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What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?
The people running the place would likely end up dead, probably after being tortured, or in a very unpleasant prison for the rest of their lives (if they’re lucky). And it’s their incentives which drive Russian decision-making around this war. On top of that, what many ordinary Russians seem to find intolerable about the consequences of giving up and going home is that they think the subsequent regime collapse would leave Russia as (something like) a Western colony.
Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?
If you meant people besides Putin, whom do you mean? Who is this class of people who both have the power to perpetuate the war and not the power to keep themselves alive should it end poorly?
I don’t understand, who are all of these tinpot dictators you’re thinking of who have decisively lost wars of choice, much less ones with the US or its proxies, and then ridden happily off into the sunset? What is the precedent for that? Mussolini was strung up from a lamppost. Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet. Najibullah was hanged on a traffic pole. Just to name a few.
Wars are very expensive in terms of political capital and betting your capital on winning a war is extremely different from having the ability to preserve yourself if that bet goes terribly wrong. The question here is really, “How could there be people who can start and sustain a war as long as their populace thinks they’ve got a shot at winning, but not protect themselves from the backlash or the victors when they lose?” And put like that it is self-answering.
Dictators who lose wars in their home country that result in the toppling of their government tend to get killed. You've given no examples of dictators losing a war on foreign soil being killed; so, even by the standard of cherry-picked anecdotes, you've given no evidence that is relevant here imo. You've already responded to my preferred way to reason about this topic, but, suffice to say, I think my collection of comparison events is far more relevant than yours.
You didn't say "not protect themselves from the backlash" you said "likely end up dead" - that answer is not a self-answering question.
Putin is losing a war on what Russian elites regard as Russian soil right now, seeing as they just annexed it, and it’s internal perceptions that matter here. However, there’s nothing unique about losing on your own soil, what matters is the stakes, and wars that impinge on your own country simply tend to be higher-stakes than those that don’t. That doesn’t mean the only really high-stakes wars are of that kind.
I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.
Gaddafi, Milosevic, and Saddam didn't just lose wars on symbolic home ground - they lost wars against people who were explicitly after them. Gaddafi lost a civil war, Milosevic and Saddam lost to foreign interventions that had their removal as a goal.
Putin's loss scenario in Ukraine is humiliating, but the Ukrainians aren't coming to get him.
Lots of Ukraine’s allies want Putin gone even if the Ukrainians have not made that an explicit war goal of theirs. Biden said in his Poland speech “This man cannot remain in power,” and his team had to walk it back, but I think it clearly reflects prevailing sentiment among Western elites.
None of them are going to physically invade Russia to apprehend or kill Putin. Merely being disliked by Western elites is eminently survivable. He might have to settle for vacationing in Sochi instead of the Mediterranean, but that ship sailed months ago anyway.
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