larry johnson describes a change in the putin view of the war;

 

 In mid-September, the Kremlin was signaling that negotiations could resume. Putin had said the trilateral talks with the United States and Ukraine would be unlikely before the State Duma elections, but that Russia would be ready to resume contacts after them. The elections ended on September 20. Within a week, both Putin and Lavrov had shifted from conditional openness to a set of positions that make a negotiated end to the war harder to reach than at any point this year.

The trigger: September 20
The turning point was Ukraine’s drone campaign on election day. Putin said more than 1,600 drones entered the Moscow area that night, with strikes on polling stations, including one in a school he said was virtually destroyed. The chair of a territorial election commission was killed when her home was hit. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the raid unprecedented. According to RT, two civilians were killed in the suburbs and an oil refinery was damaged. Whatever one makes of Russian accounts of the damage, the political effect in Moscow was plain.

Putin: from “ready after the elections” to “we will think twice”
At his press conference in St. Petersburg on September 25, Putin recast the whole negotiating track. He listed a series of Ukrainian escalations: the strike on St. Petersburg’s port during the June economic forum, a campaign against Russian refineries, an attempted blockade of Russia’s Black Sea coast that he said damaged more than 100 vessels, and strikes on commercial warehouses. He said Russia had answered each one, so effectively that Kyiv is now seeking partial ceasefires in the energy sector and the air.............more...........