What Putin is doing is that he's waiting for the collapse of the AFU so that he can walk through Ukraine without bombing the cities. That's the point of attritional warfare. When the Russians talk about "being open for negotiations" they mean unconditional surrender of their counterpart.
Discussion
well i agree with you on one thing - Putin is certainly not willing to take Kiev by force - he had multiple opportunities to do that - but he doesn't want to go down in history for doing to Kiev what Netanyahu is doing to Gaza
because Netanyahu will simply get his Jews to re-write history, while Putin doesn't quite have the power to do that