My opinion is the Russians are wasting lives with their Donetsk efforts.
Ukraine knows the Russians are almost sure to come and is ready to kill them off.
That would be a nightmare trying to hold and they learned their lesson in the Cold War. Long term this drains them (requires constant and permanent expenditure of resources).
They have almost everything they want at this point.
Russia achieved their political goal: prevent NATO accession by Ukraine.
They have achieved their military goals, seize the ethnic Russian areas.
I fairly sure it's not Russia that has been reduced, it's Ukraine.
It's Ukraine that is hard up for troops, chasing kids down on the streets for their army, that has seen their economy contract by 1/3, a damaged infrastructure, canceled elections (essentially is a dictatorship but as so often is the case, when it's a dictator that does our bidding he's suddenly acceptable).
While Russia is mostly relying on contracted soldiers for the Ukraine campaign, their economy didn't collapse (and they aren't getting hundreds of billions in aid like Ukraine is from the EU and US), their infrastructure is fine, the political apparatus is running unaltered.
I also don't think the casualty reports floated in the West are anywhere near accurate. We don't report on Ukrainian casualties and float these inflated dreamed up numbers for Russia. Already when you had the Newsweek leaked documents casualties were reported in our MSM ~1/3 higher for Russia than actual, while Ukraine was reporting none at all. But in the meantime you've had a casualty rich counter offensive and Kursk where Ukraine managed to burn up many of their troops, and Russia reorganized, changed their tactics and is trying to conserve their forces in what they also is a long term war of attrition (they came in wanting to end this fast).
I think we're fed a line of BS because people always want to wear the winning teams jersey / shirt. You have to keep morale up and support would fade even more if people had this idea in their head that Ukraine is losing, which they factually are. So we create new ideas of what defines winning, or move the goal post.
Point being, Russia I don't think is trying all that hard at this point. They already achieved their political and military objectives.