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Notes -
So I'm an Amateur SupCom (Supreme Commander: Forges Alliance) player... so even further afield.
But applying my non-existent expertise...
Russia hasn't been leading an "Offensive". And the maybe 10-20 km they've creeped over the past 3 months isn't anything that could "Culminate"
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Russia has avoided all logic of maneuver warfare since about april-may, all real dynamic movement has been near non-existent, and they've "Advanced" at the slowest imaginable snails pace, even for less than full mobilization forces they have.
None of this makes sense unless you internalize the most most important stat of the war: Russian Artillery outnumbers Ukrainian artillery 10-1.
This is a scenario that there isn't really a famous war of it happening before, or atleast not one where its penetrated pop culture But it happens all the bloody time in SupCom.
Basically when you have a numerically comparable force (not outnumbered 3-1) a massive artillery advantage, and some densive capability sufficient to resist a counter-attack you can creep up to territory your opponent HAS to defend, and force them to occupy and maneuver in it under constant bombardment of your artillery.
The obvious counter to this is just to retreat slightly out of range of the artillery, let there be a large no man's land between you, and then do fast maneuvers back and forth to attack, counter attack, parry across that land so you're still fighting the enemy and not ceding net territory, but you spend a minimum of time exposed to the artillery.
The problem is there's a lot of territory you just have to defend.
Ukraine cannot just pull back off the Donbass... this isn't a grand theater war where Russia is trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine no matter what, and provinces can be sacrificed in gambits If Russia takes all the Donbass, has their land bridge, etc. They're liable just to declare victory and dig in and that'd be it... Worse the Ukrainian army is a good percentage people conscripted in the past 6 months... you start maneuvering them around too much, a lot will take that opportunity to get lost... maybe across a border.
So what do you do when you can't cede a territory, can't hold it without being overwhelmed with artillery, and can't take out the artillery?
You endure the artillery.
I've seen maybe hundreds of players design these plays where their opponent is forced to just feed units into artillery fire, and tie up tons of resources in these attrition scenarios... and none of them ever really looked like they were moving and looked like draws to untrained eyes... then the announcer would point out the kill loss ratio.
This also allowed the player with the artillery to hold a territory with a relatively small force since the enemy's cumulatively much larger stock of units is being defeated in detail over time, and never has enough in position at once to actually attack.
Some players make big strategic sacrifices to break off from this scenario, some do really risking low numbers attacks that sometimes work, some pull of something cool with airpower.
But this is really the opposite of an offensive in the classical sense... you're forcing your opponent into a situation where they have to aggress against you but can't, and ergo suffer high attrition.
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But the big thing is this is the opposite of an offensive which can culminate. Russia is basically fighting defensively as far as I can tell and their little territorial gains exist basically to force the Ukrainians to stay at the front, and not fall back out of arty range. Even we saw how quickly Russian divisions can move in the south of Ukraine at the start of the war... Pretty much all the southern territory was taken in a month... now a tenth of that, with all the northern forces redeployed there, have been static for 4 months? If Russia was trying to do big maneuver warfare they'd either be succeeding or failing and those lines would be moving in every direction. The fact the map looks so stagnant pretty much means they have to be pursuing semi-static tactics.
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