Ukraine With a Whimper or a Bang?

Russia started the war with Ukraine in late February with a shock-and-awe effort to grab Kyiv. It failed both to decapitate the government and absorb half the country in one fell swoop.Soon the conflict descended into a war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine over the occupied majority Russian-speaking borderlands.That deadlock was eventually going to be resolved by relative morale, manpower, and supply.Would the high-tech weaponry and money of the United States and Europe allow heroic Ukrainian forces to be better equipped than a larger Russian force — drawing on an economy 10 times greater and a population nearly four times larger than Ukraine’s?After the latest sudden Ukrainian territorial gains and embarrassing Russian retreats, we now know the answer.Russia may be bigger and richer than Ukraine, but it is not up to the combined resources of the United States, along with the nations of NATO and the European Union.Most are now in a de facto proxy war with an increasingly overwhelmed Russia. And so far, a cir …