Looking past the tragic waste of this conflict, I was impressed with how the Ukrainians fought last year. They punched way above their weight in many ways and while they had some tactical defeats, they did thwart the efforts of a much larger, but very clumsy, foe.
However, they have been drawn into a meat grinder style of fighting now and the new battle allows the Russians to better mask their deficiencies (logistics and combined arms warfare) and rely on their strength - artillery.
They faced the 1941 Russian last year. How much did Ivan figure out in the past few months after the withdrawal to the current lines? We will see.
Putin thought he was just going to drive across the border and the Ukraine would quickly surrender, much like what happened in Crimea. His military was obviously not prepared for the fight and the Ukrainians were much more prepared and better equipped.
Putin tried everything he could think of to avoid this conflict since he wanted to view hohos as fellow orthodox
Christians. When his hand was finally forced he entered Ukraine with an expeditionary force hoping to force some sort of negotiations. In fact that plan did work and a peace treaty was there waiting to be signed at Istanbul when NATO stepped in and forced hohos to back out of the deal. At this point, Russians are convinced that the leadership of the West is totally insane, that they have nobody they can bargain with, and that their security can only be preserved by inflicting a massive defeat on both Ukraine and nato. That is where we are now.