Of course the Russians have never lied before!
The NY Times piece is by Charlotta Gall who at times writes realistic reports from the ground in Ukraine:
"In one battle in which his unit took part, Ukrainian soldiers attacked in 10 American-made MaxxPro armored vehicles, but only one came back, he said. He showed photographs of the damaged vehicles, ripped open and burned out, which he said had been hauled back to a repair base. The soldier declined to give his name for fear of getting into trouble with his superiors."
...
"The soldier lost a 22-year-old friend, Stas, in the shelling the day before, he said, adding that in just over a month, his battalion had suffered so many dead and wounded that only 10 men remained at the front line."
Next Gall speaks to a soldier from a different unit:
"Another soldier, who joined up last year and asked to be identified only by his first name, Oleksiy, said that his unit had taken heavy losses as Russian troops directed artillery fire and aerial bombs onto their positions. “We were shot like on a shooting range,” he said. “A drone was flying above us and correcting the artillery fire.” Their positions were in former Russian positions, hemmed in by minefields, he said, and the Russian forces were able to keep them pinned down and under constant drone surveillance.
"Soldiers were running out of ammunition and water but could only sneak in and out of their positions in ones or twos, on foot, when the light was poor just before dawn and at dusk," he said.
And a third case:
Interviews with Ukrainian soldiers and a review of military surveillance footage from a recent attack indicate that many Ukrainian units are sustaining heavy losses.
A group with special operations training, deployed last month to storm Russian positions in a village on the western part of the front, took such heavy casualties in four days of assaults that they had to pull out without success.
After their armored vehicles were largely destroyed by artillery strikes on the first day, they revised their plan to approach the village on foot through a tree line that had been mined. The Ukrainians cleared a narrow path with demining explosives and the first soldiers reached the Russian positions and dropped down into a trench.
Drone footage of the event showed what happened next. Explosions suddenly detonated inside the trenches and other strikes hit soldiers on the edge of the tree line. The video footage has been verified by The New York Times.
“The trenches were mined,” said the assault commander, who uses the call sign Voskres, short for Resurrection. “Our guys started jumping in the trenches and blowing up,” he added. The Russian forces were watching, and they remotely detonated the mines, he said.
Those who managed to avoid the mines came under attack from multiple Russian kamikaze drones. “It seemed like they had a drone for each person,” he said. “The amount of equipment the Russians have, had we known, it was like mission impossible.”
Several weeks later, the village remains in Russian hands.