Russia's in a bad position, but Ukraine is in a worse position, but doesn't get talked about much in western media. Without sugarcoating it, Ukraine just doesn't have the armored vehicles, artillery, or infantry equipment to trade blows with Russia in a pure slugging match for months on end. Ukraine's morale is higher and leadership more competent, but that only gets you so far when you're out of artillery shells and tanks. Ukraine's only real advantage is raw manpower because they've mobilized while Russia hasn't.

Russia knows this and switched gears from trying to fight a maneuver war to fighting an artillery war. With trained manpower scarce, the new tactic is to rely on their extreme advantage in artillery to flatten Ukrainian positions and cities from afar and move in after sufficient pounding. It saves on losing manpower to a general infantry offensive while slowly chiseling away at Ukraine's ability to effectively defend their positions. Without issuing a general mobilization to increase their troop numbers, this is Russia's only real strategy to continue the war. It's not a good strategy at all, but it does work in terms of casualty and equipment loss ratios.

Ukraine is also making blunders of its own by repeating the same mistake WWII Germany made in trying to defend every inch of ground until the situation is absolutely untenable instead of setting up positions in strong defensible areas. Trying to defend every inch of dirt resulted in 15,000 lost in Mariupol, 2,000 encircled and captured in Zolote, another 5-8,000 captured in Severodonetsk, and today, at least 1,000 or more lost in Lysychansk.

The shipments from the US/Western Europe help in terms of Ukraine's rapidly dwindling military, but it's just not enough. The US announced they'll be sending 220,000 rounds of artillery, sounds like a lot until you read that Russia fires 55,000 artillery shells every day, making the US shipments equal to 4 days of Russian firepower.

This war is turning into a long and bloody slugging match, and Ukraine just isn't the heavyweight boxer that Russia is, and even an incompetent, blind, deaf, and dumb Russian military can still win in a slugging match.