No,
The Goal posts were defined by two groups of folks:
1. The (political) ruling class which decided to expand NATO into Ukraine. This will not happen.
2. The (military) leadership which had their defined goal to prevent Russia from seizing the Eastern ethnic Russian once Ukrainian lands. They failed to achieve this by losing the land and then not recapturing it in the counter offensive.
***That is by definition “losing.”***
As to the rest of your junk, and it is junk, those are rationalizations to pretend there is some sort of success in failure, not unlike post Vietnam where many also tried to somehow carve out some sort of victory in what was failure. We did NOT attain our stated political and military objectives.
As to the use of older military hardware. We also use old junk. We even in the US Army use a M113 from 1958. We use a M109 which is ancient... And before you say, but but but they have been upgraded, well so have those T55s. Those arguments are sorry to say it like this, “idiot arguments.”
However, when you start a war, and you end up losing even more than your wager, i.e. (EU membership is lost, Ukraines economy and infrastructure are badly damaged, you have mass refugees many never to return...) then it becomes an “abject failure.” You see, the wager was Eastern Ukraine, that is what the West was gambeling with when we tried to push this NATO BS down the Russians throat, but it’s us that ended up losing far more than just Eastern Ukraine. Imagine you go to a poker game with the intent to gamble with $100 and win big, but end up losing your home and car while in Vegas. See how that’s an “abject failure?”
This gamble (push NATO and hope Russia aquiesces) did not go our way.
Yes that is their goal, what was putins, has Putin succeeded, certainly not yet
But time will tell
Saying either side has failed is like saying Allie’s have failed June 5th
There are no morals in war. War is an immoral act. The best you can do if you go to war is to make sure you have a Just War. When we pushed this into a war by putting the Russians in a position where they can articulate a realistic security threat to themselves, we lost that argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory
Up until October 2021, we can make the argument that arming, training, and feeding Ukraine intel was defensive and intended to prevent a true war of aggression by Russia (i.e. create a cost if Russia invades). But once we pulled the lever on unconditional NATO membership in October 2021 and tried to fastrack this, ignoring anything the Russians said, we lost that argument entirely. At that point we became the antagonist of war and threatened someone else (yes, putting tanks and missiles on Russia's border is a threat to them even, if in your mind we're always the good guys).
Post Cold War, and especially post 9-11, the US has changed dramatically. We today have an expeditionary military used to further our political and economic agenda in a vacuum of any true national security argument. We have become offensive (Libya 2011, Iraq 2003, Venezuela 2020) not defensive and our cause is seldom our own security. (1) Post Cold War left the US as the only true worlds super power. This created a situation where there are no consequences for our actions. We act with impunity, break conventions, withdraw from agreements, lie, cheat, are hypocrites and simply do what we want since the ultimate underwriter of a foreign policy is the military. (2) Post 9-11 what began as a GWOT (a term no longer used) morphed into our policy makers using our military as a foreign legion in pursuit of economic and political interests. Instead of the GWOT drawing down, our huge defense and intel budgets remained, our large oversea footprint continued, and we simply began to shift to new targets that have NOTHING to do with our national security in reality, example: Syria, Venezuela, attacking Libya, now Ukraine...
Back to Ukraine: You nor anyone else can articulate a viable national security argument for what we did. Because there isn't one.
What the proponents of this stupid war are left with are Cold War boogieman arguments that are not even remotely based on a realistic capability of the Russian military nor realistic regards their economy and political system.
What you also cannot realistically argue, is that we Americans are wealthier, safer, or more free because of this.
So what was this war? It was pure arrogance. We are strong (political, economic, military), Russia is weak, and we do what we want.
And in the meantime, we talk about moral BS causes like democracy, human rights, sovereignty, all while we literally support kingdoms in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, have mainland China (a single party communist regime with the a rights record about as bad as it comes) as our #1 trade partner, as our most favored trade partner, who we helped into the WTO (the same year tanks rolled of pro democracy students on Tienanmen square)... Did we care about Libya's or Iraq's sovereignty when we invaded or attacked them? Do we care about some of the Pacific Islands sovereignty whom we bully to prevent the Chinese from gaining naval ports in the Pacific? These ideas are today selectively pulled from our @ss whenever we want to go to war and have no justification.