Right, and that’s the conundrum for the west and Ukraine. Since Ukraine is entirely dependent on the west, they have to keep showing visible progress that western public can understand in order for western governments to continue dumping money into Ukraine. So, the pressure is to make big offensives like the one we’re seeing now that are incredibly costly and can’t be realistically sustained.

On the other hand, Russian military doesn’t have to constantly make preformative stunts for the domestic public in Russia. They can go at the pace they choose to, and grind down Ukrainian army in a war of attrition. The best example of the fact that Russian army decided to spend half a year on building defensive lines and organizing its army without making any visible progress. Western media have been screaming at the top of their lungs the whole time that this is a clear sign of how incompetent Russian army is and that Russia isn’t capable of making any progress.

Russians knew that the west would force Ukraine into a disastrous offensive sooner or later, and now we see the results of that. Ukraine is seeing incredible losses, and its not able to even fight its way out of the security zone before the first line of defence.

I expect that once the Ukrainian offensive burns itself out in another month or so, we’ll see Russians going on an offensive against depleted and demoralized remnants of the Ukrainian army.

Interestingly enough, this dynamic was understood by NATO analysts for a while now. Here’s a pretty insightful article explaining the dynamic and predicting precisely what we’re seeing unfold now https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukraine