Also, I've been an eternal Ukie optimist (though I'd argue that the reasonably optimist outlook has turned out to be...by fucking far...the most accurate one so far) so take this fwiw...but:
The Russians have been fucking throwing everything into assaults for the last 3 months now. Everything. They've barely moved the chains over that period. Over the same period, the Ukies have had about 100K troops out training with Nato countries while they stack delivered hardware. They've spent a fair bit of men and equipment defending Bakhmut, but that really does seem to be a tactical decision. Most estimates I'm seeing, from a fairly diverse set of sources, has Russian losses at 5-1 in Bakhmut. Ukie decision makers haved earned the benefit of any doubt on tactics at this point. If they believe bleeding Russia is worth it at Bakhmut, I'm willing to believe them. I keep seeing handwringing online about the Ukies not being able to afford their losses there, but I think that's based on a bad assumption. Maybe the last bad assumption going regarding Russian military capability. There's still this sense among observers that the Russians are a bottomless pit of atrition and that they can just throw meat at the problem until Ukraine runs out of bombs and bullets. I just don't see that as true. Russia has successfully employed this once in their history and only once and I think WW2 is influencing our thinking too much here on what Russia is capable of from an attrition standpoint. Of interesting note here, is that one of the key reasons the Russians were able to do this in WW2 was lend-lease. Without that 11.3 billion in equipment (180 billion adjusted for inflation), does Russia win in the east?
They're already stretched well beyond breaking in their ability to keep up with equipment and ammunition demands. Russian tank building capacity is roughly 20 new units per month, with the ability to refurbish maybe 40 older units per month and they started this shit show with about 2000-2500. They're losing 150+ units a month and the refurbished units doing the bulk of the replacing, lack modern equipment that are necessary to maintain anything resembling parity with Nato spec units the Ukies are receiving.
Russia has already drastically reduced their shell usage over the last 8 months, from about 60K shells per day to about 10K currently according to recent estimates. These are also mostly soviet era stocks that they're into now, so older tech with way, way less precision. Again the estimate I keep seeing referred to is 8-12 Russian shells needed to hit a target that Nato supplied kit requires 1-2 shells to hit. So the Ukies firing 3K modern shells out of modern arty systems actually holds a measure of artillery superiority (which can be seen in the Russian inability to use their rolling fire doctrine to any advantage at all since the Ukies started receiving the 777's and other nato arty pieces ~8 months ago). This doesn't support the idea of the Russians being able to win an attrition war either.
None of that is to say that the Ukies & Nato don't have their supply issues. Even 3K shells a day and Ukie man & equipment losses are hard to maintain without gutting supplies for nato militaries (which they won't do). But nato nations have the capability to ramp production and dig way deeper than the Russians as long as their is the financial will for nato to cover the tab. 5-1 losses is unsustainable for the Russian military, 1-5 is sustainable for the Ukies as long as the west is willing to pay the bill.
