Your assessment (thanks for the posts!) is quite close to my own.  In the current paradigm, attacking into prepared defences is difficult and costly for either side, even with a badly impaired enemy. With every week that goes by, the land bridge area -- the one piece of ground Putin MUST hold (beyond the Feb 2022 lines) to give his fig leaf 'victory' -- becomes more analogous to the built up Kursk salient of mid-1943;  belts of trenches (prefab bunkers?) plus mines, mines and more mine