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Yeah, this narrative wasn't quite so. Whomever from CD and I remember things differently.
This has some tropes characteristic of the revisionism that Russia tried to interject about the 2022 mobilizations and the 2023 offensive afterwards, both in ignoring the cause of change in the early 2023 and recharacterizing the Ukrainian limitation. Early 2023 is a when the end-2022 Russian mobilization filled the gaps that had been present from the start of the 2022 invasion due to Putin's decision not to actual meet doctrinal manning levels. Both of these elements- the lack of manning and the mobilization- were major Russian scandals that Russia has tried to dismiss / divert attention from since. In contrast, the Ukrainian mobilization challenge in early 2023 was the same as in 2022- equipment, especially artillery ammunition limiting fieldable forces, rather than manpower.
Further, the idea that the Spring 2023 counteroffensive was supposed to lead to an end of the war a year later is, ahem, fanciful. When one looks at the actual direction of advance, scope of the Spring 2023 counteroffensive wasn't any sort of military victory- it was an attempt southward to pressure the Russian logistics chain over the land-route to Crimea. This had value, but it was explicitly a long-war strategy to cause logistical complications, not a short-term 2024 military victory, not an attempt to drive the Russians out of eastern Ukraine.
Again, this narrative wasn't so.
I am familiar with Michael Kofman, have been following him since the war started, and this isn't really capturing his key themes from 2023, or his assessments of the underlying issues at the time of the counter-offensive or afterwards. Kofman was far more focused on the debilitating equipment issues, including special equipment losses and limitations. One of this points at the time was that the Ukrainians were preserving people rather than spending them because of their need of landmine clearing equipment, the consequences of western limitations to go after helicopter airbases, cluster munitions, and so on- but not manpower disaster, and certainly not 'they thought they would take no losses.'
Michael Kofman has made many critiques of the Ukrainian manpower issues, and he's absolutely on record having advocated for more conscription sooner to not have problems now, but not on the basis that the counter offensive continued until they ran out of troops in 2023 / that the Ukrainians never planned to take losses / that the losses were disastrous.
The intensity argument doesn't quite match the narrative you think it does. The intensity equivalence isn't Russia at the start of the war- it's Russia during during the Kharkiv offensive at the end of 2022.
This is just attrition looks like if you aggressively do it faster in a shorter period of time. Both the gains, and the casualties, are accelerated. In terms of scope and scale, though, this is much more like the Kherson offensive in terms of scope and territory changing.
Ukraine's manpower shortage is absolutely contributing to making things worse, it is very relevant, and the loses of terrain are indeed notable- but the terrain was always going to be lost. Most of the Ukraine War has been Russia making consistent gains in the area it chooses to focus in, with the Ukrainians trying to make it take time and inflict high casualties in the process, and the counter-offensives have typically followed a similar pattern of penetrations but not dramatic breakthroughs (Kharkiv being a singular exception).
Not really. When attrition collapses approaches- when the state looses the ability to resist- the casualties of the attacker tend to plummet, not scale upward.
This is because attrition has compromised the ability of the defender to bring their systems and networks back. Attriting an air defense network allows you to bring air power to bear against defenses for more effective neutralization, attriting the logistics network deprives the enemy of maneuver or ability to reinforce and makes them easier to flank to attack advantageously, attriting enemy artillery lets your own operate more freely to suppress the enemy more, etc. etc. etc.
The 'high surge then collapse' runup model is less about attrition and more of climatic battles for all-or-nothing standup fights. Those do acctionally happen, but that is pretty clearly not what Ukraine is doing in the Donbas (hence why the counter-attack forces went into Kursk, where they have not faced a climatic destruction).
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