@Okceg The trouble with the 'slow and steady' (a full month ago they only had to advance 6km to fully encircle Bakhmut apparently) approach, is that it is often punctuated by bouts of not so slow and not so steady moves in the wrong direction. Ukraine gained considerably more territory in a couple of days in Kharkiv, than Russia has gained in 8 months of slow and steady.
Even if their goal is limited to seizing the 4 annexed-on-paper territories, and not taking any additional Ukrainian territory, at the current rate of advance, and making the huge assumption of no large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensives, Russia would need until 2025 to take Donetsk alone (and from memory Prigozhin himself offered a similar timeline). To then take Zhaporizhzhia as well, and cross the Dnieper again but this time without its bridges, and take Kherson again, how many more years would that be expected to take? Zaphorizhzhia, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk, are all far bigger cities than Bakhmut. Personally I can't see any hope of the Bakhmut strategy succeeding in those cities.
