Anybody with a functioning brain understood that Ukraine could never win a war against Russia. As Obama openly said back in 2016:

Obama declares Ukraine to be not a core American interest and that he is reluctant to intervene in the country, because Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Yet, western powers convinced Ukraine to fight Russia anyways because as RAND explained back in 2019, using Ukraine as a proxy was seen as a way to weaken Russia.

The reason the war started has also been publicly acknowledged by the head of NATO

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Now, after two years of the west prolonging the war, the only possible outcome is becoming clear even to dimwitted western public.