"Russian meat grinder continues to grind" isn't much of a headline but you can absolutely find regular articles about the state of the war. They just don't bubble up to headline news or RT. Russia does get its share of press by bombing childrens hospitals and infrastructure.

Now compare that to a country with no navy sinking a missile cruiser or downing an AWACS jet. Or, in this case, sending trucks thousands of miles into enemy territory to destroy strategic bombers. It's simply more interesting news despite how it makes you feel.

Russia thought they could take Kyiv in less than a week. If you're judging this war by their own goals, then they absolutely failed.

A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.

That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".

There was quite a lot of Ukraine is doomed stuff at the start too. By the way this isn't really 'western media.' It's Ukrainian.

Here's CNN three days into the war for example https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-mil...

If one only had listened to Russian media you wouldn't even know there is a war, just a "special operation"!

Ukraine never claimed a 5 minutes war, Russia did claim a 3 days special military operation though, that was a good 1000+ days ago though

Russia did lose its special military operation in about 5 minutes when it totally failed it's objectives. Leading to this drawn out war of attrition against a much smaller country.