It will end when China tells him to end it. China likes money, an escalation in the west means less money for Chinese goods.
My guess is Putin will suffer the same fate as some of his opponents and will either have an "accident" or succumb to a sudden "illness" . His adventure as failed and his supposed first class armed forces turned out to be the poorly equipped poorly led drunken rabble many of the senior NATO people thought they were. If he were to start on NATO it would end very badly for him because I can see the equally ambitious President Xi sending the Chinese army into the Asian part of Russia just like the USSR went in to Eastern Europe at the end of WW2 So you end up with Asian Eastern part of Russia under Chinese control and the European Western part under Nato's control. Putin bit off more than his armed forces could chew when he invaded Ukraine and his threats are hollow first he said NATO couldn't arm Ukraine at all or else and was ignored then he said if they send F16s they'd pay a price again he was ignored, he said any incursion into Russia would result in a nuclear response yet Ukraine have gained territory in Kursk and haven't been nuked yet. We should let Ukraine use western supplied weapons to give Putin a taste of what the Ukrainian people have suffered for nearly 2 years and like Starmer told him if he doesn't want that he can stop the War now by ordering his armed forces out of the entire pre 2014 territory of Ukraine.
I think that with China is a bit of a stretch. Despite all the propaganda in this country they seem to have little appetite for wars. I think it’s much more likely that Starmer & whoever’s in charge Stateside lead us into another war in the Middle East than China invading Russia.
None of us know what it's like to live under a totalitarian regime so it's impossible to understand how the people of Russia think. But what I can't get my head round is why in these days of Internet and social media do they slavishly follow Putin? Unless of course they are afraid to show the slightest dissent...
At some point, instead of escalating and spending more money (in spite of the 22 billion black hole) someone needs to actually go and see Putin, nasty though he is, and do a deal so he has a way out. Further escalation will only lead to further escalation. Someone has to have the balls and foresight to start talking. Hopefully Harris when she wins the election will get involved.