Their hope was to embroil Russia in a forever war with Ukraine that would "degrade" Russia by bringing about the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian troops. By funneling U.S. weapons to Ukraine, another aim was to have Ukraine defeat Russia militarily in the hope that the Russian people or the Russian national-security establishment would oust Russian President Putin from power and replace him with a leader who would be subservient to the U.S. government.

Of course, U.S. officials were simply repeating what they had accomplished back in 1979, when they provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, with the aim of giving the Soviets their "own Vietnam," meaning that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers would be killed in Afghanistan, just as 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam.