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I will make this post with the prior that I personally favor the Ukrainians and their cause.
I do not like warfare by media spectacle. Insomuch as this is a victory, it is giving the Ukrainians a positive media cycle. What strategic value was gained here? Has the overall situation changed much? It is very much stinks of desperation. Perhaps if you subscribe to vibes-based warfare it is a victory worth talking about. It embarasses Gerasimov (and Putin by proxy.) Who cares? Gerasimov is a nincompoop. He is a butcher and a moron, but even a moron can hold a trench line.
The memory holed offensives with the much-hyped Western equipment half a year ago destroyed much material and good men for no gain at all. I also believe that they wanted a good media cycle before the NATO conference. Zelensky's generals seem to be strategizing, not to win the war, but to get the best headlines in the west. Why are they doing this? I don't know. Why aren't they trying to win the war? Why are they spending manpower and material on what are essentially photo ops?
The only comparable situation I can imagine from history is Republican Spain throwing an excess of resources to holding Madrid, of planning offensives for newspapers and prestige. The Republicans lost for many reasons, but they lost, because they weren't fighting to win. Can the Ukrainians even win? I suspect that their American backers need political cover to continue their aid.
The Battle of Shanghai would be another partial example, where Chiang Kai-Shek intentionally spent his best men and disproportionate amounts of armor to defend Shanghai both to buy time to move industry and to try to provoke an international reaction.
Throwing resources to hold a symbolic target is more a Ukrainian thing, with the massive overcommitment at Severodonetsk causing Lysychansk to fall in short order. Overcommitting in Avdiika and Bakhmut should have cause rapid collapses of Chasiv Yar and (pokrovsk?) but the Russians barely stormed 2km out the gate before settling down for a long grind (to nowhere in Bakhmut and now encroaching Pokrovsk near Avdiika. Ukraine overcommitted to stupid defenses in those locations, and Russia arguably overcommitted in throwing bodies there too. A question could of course be 'where should Russia choose to attack', but I am uninterested in expending brain cells in even theoretical advancement of Russian goals.
If we want historical analogies of 'overcommitting offensive resources to a militarily ineffective onjective' it would probably be Stalingrad historically or even Kursk itself, where Germany pushed troops it did not have to secure a target it did not need. Hindsight showed that German commitment to those campaigns was ineffective. We may yet make such a similar assessment of Ukraines own Kursk adventure in future, but right now it is very much Ukraines ball to play.
I was just giving another example of a military decision made explicitly for international optics rather than for strategy or propaganda, etc. Doubtless there are many examples of militarily ineffective overcommitments throughout history.
Hmm. Strictly speaking even Shanghai served a real purpose: the defense, however hopeless, of a major population center. Highlighting its value for foreign audiences would be opportunistic, since foreigners were actually there. I don't doubt the Chinese, like literally every military, would have yelled for every eyeball possible to be on their plight when they are under attack.
If we are talking about attacks launched specifically for foreign support against militarily dubious targets, arguably the Oct 7 Hamas-Palestine attack counts. The now-purged Arab telegrams and social media were publishing footage of the attacks on Israelis far and wide, with calls for the rest of the Arab world or at the very least West Bank and Hezhollah to strike the visibly weak Israelis that were blown away by the Hamas onslaught. Similarly the Six Day War had the Egyptians claim they had successfully bombed the Israeli Air Force into oblivion in order to get the Syrians to attack as well. This may be a case of an attack failing to materialize that nonetheless was constructed for foreign optics, so it may hold to your example.
Thinking about it, I recall tankies at one point claiming that Indonesia attacked East Timor to curry favor with the USA, or Columbia warring against Cartels and FARC for the same reason, claiming that these peopld would not have acted without US demanding it so. Though this may fall kore as 'proxy war' instead of 'notice me senpai'.
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Although not strictly a war, the Hong Kong protest leaders made a lot of mistakes because they were thinking more about how certain actions would play in the western media than how they would look at home.
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You seem to be assuming that the most straightforward avenue "to win the war" is also the most viable for Ukraine to take. It reads as "just break the Russians' offensive head-on, bro", but in more words.
My impression is that they, in fact, believe that with the resources available they can't just break the Russians' offensive head-on, or otherwise accomplish straightforward victories that would be legible to you as "trying to win the war", so they're going for headline victories. Which aren't nothing.
Then what, exactly, is all of this western aid paying for?
What is the length of commitment necessary from the West for Ukraine to win the war?
I think the average American is happy to support Ukraine, less happy, if it proves to be a Afghanistan-level commitment. Open-ended conflicts with no clear objective is the kind of foreign entanglement I do not like.
Presumably to bleed Russia of manpower and materiel. Ukraine definitely isn't winning the war right now, but Russia's eventual victory (barring some sort of black swan event like an internal coup or civil war etc.) will definitely be a Phyrric one. Russia will likely become a client state of the Chinese (see China already bending Russia over on petroleum deals), the embarrassing performance of a lot of their systems (like the S-400) will cause tons of nation states to turn to other suppliers for arms. The widespread incompetence seen in the Russian military is unlikely to lead to significant or lasting reforms.
In the end Russia will likely secure a peace deal that gives them Crimea officially (along with a land bridge connecting it, basically the territory that Russia currently controls). But at tremendous cost to their capabilities and their place in the world order.
For me any ideas I had of Russia being able to go head to head against NATO were obviously wrong after the failed Kiev offensive at the start of the invasion. Russia clearly can't into logistics when they don't have uncontested railways within 50 km of where they're operating. Logistics is what wins wars, and has ever since the advent of modern weapons/air power/etc. have made armies unable to support themselves solely on raping and pillaging the countryside. See America's barge dedicated to making ice cream for troops in the Pacific vs. Japan not even having enough fuel for their remaining fleet by the end of WW2 (and the US also had several more ice cream barges serving the European theater).
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