So what happens when Ukraine loses? Are we at war with Russia then?

NATO can’t field an actual war against Russia, NATO countries don’t have the industrial capacity to do so. NATO has big scary tools, but not many of them, and in a protracted war where the industrial power wins Russia would win out. It would be very bloody, long, and NATO would lose, so it’s unlikely that there will be all-out war.

Russia can’t even beat ukraine.

They are steadily achieving all of their stated objectives for the SMO. Russia isn’t trying to do a Marvel-style total destruction of Ukraine like you see in hollywood depictions of war.

“steadily” as in… they complete one every couple of years? How long until they’re done? 10-20-30 years? They started this in 2014 and 11 years later they’ve accomplished next to nothing beyond creating a pile of bodies.

If germany took this long to take poland it probably wouldn’t have been world war at all.

The SMO started in 2022. In 2014, after the western-backed Euromaidan coup, Crimea was annexed but then there were multiple attempts to resolve things peacefully, called the Minsk Agreements, which Kiev broke both times. In 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk seceded from the new far-right led Ukraine, fastforward to 2022 after a decade of fighting and Russia agrees to go in and resolve things by force.

Since 2022, Russia has steadily been gaining more and more territory, and has nearly completely taken the four oblasts they declared as their targets for annexation. Ukraine has slowly but steadily been losing ground, and NATO has proven to be incapable of matching Russian industrial output. Russia isn’t trying to do a Blitzkreig, they are going carefully to fully demillitarize Ukraine and prevent casualties on their own end. They have the industrial capacity to field a protracted war, so they are playing to their advantage.

I read a few articles that said at russias current pace it would take them a hundred years to take Ukraine.

Russia stops at Zaporishia and Dniepro (and Donetsk) if Ukraine wants to keep losing. Kherson, Odessa, Karkiv if Ukraine really insists. They have other territories they are willing to trade to facilitate important liberations without having to destroy what they liberate. At any rate, the pace of Russian advance has increased in last year, and increased again in last months. It is far higher than the 3.5 year average of the SMO.

Russia does not stop