Most Americans understandably favor the Ukrainian resistance against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yet for Ukraine to break the current deadlock and “win” the war, it apparently must have the military wherewithal to hit targets inside Russia.

The operational “rules” of proxy wars are well known. In Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, Russia supplied America’s enemies — sometimes even sending Russian pilots into combat zones.

Thousands of Americans likely died due to our adversaries’ use of Russian munitions.

Ukraine risks now becoming a new — and different — proxy war altogether.

Never has the U.S. squared off against Russia or China in a conventional proxy war.

Neither has Russia nor the U.S. itself ever provided weapons to a proxy belligerent that were used directly inside the respective homeland of either side.

If all the current 1916-style talk of going into Mexico — ostensibly to stop the cartels from importing drugs over an inert border — were to be reified, would the U.S. warn Moscow not to supply Mexico or the cartels with weapons or advisors?

The U.S. in 1917 declared war in part because of German interference in our own territorial affairs.

A hacked telegram from German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann revealed Germany had promised a potential proxy, Mexico, some U.S. territory if it were to join the Central Powers to defeat the Allies. That provocation helped convince enraged Americans to enter World War I.

The 9/11 hit was followed by an immediate American invasion of Afghanistan.

Additionally, nowhere in the world has territory been more disputed than in Ukraine.

Seventy-eight years ago, Joseph Stalin’s Russia formally annexed his previously stolen western regions of currently independent Ukraine. The lands were taken mostly from Poland, but also a few parts from Hungary, Romania, and the former Czechoslovakia.

Russia also seized and occupied Crimea in 2014. The peninsula had previously been Russian from 1783-1954.

Yet Crimea was only ceded by Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 as a political ploy of then Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev — himself born near the Ukrainian border.

Khrushchev sought to ensure that a restive Ukraine stayed an integral part of a supposedly eternal Soviet Union by ceremonially including Crimea into one of its own Soviet state’s sub-jurisdictions.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the short-lived Russian-majority, and independent Republic of Crimea (1992-95), was annexed by the newly independent Ukraine.

It then remained part of the Ukrainian nation for 19 years until the 2014 invasion. Why Putin for a third time dared invade Ukraine is obfuscated by contemporary domestic politics.

He likely enacted his irredentist agenda of restoring the borders of the former Soviet Union in 2008, 2014, and 2021, because he gambled that the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations could not successfully oppose his serial annexations.

Equally forgotten were the policies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations regarding the 2014 Russian annexation of the Donbas and Crimea. Prior to the February 24, 2022 Russian attack on Kyiv, none of the three had ever sought to force Russia to give up either the borderlands or the Crimea.

The Obama administration’s disastrous 2009-2014 Russian “reset” appeasement policy, the 2015-16 Russian collusion hoax, and the humiliating American skedaddle from Kabul also convinced Putin that America either would not or could not oppose his 2022 invasion.

America should help Ukraine resist Russian aggression. But we should be mindful in doing so that the entire region is an historical Gordian Knot of poorly understood but ancient intertwined and competing threads — one that may risk being cut by a Russian nuclear sword.

Victor Davis Hanson is a syndicated columnist. ©2023 Tribune Content Agency.