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The counteroffensive was politically inevitable. Even if Russia had already shown to have lost practically all its offensive potential, Ukraine still had to show its best effort to liberate the occupied territories to advance the war towards a negotiated settlement. A counteroffensive that makes meager gains and is ground to a halt with a lot of losses on both sides is probably counterintuitively the quickest way to a political resolution of the war:
if it's quickly blunted by the Russian defenses, it will reignite Russian jingoism, leading to the next phase in the war where Russia tries to advance further into Ukraine again
if it makes politically significant gains (i.e., cuts through the land bridge), then the total liberation of Ukrainian territory can be measured in about several more similar packages of military aid. That is, it's relatively affordable, but will take several more years. You can fit lots of black swans into several more years
of course, if Ukraine manages to push Russian forces all the way to its 2013 borders in one fell swoop, it's a total victory that makes further negotiations irrelevant, but so far it doesn't look like it's going to happen
But if Ukraine's hopes and dreams of recovering the occupied territories via military force are shown to be just those, then the war can move to the next phase, the phase of resolution. And I'm not sure Ukraine and its allies have the same goals in mind:
there's the Indo-Pakistani solution, with both countries saturating the recognized border and the line of actual control with troops in case the other side tries something, with regular standoffs and border skirmishes, if not additional wars/special operations down the line
there's the "cutting the losses" solution, with Ukraine ceding the occupied territories in exchange for security guarantees and Russian frozen foreign currency reserves
The old EU prefers the latter. The US prefers the former, Pakistan has successfully kept India busy for 75 years now. The new EU prefers the former as well, as Russia that is permanently busy with Ukraine won't have time for them. Which one Ukraine itself prefers? Does it have enough power to influence the outcome? I think we'll see in a year or so, when its northern border with Russia is reinforced on both sides and makes raids impossible.
Were those raids ever anything other than PR for Western media and Ukrainian domestic jingoism? They generate lots of media attention and allows headlines in Europe to the tune of "partisans advancing into Moscow" which are always useful as average normie has lost all interest in the war other than seeing the occasional headline.
Tie down Russian forces and equipment defending large stretches of land would be the biggest "real" reason. PR and morale reasons are definitely valuable as well.
I am not so convinced by this. Ukrainians also have to tie down forces and equipment to create such a reaction. They cannot use their air assets as much so rapid deployment of force is even more difficult for them.
Substantially less than the Russians have to. Russia is forced to defend a huge area of land against raiding forces that are able to strike pretty much anywhere along it and must defend in sufficient strength to withstand the raiding forces, who will simply withdraw before serious reinforcements are able to be brought to bear against them. The raiders, able to choose the time and place of the battle, need only to be strong at one point, whereas the defender must be strong everywhere they wish to defend.
You don't even need to launch many raids to achieve this effect, meaning you don't really need to care about rapid redeployment, in fact your goal should be to launch the minimum number of raids that you can in order to achieve the desired effect. The point is to present a threat that your opponent cannot ignore and that they must therefore dedicate a disproportionate amount of resources to ensure their security, the raiders should make themselves the biggest nuisance they possibly can, while keeping losses to a minimum in order to maintain this effect for as long as possible.
If Russians start maintaining a large military presence in the northern border then all of these points start applying to Ukraine equally as well. Russians can also now launch operations from the North and Ukraine has to defend.
Overall I believe actions that might force further mobilisation in Russia are not good for Ukraine. They are massively benefitting from Russian leadership’s desire to make the war invisible to daily lives of ordinary Russians, and because of this they are able to keep parity in soldier numbers against a much more populous rival.
They could, but they probably won't. Russia has shown zero real desire to start seriously engaging along another front since they withdrew from north of Kiev. More likely Russia sends some bottom of the barrel troops to hold the line, perhaps even resorting to sending conscripts, but Putin seems very scared of involving any of them in the war, even when the law says he could. Offensive operations require motivated troops, which Russia has been burning through with alacrity and they'd be better used fighting somewhere that matters. Overall the Ukrainians running the war have shown themselves to be competent, they've mostly been making sensible moves on the macro level, they know the situation on the ground better than probably anyone else and I don't think they'd do something as big as launching raids into Russia unless they felt that it was really advantageous.
Further mobilisation is going to happen regardless, the only thing that's going to stop another wave of mobilisation is if one side folds before it gets to that, which seems exceedingly unlikely at this point. Or Putin decides that it's too politically risky and he'd rather lose the war, which also seems unlikely. You don't win wars by being afraid of seriously hurting your enemy, you do so by shattering their will or ability to fight. Putin has made it clear that the roads to those objectives are paved with dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons.
