Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that Russia is importing petrol, calling it the rightful result of the work of the Security Service, the Armed Forces, intelligence and Ukrainian weapons manufacturers.
Quote: "Today, there were also reports on our entirely justified strikes against Russian targets – against their logistics and fuel infrastructure. I am grateful to our warriors for their precision. Russia chooses war, Russia destroys our people’s lives, and must be held accountable – our long-range capabilities will increase.
That was an unwinnable war. China supported North Vietnam, with which it shared a long border. The US was fighting thousands of miles from its borders, with all the logistical problems that entailed, and was not willing or able to engage China directly in the fighting-- they had recently tried that in the Korean war and barely managed to achieve a stalemate at a high cost in lives. The South Vietnamese government was a former French colonial puppet regime that was rotten to the core, the South Vietnamese soldiers knew that and had no desire to die for those parasites or for the US’s obscure objectives. The North Vietnamese soldiers had to either fight and win or be massacred by either the US or their own government. So they cared about winning, since for them it was an existential imperative. American draftees had more options than that.
But I agree that your analysis that the cost of failure to the sides in that war was massively asymmetric is indeed also applicable to Russia and Ukraine.