SeigSoloyvov wrote:For Russia the problem lays not in losing some settlements but rather their manpower, they have very limited forces and each loss is a blow.
Ukraine can afford to send much much more men to the front, if the russian force takes enough losses to the point it can not conduct proper battles anymore.
That forces Putin to make a choice, give up or conduct a full scale mobilization.
I suspect Ukraine hopes if they kill just enough russians that will force Putin's hand, as they probably think he will not risk serving backlash from Russian people going full-scale war mode.
In the end, there is a path to victory that Ukraine can get, its a very specific and narrow point but its entirely possible.
There is no path to victory for Ukraine here anymore
Average Russian is 100% behind this war now which is a massive change from first couple of weeks and Ukrainians have only themselves to blame thanks to their shenanigans, in fact population in Russia would support mobilization (this is pretty much unprecedented)
Whatever original Russian plan was it's ancient history now, this is completely new ball game now
Winning this war quickly would be disastrous for Russia and it should be avoided at all costs, if they do they would be stuck babysitting and funding Afghanistan on steroidsWhat they should do (and what they are doing now) is to go slowly and kill as many able bodied Ukrainians as possible before moving forward and cutting up Ukraine into cheaper and easily manageable components
Since Ukraine will never run out of weapons or money the best and only way to neutralize them is to kill their manpower, they have a lot of cheap walking corpses but there is finite amount of them
Ukrainians are the ones losing way more people than Russians right now and even of those Russian losses majority seems to be from local militias and not Russian Army
This will only get worse for Ukraine the longer this lasts and Russia should make it last as long as possible, mountain of Ukrainian corpses is also necessary as a post-war message and it needs to be made massive
For the first time in it's history Russia is in the situation where it's fighting a war with properly equipped and motivated military, with stable finances and with full support of it's population
This never happened before, best they could have hoped for in previous wars was maybe 2 out of 3 but even that was rareThey need to use this situation to it's full extent
Only way for Russia to lose this war is to do it on purpose