I never made the argument about gaining ground anywhere. What I said was that Russia’s strategy is to grind down Ukrainian army through attrition. The game theory approach for analyzing this needs to account for the fact that Russia has a vastly larger population and massive industrial capacity that Russia inherited from USSR that the west is admitting is not able to match right now.
Also, every credible source such as BBC and Mediazona show that Russian casualties peaked before Ukrainian offensive started and have been falling since. On the other hand, Ukrainian casualties have been catastrophic even by western admissions.
Again, there is no point continuing this since clearly we aren’t going to convince one another of anything. We will simply see who is right when the war ends.