A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
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Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.
I would argue that is inaccurate: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.