James Nixey: Ukraine's victory is still pretty much what's in Zelenskiy's 10-point peace plan

James Nixey heads the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House , a London -based research institute.

He says he doesn't think the Ukraine war will become "frozen" given how much Russia has "gone all in" and how "so many have died" on the Ukrainian side.

Russia is "a little bit soft" and "we shouldn't underestimate how difficult this should be for Russia to fight this war," he says.

Nixey: Ukraine war in Ukraine is an absolutely...unique situation. And, unfortunately, there's no going back from it. I find it hard to see people...going on with their lives in this situation, when so many have died, when it's been such a shakeup of a system, when Russia 's gone all in, doubled down. It just makes freezing harder. I might be lacking imagination, but it's not easy to see how that could play out satisfactorily.

Nixey: We have a hot war, amazingly, which is apparently containable, with no spillover.

It is funny, isn't it, how comfortable policymakers are with here and now, because it's the existence that they are living in and how uncomfortable they are with almost any change.

He says U.S. policymakers don't want to reach for a substantive change, and that leads to paralysis.