My opinion is that since, like, day 4 of the invasion, Russia has been purely improvising. Improvising obviously on the battlefield, but also flat out improvising the objectives and even the purpose of the invasion. This whole thing only makes sense if Kyiv had capitulated almost immediately and ceded the whole country to Russia. It went wrong, but Russia couldn't just walk away from an invasion involving over 100,000 troops, even if they were only meant to be a bluff...Putin had to double down. What Russia is left with now, at best and probably only temporarily, is a semi-destroyed portion of Ukraine with little strategic value. After losing Kherson and full control of the Dnipro, Russia's stolen territory isn't worth the body count, IMO, even with the rosiest of spectacles. So the war is now reduced to trying, and mostly failing, to avoid total humiliation - mostly the personal humiliation of Vladimir Putin, and mitigating the genuine national security risk of looking weak ON TOP of an utterly decimated armed forces in a country with a lot of borders and a lot of concentrated ethnic groups in far flung regions. Russia is not defending the captured territory in eastern Ukraine, rather they are just trying to prevent Ukraine from having it and trying to avoid the appearance of complete collapse.
This was supposed to go like Crimea and Georgia, a clever ruse with the threat of overwhelming force - but Ukraine and NATO called the bluff and here we are. The most pathetic thing about all of this was that I don't think Putin actually cares about Russians (clearly not based on ridiculous rate that he's willing to sacrifice them) but only about his own sort of mythology. His self image as an 'elected' leader and his ludicrous, obsessive adherence to maintaining plausible deniability is the only thing keeping him from going completely off the rails and becoming Hitler V2.0.
