I think one of the mistakes that pundits in the West are making is to judge Russian equipment, tactics and war aims by our standards. Russian units may be more resilient to attrition than those in the West because they are less sophisticated, require fewer specialists and/or simply value life less. Russia is prepared to use outdated equipment and ordnance because the accuracy that comes with better equipment seems to be less important to them than the sheer volume of fire.
I saw a thing highlighting Russian tactics:
Shell an area for a time - hours, days, multiple days. Not a large area necessarily, not with accurate artillery, but just hammer it for a good long time.
Maybe do a bit of shoot and scoot, but so far Ukrainian counter-battery fire has been of very limited effectiveness. Efforts to limit supplies of ordnance delivered to the Russian guns has had some success, but not actual destruction of the guns. And they seem to be working through the logistics problems a bit. The Russians are not as flush with ammo as they were a month ago, but they've got more than now than they did in that first week or two after HIMARS equipment first starting hitting the ammo unloading points.
Finally, after hours or days of utterly hammering an area, send in a platoon or two of infantry. That's all, no huge movement of thousands of soldiers, literally just one or two platoons sized groups.
If they don't face much resistance, they take the area and dig in - mind you, they are not taking large areas when they do this, just a small village, a city block or two, or a patch of forest, even just a forested strip between fields.
If they face resistance, pull the infantry back. Go back to the first step (pound it with artillery) and start over. They don't need good infantry to do this because they don't try very hard. The Russian infantry are just there to mop up survivors of the artillery barrage, and if there are too many survivors, they just pull back and let the big guns go back to work.
This is a pretty low risk strategy, and the most crucial bit - the artillery troops - are not taking much casualties at all. They can keep it up as long as they've got artillery guns and ammo. They don't need much accuracy, it does not matter so much if the target is an area some hundreds of meters across being targeted by dozens or hundreds of guns for a day or two continuously.
It is, however, a very slow strategy.
It seems like everyone is settling in for a long-duration war.
