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Who desires that framing seems to depend largely upon who's currently in possession of the podunk towns -- I certainly saw Bakhmut referred to this way in Western media as Russia was on the cusp of occupying it; ie. "Look how hard it has been for Russia to capture this one little town, they are so dumb/ineffectual/whatever". Now that Ukraine is making progress (?) on retaking it's bombed out husk it has suddenly been framed as a more important place. I have limited exposure to Russian/Ukrainian media, so IDK how it's framed to the people who are actually getting killed over it.
I believe it -- just that it seems not-unreasonable to think that this might change at some point before NATO tires of spending single digit percentages of its military budget on having other people kill Russians for them? "Ukraine is little puppy, we are big bear" seems like a pretty easy sell for the Russian leadership?
None of this is working, at all, though? "Current Thing" support for weapons delivery/profile flags seems strong as ever -- and even if it weren't there would be a long ways to go before public opinion stopped the Pentagon from doing as they please, no?
I mean it's probably the only plan -- full retreat would be the end of Putin I should think.
You're confusing propaganda narrative for assessment of value.
Bakhmut was referred to as strategically insignificant by non-Russian analysts because it's capture was (correctly) analyzed as not going to allow Russia the sort of breakthrough or impact to Ukrainian offenses to meaningfully change the strategic posture in a way to facilitate more effective follow-on Russian operations. Early in the war, Bakhmut falling was a pre-requisite for the Russians having a pincer attack that threatened the entire Ukrainian position in the Donetsk, one of the key territories in Russia's nominal casus belli for the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk separatists they claimed to be fighting for. As a pincer at a theater level, it would have allowed the Russians to deny the pocket access to artillery, given localized air superiority, and greatly diminished the ability of the Ukrainians to defend, as we saw earlier in the summer elsewhere during the grinding artillery offensive. After Kharkiv, the Russians lost both the territory and the logistics hubs required for any sort of pincer, negating the potential for overlapping artillery to keep out the Ukrainian artillery, greatly limiting the effectiveness of aviation, and so on. Without the second pincer to weaken the Ukrainian defenses by denying them safe space for artillery in the 'pocket', the advance from Kherson became the same general prospects as the advance into Kherson, which was not only massively wasteful in manpower, but the political consequences ended up resulting in a mutiny. Analysts didn't know the later would happen, but they were completely correct about the former, hence why it was a fight for a city and not what was beyond because the city became it's own target regardless of anything else.
By contrast, referring to the current offensive as over (non-specific, temporally isolated, inherently insignificant) podunk farms ignores that the podunk farms are simply where a defensive line is that- if broken, would radically reshape the viability of follow-on operations in war-altering ways. Namely, that the southern offensive threatened to reach the black sea, or at least put it into artillery range, thus cutting off land-based resupply of Crimea. Russia was highly dependent on the Crimean bridge to move forces and supply the Crimean peninsula, a logistics lift which was throttled by the bridge attacks but somewhat mitigated by the land corridor. Compromising that land corridor forces the Russians to be far more dependent on a far more limited supply chain itself still vulnerable to disruption, and by limiting that supply chain would enabled the Ukrainians to have future more favorable operations against the Russians in those undersupplied areas (i.e. by going from the sea and then west, towards the peninsula's opening).
The Ukrainians don't/didn't care where particularly the southern lines were breached, but no matter where it was, it would be through podunk farms. Framing the offensive as over podunk farms, as opposed to being over what the podunk farms are in the way towards, is a propaganda framing, not an analysis of what the target.
And yet, the Russians don't believe this (which I believe is correct), and are focusing their propaganda efforts at the west instead (which is reflected in the prevalence of themes and prioritization of efforts).
The question is not whether you think the Russians are doing the sensible thing. The war was not a sensible thing. The question is what the Russians are doing, and how we might know it.
'At all' is totalizing language that would be inherently wrong. There are anti-war / 'don't support the Ukrainians' movements, and there have been diplomatic flareups between the western coalition that Russia has signal-boosted and amplified.
It is not working enough at the moment, but that's why the Russians are playing for time in Ukraine while trying to shape the western information sphere via propaganda over time.
Hence why they are strategically playing to the defensive and buying time and going after the long-term viability of the Ukrainian government (which would collapse without Western aid).
The Russian wish-fantasy-strategy is that someone like Donald Trump comes into power on a wave of discontent (that the Russians help amplify), and once in power overrules the military / fundamentally breaks the alliance / does things that Russia would like.
It doesn't matter that even Donald Trump didn't do that when in office, that's just what the Russian hail mary is, and Putin is well into hail-mary territory.
Putin still has full control of the internal security forces, and the ability to shoot dissenters. He'll be paranoid and miserable, but it's not like he'll lose an election. Wagner's mutiny was worse for showing how little the military was able/willing to stop it, not for it's (in)ability to take over Moscow or a lack of government control of the internal security services. Moscow would have been bloody and embarrasing, but not the end of Putin for the same reason that the war itself isn't: Putin has made all his potential successors complicit, so that they would share his fate, so they have an interest in avoiding it.
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