imo the time for offensive was never. The offensive should happen “naturally”. If they had enough resources, they would be slowly pushing Russia back just like they are being pushed back currently. The whole “spring offensive” was just as dumb as Russian plan to conquer Kiev in 5 days or whatever insanity they had in mind.
Yep the problem is that people don’t play enough Age of Empires. Basically the worst thing you can do in that game is to send a knight to the enemy’s base, wait a bit, then send another knight, wait, send next one, … etc. One by one each of the knights dies without achieving anything because he will be massively outnumbered. The correct thing to do is to muster a group of the knights and then send them all at once. That way you will have the advantage and have an actual chance of winning.
Going back to the real world Ukraine “The West” is almost comically stupid. They are arguing over how much help should be sent to Ukraine and always sending just enough to get by but not enough to give Ukraine an advantage. Instead of spending a lot of money during a short period of time to actually get some results, “The West” decided to slowly throw away money in the infinite pit of frozen conflict.
The way I, the self proclaimed internet war expert, see it, there are 3 possible solutions for “The West” to the Ukraine problem.
Decide to send a lot of money to flip the tides. (that won’t happen)
Decide that they aren’t stupid to feed an endless war and decide to exchange half of Ukraine’s territory for Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Kinda crap but honestly better than the 3rd option.
A nothing burger. AKA doing what they are doing right now. The optimistic vision is that over the next decade “The West” will get rich enough that even with these small scraps here and there Ukraine will be able to win in the end. The realistic one is that the scraps won’t be enough and Ukraine will slowly but surely lose territory, ending with some kind of crap treaty including Ukraine both losing a lot of territory and not being in NATO. “a lose-lose”
That comes down to the “they are being out-everything” from your earlier comment. Europe needs to start spending much more money on the war, but that wouldn’t be popular amongst the Europeans and therefore won’t happen, sadly.