> The optimal thing would be to push the Russians out of Ukraine with military force, though that is also going to leave many dead.
And the primary victims will be Ukrainian. Even considering that Europe has its arms open to this particular class of refugee, the country that they left will be a smoking crater. I wish we'd stop pretending that we're arming the Ukrainians for the Ukrainians' sake; we're trying to extend the war as long as possible in order to economically destroy Russia. The end stage of that is Western and central Ukraine being reduced to dust.
Russia has committed something like 15% of its military so far IIRC. This is just a matter of time. Ukrainians are being pushed through jingoistic nationalist propaganda (which is enforced at the borders if men who are old enough to carry a weapon try to leave) to destroy their country, and letting extreme-right minorities of the population (who are basically Banderaite lost-cause Nazis) lead. Those groups are happy to burn their country so the disgusting muslim commies won't rule it, and to die in glorious battle against them.
The disgusting thing is Americans are parroting the Azov rhetoric, too. Fat slobs sitting on a couch watching MSNBC/FOX/CNN all day and yelling at the television are calling Ukrainians traitors for leaving, and demanding that they be armed and sent back in.
The optimal thing is not to push the Russians out of Ukraine with military force, it's for Ukraine to give up. The world has shown it's willing to take white refugees, so those that fear Russian persecution can escape. Plenty would have happily emigrated without the Russian invasion, but the doors to Europe and the US were shut to them before. NATO re-promises not to put their alliance whose animating premise is anti-Russian on the borders of Russia. Ukraine rebuilds and normalizes.
What have they lost anyway? They were dominated by the Russians (and hopelessly corrupt), then a Western-incited and funded coup used the extreme-right element to install a (hopelessly corrupt) puppet who left office with a 5% approval rating, so the public elected an actor who played a president on television (also fully owned by an oligarch), which is an act so desperate, it would seem insane if the US hadn't elected a guy who played a boss on television to be president, or Italy hadn't handed its politics to a comedian playing the wise fool, or Boris Johnson hadn't been. Russia and the US trashed Ukraine, and we're cheering them on while they finish the job.
Even better, maybe we can push Russia into using some tiny nuke that we can't justify destroying the entire world over. Because the fact is, if they nuke Ukraine, we're not going to do shit. They know it. Lets make them feel so victimized to the man that they do it to reclaim some face, and piss the average Russian civilian off so much that they feel like there's nothing left to lose but their pride.