given the massacres. I think both sides see that negotiated settlement is the endgame, but neither side sees that settlement as anywhere near close at hand.There is an increasing risk of nuclear, biological or chemical (NBC) weapons deployment.
Russia's disinformation is, historically, an important signal of its intentionality. The fact that Russian sources are lying, still, about Ukrainian NBC weapons deployment means that we have to assess at least some risk - really, a fair amount of risk - that Russia is preparing the way for its own NBC weapons to be deployed in a false-flag provocation event to justify its war.Ukraine wants tanks and offensive weaponry to push this war to the fastest best outcome possible; it's a question whether other nations see that as a need.
If Ukraine isn't going to accept a Russian claim of the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, and if Russia won't accept an end until they have a internally politically defensible "win", then the negotiated settlement is going to be dictated by conditions on the ground; this is the way that both sides are acting in this war.
The best negotiating stance for Ukraine in terms of that settlement are essentially:1. retaking Luhansk and Donetsk all the way back to the Russian border,
2. retaking the Crimean peninsula, in particular access to its valuable offshore oil assets
Both of those require substantial offensive strategic moves by the Ukrainian army; the second requires at least some modicum of a navy, which Ukraine doesn't really have. Per Wikipedia, Ukraine's navy is really more of a flotilla: "1 corvette; 4 landing craft; 1 minesweeper; 13 patrol boats; 18 auxiliary vessels; 10 aircraft".
If the countries aiding Ukraine actually did see that as a need, and if they did accept that this is the most optimal outcome to this war, then we would be prepping Ukraine for a fairly substantial offensive campaign.
I don't think anyone is doing that. And out of all the weaponry that people are sending Europe, I note that warships, tanks and ballistic missiles are not on that list. Armored personnel carriers, aircraft, air defense and anti-tank weaponry are on that list; but these are not properly offensive weaponry like Ukraine would need to make a substantial territorial push. Supplying these forms of aid would play into the Russian narrative of Ukraine somehow being an existential threat to Russia. I think for that reason, as well some level of the basic politics of military aid in such a situation, that it's not likely to happen.
We'd be talking about setting up Ukraine as a new regional hegemon, rather than merely guaranteeing its independence via non-kinetic warfare and military aid. That's a different game altogether.
Absent other emergent factors or circumstances - which, given the fact that it's a war, are a near-certainty - that positions all this for a rather wrenching few months as Russia continues to commit forces piecemeal to the Donbas, and more evidence of Russian war crimes get uncovered, and Ukraine prosecutes an increasingly offensive war with a defensively geared army.