From a Washington Post analysis by Ishaan Tharoor headlined “Putin retreats deeper into his labyrinth”:

More than a year into the war he launched in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is confronted with failure. Over months of offensives, the Russian war machine faltered badly, failing to capture Kyiv and buckling on other fronts in Ukraine’s south and east. What Putin spuriously billed as a mission to “denazify” Russia’s neighbor has turned into a set of grinding, attritional battles, punctuated by reports of Russian atrocities and war crimes.