Now, he said, the Russians have a manpower advantage of around five to one. Only about 20% of the casualties his battalion takes are replaced by new recruits, and the mobilized men who arrive tend to be older than those who volunteered at the start of the war. As in other brigades, the average age of infantrymen has ticked up over 40.
Ukrainian gambit is that taking land gives them negotiating table chips, while the land that they are sacrificing is land that would be given to Russia in a negotiation anyway. They’re banking on the fact they’re not actually losing anything and that gains past a certain point are something Russia wouldn’t want anyway since they couldn’t keep/occupy the land that isn’t majority russian-ethnicity in a reasonably stable way.
I think it probably means the thing they care about more in negotiations is policy. They’ll give the russian land back and let them keep donbass/crimea but will want nato membership as a trade off and safety guarantee or something in order to sell the loss of those territories as acceptable.
NATO ain’t gonna take you, hun