It’s obviously not a proxy war when literally thousands of soldiers from NATO countries have been killed inside undisputed Russian territory. The Russians released a report on bodies recovered from the Kursk incursion; these are fatalities, not casualties.
In just a few months, NATO lost nearly as many soldiers as the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” did in eight years of invading and occupying Iraq. The USA didn’t lose a proxy war in Ukraine, it lost an actual war; remember, these are just the fatalities from one single Ukrainian offensive.