>>521148722
>The "good reason" they're using this stuff is because all their other stuff is blown up.
Nope, there have been plenty of reports by a wide variety of independent sources using various methodologies to estimate Russia's armor production, loss rates, and reserves, and they universally conclude that Russia is producing more armored vehicles than they are losing and have been for some time. Nobody who isn't a blatant propagandist is claiming Russia doesn't have a sizable reserve of armored vehicles.
>>521148927
>Russia is (...) seriously struggling to win
not really, they are just taking a long time, taking a long time to do something doesn't mean it's hard, you might just be being very methodical and taking your time to make sure you do it right the first time so you don't have to go back and fix things after you're done.
>in a conventional war
If they went quickly they'd have to fight an insurgency instead of a conventional war. They realized pretty early on that an insurgency in Ukraine would be extremely nasty, far worse than Afghans or Chechens. So if they are going to win and avoid fighting against an insurgency, they need to keep the war conventional until Ukraine runs out of men who are willing to fight.
>against a technologically equivalent but numerically inferior foe.
In most ways Ukraine is technologically inferior. They're much closer to parity than a lot of conflicts fought in recent decades, but they're still well behind Russia, even with the help from their western backers. The much more important disparities are in logistics, command and control, morale, force generation, and other things like those. Russia's ability to actually take the resources they have and conduct combat operations with them is far beyond the Ukrainian's ability to do the same.