SpeedyInTexas: "Ukraine doesn’t need an ‘offensive’. They want to avoid any climactic battle.
Cede ground if necessary and pull back."
You might recognize this as the "Joe Johnson strategy", also advocated by Longstreet, but incomprehensible to more aggressive leaders like Davis, Lee and, most notoriously, John Bell Hood.
As a result, Old Joe was fired for it at Atlanta, in July, after which John Bell Hood aggressively destroyed the Army of Tennessee at Franklin and Nashville.
I think historians today see Johnson's strategy as the only one which could have won that war, or at least fought it to a negotiated settlement.
Old Joe was much admired by Grant and Sherman, Grant writing of him:
"For my own part, I think that Johnston's tactics were right.Post-war, Johnson and Sherman became friends, and Johnson was a pallbearer at Sherman's funeral, in February 1891, from which, exposed in the cold weather, Johnson caught cold, then pneumonia and died 10 days later.
Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it finally did close, would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a settlement."