As a completely uncredentialed internet commenter, this looks like true maneuver warfare in action. The goal is destroying the ability of enemy forces rather than capturing territory. A subtle but important distinction. Any territory taken should be in furtherance of the main goal, and if holding the territory distracts from that it is to be abandoned.

(If numbers are anything close to believable) this has been happening inside Ukraine where defensible positions are held by Ukrainians to cause huge losses to attacking Russian forces, yet the Ukrainians don’t immediately press the local advance often to take back disputed territory. A big exception was Ukraine’s initial, and I think it will come out as disastrous armored offensive early in the war, probably a result of over confidence in thinking they’d whittled down the Russian forces that early. Looks like lessons learned as Ukraine has become much more cautious of large scale offensives. I believe last year they were assaulting Russian defensive lines inside Ukraine but (if numbers are to be believed) they were inflicting more losses on the defenders than they were taking, which is insane for assaulting static positions. Russia seems to have held those positions by simply pouring fresh troops into them over and over, sacrificing men to prevent the lines on the map from moving. Years of those kinds of losses seem to be at the point where Russia can’t pivot to defend itself in any kind of reasonable time. Even if the Ukrainians pull out, the damage by showing what they are able to do is done.

In a funny twist, at least from the snippets of news reporting (which I stress we should always be willing to rethink) it sounds like the Ukraine incursion is using a sort of variant of “deep battle” by bypassing enemy defenses with the majority of its forces. This is funny because early in the war the massive Russian tank losses from their disorganized dollar store thunder run were explained as expected deep battle losses by pro-Russians on the internet.