“It mystifies me why any Americans would resent Ukraine for defending itself.”
I’d be fine with whatever Ukraine did if it defended itself. That’s not what it’s doing. Now Ukraine is complaining that that it has run out of Ukrainian cannon fodder. Guess what it will want next to “defend itself”.
In the process, the Ukrainians are wiping out a generation or two of Russian young men, that the Russians are pissing away at a record clip.
Their conscription has failed, and even using criminal prisoners has failed, a bucket that they are dipping into a second time right now.
The bottom line is that doing an Alexander Nevsky and forcing Ukraine back into “greater Russia” is a mindless, purposeless exercise, and everybody but Putin realizes it. After the Holodomor, Ukrainians hated Russians so much that they embraced the Nazis, for heaven’s sake, as the lesser of two evils.
Their idea of Nazis is basically, “anyone who will kick the Russian’s ass”. Rather different from the standard view.
In the final analysis, they are fighting for the achievable goal of chasing the Russians out of their country. And they are motivated to do so.