The Russian military has developed a minimally sufficient form of operational art that can enable very slow operational successes against overstretched Ukrainian defenses, but Russian offensive approaches do not translate effectively to maneuver warfare at scale and will not produce a rapid Ukrainian collapse in the short to medium term. The Russian military likely developed and disseminated an operational approach to facilitate steady advances by early 2025, modeled on the capture of Avdiivka in early 2024. Russian forces have demonstrated the ability to find and exploit tactical weak points in Ukrainian positions (most often the seams between unit boundaries or attacks during Ukrainian unit rotations), interdict Ukrainian lines of communication, and slowly envelop key settlements to force Ukrainian forces to withdraw to avoid encirclement.

…

The Russian military is highly unlikely to accept, through the medium term, that it is only a positional warfare force and double down on its current capabilities in Ukraine. Militaries do not often prepare for types of wars they do not want to fight — and the Russian military did not intend to fight a positional and attritional war in Ukraine. Russian military discussions prior to 2022 emphasized the need to fight fragmented mobile battles without cohesive front lines and to quickly win a war with NATO through a combination of rapid mechanized maneuver and potential nuclear escalation, not wearing NATO down in a protracted conflict. The Russian military’s continued exaltation of the Red Army in World War II; historical focus on speed and mass at the operational level; and the desire to avoid a future positional war will all push the Russian military to attempt to reconstitute a force capable of mechanized maneuver — even if it faces limitations on its ability to do so.