Yes, but we gave them enough aid to survive, and they've had to build a homegrown defense industry that includes the means to hit Russia deep, hard, and where it counts, and that nobody can tell them how to use, and Europe is finally starting to step out of our shadow.
It's unfortunate that in our lifetimes, we are watching the US give up our world leadership role, the "arsenal of democracy", but the kids are...errrr..Ukraine is going to be all right in the long run. We gave them the bare minimum, and they pulled themselves together and are hurting Russia far more here in 2025 than we could have imagined at the end of 2022.
They may have just lost Pokrovsk, but Putin was going to do anything possible to get a victory ahead of all of these bullshit peace talks to anchor his claims over Ukrainian land and to try and lay the groundwork for something before the 4th anniversary comes up, but guess what? He killed or wounded almost 15% of the entire Russian Army just to take this town of 60,000 people. Imagine if we killed or wounded 15% of the United States Army to take a city the size of Pflugerville.
And Finland and Sweden joined NATO.