Okay so what exactly are we suppose to do then just support Ukraine until the end whatever that looks like? Seriously dude you sound like a spokesman for Raytheon at this point. We need to look at reality and balance a Russian victory against what we would actually lose and gain at this stage of things. Far as I can tell a Russian victory means Europe starts to carry its own weight from now own. Also Ukraine still exists just a bit reduced in its territory.
Absolutely nothing good comes from Russia winning. Absolute best case scenario, they choke to death fighting Ukrainian partisans, enacting an escalating spiral of brutal reprisals against a populous that hates them, until either the Russian occupation is driven out, it turns into an outright genocide, or the west finally does intervene directly.
A more likely scenario, Ukraine is cut in a third or a half, and Russia immediately starts rearming for its next expansionist enterprise. They're
probably smart enough not to make Ukraine their next target, so they'd more likely try to absorb part or all of one of the central Asian nations that used to be part of the USSR. It'd be a lot harder to support such a country in opposing Russia, and if they succeed
there, they will come back for either the rest of Ukraine or one of the Baltics later.
And yes, as others have addressed, in any scenario where Russia wins, if they don't take all of Ukraine outright, they'll
demand that the rest of Ukraine never being admitted into NATO is one of the terms of a cessation of hostilities. The Russians will also demand an end to all the economic sanctions they're suffering under, letting them use western parts to feed their defense industry again.
If Ukraine wins, in the absolute worst condition, we have two corrupt nations that hate each other staring at each other across a heavily-armed and increasingly heavily-fortified border, keeping each other partially pinned down so they can't trouble anyone else.
More likely, a Ukrainian victory will mean either someone coups out Putin internally, because the Tsar has humiliated Russia, and that's the one thing that is absolutely intolerable, or he's so busy fending off coup attempts that Russia can't get up to much shit for the rest of his lifespan. Either way, Russia, its military, and its defense industry will have been humiliated on the international stage, and they'll lose even more of their export market, continuing to degrade their defense industry's ability to produce modern hardware.
In this scenario, Russia is turned from a regional superpower to a regional mid-weight, possibly collapsing into civil war and not even being that much, and its ability to support other hostile actors, principally Iran and China, is severely reduced.
The wise thing to do, would be to empty the vaults of every bit of stockpile that's old to the point where we wouldn't use it ourselves, and start churning out every bit of cheap support material we can send the Ukrainians. Artillery shells, drones, small arms and ammunition, stuff like that with a small price tag but fairly substantial impact. Also, shuffle off a lot of our old F-16 inventory, maybe some A-10's and even F-15's, so that they have the air power to support offensive operations, not just inhibit Russian air power.
Stop drip-feeding them support, flood the zone so that the Russians aren't dealing
daily with the amount of drone and HIMARS attacks they're currently dealing with weekly, and the Ukrainians will be able to achieve the kind of breakthrough offensive they did in Kharkiv, the sort of thing you need to make this look more like a modern war, and less like WWI.
Frankly, flooding them with war material will cost us less in the long run than the stupid crap the Biden admin is doing right now, where we're sending them huge amounts of cash to fund their government as well.
