Why would Putin agree to a peace deal if he thinks he can win the war?

Because a peace deal is the only way to eventually end the war, unless the Russians fully occupy Ukraine (which won't be happening).

Putin will almost surely demand an unfreezing of Russia’s reserve assets. This is a potential deal breaker for the Europeans. Unwilling to make any fiscal sacrifices for Europe, the Europeans had been hoping to plunder the $300bn pot of Russian reserve assets

Lmao just saying the quiet part out loud. Did any other country ever get the privilege of playing European foreign reserves as a way of rebuilding from colonialism?

The financial burden is so large that it would either have to be funded through debt, through taxes, or through cuts in social services. I don’t think the Europeans would voluntarily agree to do any of these things.

Well no worries here. The dictatorship of capital will come to the rescue.

Macron would, if left alone, be one west Europe’s most effective supporters of Ukraine, but he is hampered by the political chaos in his own country

And also the unravelling of the French empire in Africa.

Europe was dependent on Russian gas and oil. Some of these dependencies persist to this day.

Delinking from Russian gas fully was a pipe dream

We have put ourselves into a position where Trump is our best hope to end the conflict. How did it come to this?

By being imperialist/liberal pieces of shit, and terminal failures. How else?

The viral genome sequence obtained from a tracheal-aspirate specimen collected on November 9 (8 days after the onset of symptoms) was reconstructed as described previously.3 The virus was typed as clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1,4 most closely related to viruses detected in wild birds in British Columbia around the same time (Fig. S2). Markers of adaptation to humans were detected in the tracheal-aspirate specimen collected on November 9: the E627K mutation was detected (52% allele frequency) in the polymerase basic 2 (PB2) gene product, and analysis of the H5 hemagglutinin (HA) gene yielded ambiguous calls in the codons for amino acid residues E186 (E190 according to H3 mature HA numbering) — 28% allele frequency for E186D — and Q222 (Q226 according to H3 mature HA numbering) — 35% allele frequency for Q222H. The mutations in the H5 HA gene have previously been shown to increase binding to α2-6–linked sialic acids, which act as receptors that facilitate viral entry into cells in the human respiratory tract and enable viral replication.5