I'm late responding, but for all the right reasons. :-)
In the week since you posted, the war continues to go towards the Russians. At this point the Ukrainians are saying that to win the war they need arms donations equivalent to the armament they had at the beginning of the invasion.
That request makes no sense for multiple reasons, but a very simple one is that Ukraine has sadly lost an enormous number of men, and an enormous amount of infrastructure since 24 Feb. If Ukraine were to somehow get all that equipment instantaneously on the frontline of today, why would anyone believe that the same would not happen to the equipment again?
The only way for the request to be a feasible means to victory would be if Russia had suffered such devastating losses and learned nothing from their tactical defeats so far. The status of the war says that is clearly not the case.
Russia has changed from their "shock and awe" tactic at the beginning. It worked in the south very well. Russia took Kherson and the surrounding areas with low causualties and has held it since. Kyiv and Kharkov? Not so much. The gov't didn't fold, the cities didn't give up. The Russians swapped to a "fixing" operation for several weeks until the Donbas forces were well engaged, then pulled back.
The Donbas Line is massively fortified after 8 years of buildup. The Russians changed tactics again when it was clear they could not overrun those interconnected defenses. They are using tactics similar to those that lead to their victories in Syria. Pound the defenses with artillery to soften them up. Probe for a weakness. When one is found, break through and encircle the enemy.
This tactic has been working, albeit slowly. A huge breakthrough for the Russians came a few weeks ago in Popasna. Similar smaller victories (e.g. Lyman). This has lead to a situation in Sievierodonetsk as there was in Mariupol.
The way the war is going, Russia will end up with a landbridge from Transnistria to the Donbas. What happens after that I don't venture to guess.
I don't think the US "wanted" Ukraine to lose in the beginning. I think the US hoped that Ukraine would pull a "Rocky vs. Apollo Creed" upset that ends in a split decision. But the US clearly doesn't care much that Ukraine is being destroyed, an entire generation wiped out at WWI levels. Like the US did with Noriega, the Shah of Iran, and even Saddam Hussien - as long as the US gets something out of it politically and financially, we'll support whatever any dictator does. For example, we support Saudi Arabia even though our own intelligence says the Crown Prince gave the order to murder and dismember a dissenting US resident reporter.
US weapons manufacturers got 10s of billions in money from US taxpayers. Right after that, the truth about how badly the war is going came out, and the US started distancing itself from Zelenskyy and Ukraine.
Sending US troops to Ukraine would be political suicide at this point.
The US just sent a bunch of artillery and what did Ukraine do? They bombed civilian targets in Donetsk. Reuters reported and posted photos. The US is not so stupid as to give long range weapons to Ukraine, as it VERY likely they would use them to attack Russia, rather than Russians in Ukraine, drawing the US into the war. I expect fewer and smaller donations going forward for that reason alone.
Certainly the oil reserves found in Ukraine played a role in this invasion, but IMO that was secondary or tertiary. First and foremost was Ukraine had become a defacto NATO member, and Zelensky specifically talked about building nukes two weeks before the war. I've heard (but not yet confirmed) that the head of the IAEA here in Vienna stated that Ukraine had collected enough fissible material to make a nuclear bomb. If the IAEA knows that, I'd bet the Russians did, too.
Ukraine was pre-war the most corrupt country in Europe. A NATO aligned massively corrupt country with nuclear weapons 4 flight minutes from Moscow? No way Russia would let that stand, in the same way the US wouldn't stand for missiles in Cuba.
The concept of spheres of influence is not difficult to understand unless you have the blinders of US empire on and believe that only the US has the right to a sphere of influence, and that sphere is the globe. That is the Wolfowitz doctrine in operation since the late 90s.
The US squandered our hegemony by pushing to hard and too far. This horrible war is part of the realignment to (again) a multipolar world.
