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I agree with the later, but would disagree(?) that there was a consistent long-term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine.
From my perspective of having watched EU eastern expansion from the 2000s onward, Ukraine has been far less a US-strategy point and more a context of German post-cold-war strategy that reached a point the Americans supported but the Germans were unprepared / unwilling to lead, and then it transitioned into an American national security premise post-2014 Crimea invasion when Russia interjected a military rather than economic-political issue.
It's generally forgotten / glossed over now, but post-Cold War Germany not only had a major focus on re-integrating Eastern Germany, but all of Eastern Europe. Germany took relatively systemic efforts to execute influence-expanding investments across the region, ranging from the overwhelming ownership of Polish media to Baltic incorporation into German supply chains to Russian energy. These efforts were general and broad, aligned with the European (and especially French) efforts at trying to integrate eastern europe and even Russia into the European Union economize zone (where Russia was a potential counter-balance to the Americans), and Ukraine was not exempted even as it was fertile soil. While the Americans generally supported the Europeans in EU expansion (for a variety of reasons, from the ideological benefits of spreading democracy to the willing to economic interest to strategy in watering down German/French influence over the EU), the cultural dynamics of EU-positivity and democratic liberalism that sparked Maidan was fundamentally EU, and German, driven and funded.
The strategic handoff came with that while the Germans were interest in the eastern expansion in general, they weren't interested in doing so at the expense of their Russian economic relations under Merkel, and so Putin made Russia EU/Eurasian Union alignment a massive issue, Germany entered a strategic paralysis as the factors it had encouraged and sympathized and in some cases funded grew, but the government's interest was not to lead. So the Germans didn't, and without the Germans who had been the institutional leaders the EUropeans floundered, and into that western power vacuum stepped the US. Many forget now due to the Nuland conspiracy theory that Nuland debating opposition members for inclusion into Yanukovich's government after his invitation for such was proof of a coup against Yanukovich, but Nuland's infamous transcript was initially a scandal for its impolitic language on the Europeans.
The transitions have faded with time and popular memory, but US/western military interest in Ukraine was never a consistent interest, and in many respects quite late. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, you had the Clinton Era in the 90s where there was no particular interet beyond nuclear proliferation, you had the Bush era in which NATO expansion was an interest as a part of general NATO expansion sympathies but Bush was decisively curtailed by the 2006 European vetos, and then you had the Obama era in which Ukrainian NATO was not a topic of pursuit. US military aid / training / assistance to Ukraine only started after the occupation of Crimea and the Russian intervention after the failed Nova Russia campaign, which was also the first time the Ukrainian body politic started to come to a military security consensus on Russia being the threat.
A lot of this probably comes down to how you would define "Long-term" and "consistent". I would imagine that military aims for Ukraine were practically non-existent up until 2014, with the ousting of Yanukovich and invasion of Crimea opening up the possibility. Most likely, Euromaiden was led by CIA and CIA linked assets, but any further military goals coming from that would be opportunistic. Could you call this a consistent strategy? And 2014 means <10 year, is this long-term?
I think if you're talking long-term and consistent, then it would be the aim of expanding NATO membership to fully encircle Russia. Ukraine would just be one part of this, up until the relatively recent events brought it much more to the fore.
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