As I have noted before, World War I did not start as an imperialist war; the territorial demands only came afterwards, when all of the participants insisted they were entitled to compensation to justify all the suffering they had endured. In the end, the Allies fought on to more or less total victory. In exchange for that, they ultimately got Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. We would never have heard of any of those people if the parties had negotiated a peace treaty on the basis of the status quo ante in 1916.
Keep that in mind when pundits tell you there is no acceptable alternative to a complete victory for Ukraine.