The number of able bodied men within a country and the number of soldiers a country can field are not the same. Again and again in this conflict people act as if Russia is "going easy" on Ukraine, rather than fighting to the best of the ability that the political leadership feels it can. Putin is very clearly scared of the domestic consequences of acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and putting Russia onto a real war footing, delaying important decisions like mobilisation or major withdrawals until it is impossible to do so any longer. Putin isn't afraid of losing this war by having Ukrainian tanks rolling into Moscow, he's afraid of being hung from a lamppost by his own people. Ukraines total population is smaller, but has a far higher level of motivation per capita than Russia does and will be able to mobilise a much greater proportion of society towards fighting the war.
I think you're underselling it - the Russian position has been, since before the conflict even started, that they view western missile interdiction systems being placed in Ukraine as an existential threat (as they believe it would give the US government the false impression that they could initiate a nuclear exchange without reprisal). There aren't just dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons on those roads - there are plenty of mushroom clouds as well.
I don't think that Putin is scared of the domestic consequences - his approval rating has gone up since the conflict started. Hell, he's actually doing substantially better in terms of approval rating than Biden is. I find it rather amusing that your framing of this paints a picture of Putin's government being substantially more beholden to and dependent upon public opinion than the USA, but at the same time I don't think that's actually true. I think a far more likely motivation for Putin holding forces back in reserve is to prepare for a potential NATO escalation that involves US troops being deployed in force, and this matches up to both the statements of the Russian government and the current situation on the ground.
Their position was blatant posturing then, it's blatant posturing now. The Russian leadership is not stupid and they are not suicidal, the use of nuclear weapons, in any quantity, by Russia in this war is the fastest way for them to lose this war and in ways infinitely worse for the Russian leadership than any loss that can be inflicted on them upon the battlefield in Ukraine. The very best outcome that can be reasonably expected is that Russia loses the last friendly relations they currently have, as China (a nation very strongly invested in maintaining the nuclear taboo) turns against Russia and the country becomes a true pariah, followed not long after by near complete economic collapse. The worst outcome is that the entire Russian leadership and everyone they care about dies, either in a blinding flash of light, or from an agonizingly protracted death from radiation poisoning, along with their entire civilisation. Russia won't use nuclear weapons until tanks are hours away from Moscow and even then it's not terribly likely beyond tactical nuclear weapons, the consequences of using nuclear weapons in the modern age are, in almost every case, an order of magnitude worse than the consequences of not using them.
Russia is attempting to leverage its ridiculously oversized nuclear arsenal to frighten civilians in the west, ignorant of nuclear strategy, into pressuring western leaders to reduce support for Ukraine. They've put down "red line" after "red line" only to do nothing when they are crossed, because they know the consequences if they do try and play the nuclear card and they want absolutely nothing to do with it. The strategy hasn't been a total failure, the threats give those in the west eager for reasons to ditch Ukraine an argument they can trot out and I'm fairly certain it's at least partially responsible for the slow roll out of western weapons to Ukraine, but I'd personally put that down more towards western politicians trying to win the war with the least possible expense, not understanding that this strategy will instead prolong the war.
If you believe that then I've got a bridge to sell you. The US isn't putting serious numbers of boots on the ground in Ukraine, most you'd possibly see is the USAF deployed to do some Desert Storm type missions in support of the Ukrainians on the ground, but that's extremely unlikely. The reality is that the American establishment simply does not care enough about Russia to do something like that, not when China is eyeing Taiwan and trying to extend its influence. Russia has been effectively contained, even if they win in Ukraine they're spent for a generation at least, probably forever. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden has in all but name, Europe is collectively rearming in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and will be able to deal with Russia without having to heavily rely on american intervention. Of course the US would prefer a Ukrainian victory (although they're divided internally over what that looks like), but they're not willing to expend much to achieve that victory and certainly not American blood.
The position of an autocrat is a strange one, they are less beholden to their people than leaders in more democratic societies, but are simultaneously in greater fear of them. The threshold for discontent that would cause a leader to be replaced in a democratic society may be far lower than that found in autocratic societies, however a similar relationship exists in terms of the consequences for the deposed leader. Democratic leaders get to retire into private life, autocrats are dragged out of pipes and sodomised to death with bayonets. The fate of Gaddafi apparently deeply affected Putin and has influenced much of his thinking since, Tsar Nicholas the second probably also weighs quite heavily on his mind these days. If I were him I'd be pretty damn cautious right about now, it doesn't help that the nature of autocratic systems means they tend to stifle the warning signs until everything goes up.
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