The US seems to want Russia to lose the war but not for the government (i.e. Putin's grip on power) to collapse (because nukes). That seems to be the main thing driving this 'helping but not too much' strategy, but it's not obvious that it will or can succeed.
> US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?
Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.
How can people look at the human rights catastrophe in occupied territory and be delusional enough to think everything would have been fine had Russia "won". It's crazy.
The key thing to successfully take refuge in Russia is to be mentally Russian. Ukraine has plenty of such people, at least because 20% of population are ethnical Russians who migrated here at different times in our history. For somebody like me, whose Russian skills are on lower intermediate side, posting comments like this in social networks occupation is effectively a death sentence, there's no way around that.
As an example my friend barely left Russian checkpoint alive after they took his phone for check-up. They were beating him for hours, because they found picture where he stands near the Ukrainian flag. Twist: he was 17 at that time, would he be a bit older, I don't know what would happen. And this is just one example among countless. You can see what happened in Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, etc. You can learn what happened during the Soviet period after we briefly regained independence. Our population shrinked by double digit percentage pre WWII.
Average homo sovieticus with no sense of identity will be sort of okay, that's true. But Russia probably will use the men for the next war similar to what they did with people occupied in 2014.
People in occupied territories are not safe from the Russians. Rather they became cannon fodder.
Surrender was and is probably not an option for Ukraine. Without Western support, what might an industrialized nation do if cornered with no options -- I don't want to know.
Regardless, if Ukraine wants to fight for freedom, you really think we shouldn't enable them? Or is freedom of no value to you?
Rounded to the nearest whole number there has never been anything more than a 0% chance of the Ukraine "winning" a war with Russia. Even the dumbest generals in Washington know this.
> Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process
Pretty much. I see you got downvoted because somehow there are still people that believe it's two more weeks and Russia will collapse.
Initially the plan was a rehash of 2014 when the Obama admin encouraged Ukrainians not to fight. It was going to be a media storm and very harsh pronouncements, sanctions and so on. However, from a geo-strategic point of view when Zelensky refused to take the ride offered to him by the Biden admin, it opened this new opportunity, and Americans and Europeans allies took it. Never let a crisis go to waste! They helped Ukraine stay afloat and saved Ukrainian lives as well, no doubt, but that's a bonus for the magazine stories. If we pretend their only goal was grinding down Russia without also letting it collapse or trigger WW3, the playbook would have looked exactly as it did for the last 4 years. So I think it's silly to pretend it was something other than that.
I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.