people continue to not understand the way Russia wages war - since the time of Napoleon, Russia has embraced scorched earth and brutal attrition
Russia spent 9 months on this offensive. They got Bakhmut and lost immense combat power. Now Ukraine is readying a counter offensive.
Ukraine is the new Syria, the conflict will probably never end.
However, you're right that this is going to be a long war. At least as long as it has been going on already. And then it will probably turn into a frozen conflict like North/South Korea or "Turkish" Cyprus.
The last Ukrainian counter offensive reclaimed vast swaths of lands. It’s not unreasonable to think they could get in range of shelling Crimea.
The continued reason for Russia to take Bakhmut at that point is largely attributed to inter-service rivalry within Russia: Wagner was hell-bent on taking it, to prove greater competence than Russia military (conscript or professional) forces. Ukraine continued fighting to defend it because it gave them such favorable casualty ratios, although it has been suggested that the casualty ratio became unfavorable to Ukraine in the past few months. (Whether or not it was still a good idea for Ukraine to continue contesting Bakhmut rather than withdrawing entirely is a question that has no clear answer right now, and will be hard to properly assess likely until well after the war is over. Fog of war is hard!)
here's an appetizer for you: the Brusilov Offensive in WW1 was only a strategic operation inside a single war and Russia lost more men in that alone than have ever died on behalf of the US in all wars
It is just plain wrong that Russia won by sending more people to the meat grinder than the enemy. Im fact, deep battle, refined during the fighting at the Eastern Front in WW2, is one of the more successful maneuveur warfare doctrines out there, especially in wast territory.
Not that the current Russian army seems to be very good at applying that doctrine at the moment. But that is a different story.
As far as research goes, Wikipedia is free to use for everyone.
It is interesting to note that the most successful offensive land operation of the World War II was the Soviet offensive in August 1945 in Manchuria against the Japanese Kwantung army [0]. Within two weeks the Soviets (1.5M soldiers) annihilated Japanese army of about 1M soldiers and conquered the territory of the size of Western Europe. This together with American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were major factors in Japan finally surrendering (better be occupied by Americans than Russians).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
this is why Zelensky is talking down the value of the city, he knows too
It's called fixing. War involves, many times, sending people to certain death in a hopeless situation to provide room for manouvre and force generation.
The city previously held strategic value.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJnf_DDTfIVAddjHY3ss1...
They didn’t die trying to retake it (since it hadn’t fallen to need retaking, until arguably very recently, though even that is disputed), they died trying to pin the Russian Army/Wagner down and kill them (and did kill vast numbers of them) to prevent advances elsewhere. Just as the Ukrainian effort now to encircle the Russian forces that are still fighting the Ukrainian forces in and around the citiy is not because control of the rubble matters, but because cutting off and removing from combat the Russian forces in the rubble matters quite a bit.