Russia and Ukraine

[Thumpalumpacus]

well, it did work out reasonably well in 1941 and 1942, after enough army, corp and divisional commanders have been shot, they started to not lose battles by 1943.

Probably more a result of T-34s and Il-2s hitting the battlefield in numbers rather than leadership genius, I think. (Don't get me wrong, they had some great leaders such as Chuikov or Rokossovsky). Look at the loss ratios in soldiers between the Wehrmacht, the British, the Americans, and the Soviets. That didn't improve much throughout the war in terms of KIA.

Of course, early-war Soviet POWs subsequently killed in camps probably skews those ratios too. But surrenders on the battlefields are mission-kills anyway, and the Soviets presided over several of the largest surrenders in history in the early stages. Given the brutal camp conditions, that probably inflated the Wehrmacht kill-ratio against them.

The Russian soldier has historically been a pretty stout soldier, but we're definitely not seeing that in the last twenty years or so.

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As pointed out above, their organic logistics train per division aren't structured or tailored to provide deep mobile ops. Even the peacetime ToE would limit their divisions to about 90-100 miles from the railhead, and that's before they got a bunch of stuff shot up in the last six weeks.

Ukraine is only about 300 miles wide.    If they can improve that by 50% they can do pincer movements that can cut Ukraine in 2.   

"If". Remember, they're out a couple of hundred tanks, a few hundred more AFVs, and still don't have air superiority to a reliable degree, not to mention a logistics train that by now must be taxed beyond belief, given the losses they've suffered.

They will need to merge divisions and reorganize their deployable formations.   The key is do they have people with the organizational skill to pull that off, and how long will it take?

Amalgamated divisions generally don't project the combat power of divisions trained and operated as units until quite some time after conjoining. The term that comes to mind is "scratch force"; numbers aren't everything. Esprit de corps can't be infused by an IV injection of manpower, generally. And while organizational talents are obviously required, leadership matters as much if not more in getting disparate troops from shattered units to work with unit cohesion.