The order of operations goes:

1. Stop the war, prevent Russia from winning
2. everything else

I spend a couple hours a day following this conflict and my conclusion is that, yes, it would likely be in Ukraine’s interests to continue conducting the war for a couple more years as long as they had enough support from Western allies. But there’s a few things to consider here.

1. Russia is still pushing for maximalist goals when talking about a peace deal. This makes fighting a lot more attractive to Ukraine than a peace treaty for now. If that changed, the calculation could change with it.

2. Ukraine is still slowly losing land. So in general it is not in their favor to continue to prosecute the war if Russia was willing to allow a peace deal at the line of control.

3. Western support isn’t guaranteed as Trump is a big wildcard here but looks pretty okay for the time being.

The goal of continuing to prosecute the war would be to get Russia to a point where they either

a) Start losing territory

b) End up in such bad shape economically that they simply can’t manage to keep the war going any more and make a favorable peace deal

c) End up in such bad shape that Putin is deposed

I personally think that given their current constraints that we could reach one of the above outcomes in the next few years if we kept Western support about at the levels that it currently is, because Russia’s capabilities will degrade pretty quickly over the next couple years due to the fact that they

1. Have used up the vast majority of their usable stockpiles and can only build equipment at about 10-20% of the rate they have been historically consuming it. Ukraine and Europe’s production on the other hand is picking up as it wasn’t based on refurbishing stockpiled equipment.

2. Will have harder and harder time finding soldiers as their recruitment techniques are becoming prohibitively expensive (though this is also true for Ukraine)

3. Have all but used up their sovereign wealth fund and do not have much access to anyone else which can loan them money, even at the high interest rates they are offering. Now they are raiding the banks for money, but the first banks are already starting to collapse. Their only option left is to print money which will cause inflation. Given their real inflation rate already is somewhere around 20%, the likely outcome over the next couple years is a hyperinflation spiral which will hurt everyone in Russia enough that there will certainly be negative sentiment towards Putin. There could also be a banking crash where people can’t withdraw their money, etc.

My feeling is that the US doesn’t want the risk of Russia falling too far due to their nuclear stockpile and just want to see the whole thing over, but Europe really needs Russia to be beaten well enough to not come back, so it’s really a question of whether Trump gets his peace deal or not, because I feel like Europe is okay to go on fighting, even without the USA, though they will be strapped for resources to do so in that case, at least in the near term.