According to Ukrainian figures, the Russians have lost 4300 troops so far. That's equivalent to America's losses in the
entire twenty year Iraq war. And Kyiv and Kharkiv still haven't fallen. I do wonder if modern war is at a point where armies are capable of obliterating cities but almost nobody is capable of capturing them intact. Fallujah is one of the only serious urban battles I can remember in recent times where the attackers won, and a) Iraqi insurgents who were outnumbered three-to-one are hardly the Ukrainian army and b) Fallujah is about a quarter the size of Kharkiv.
Kadyrov, the rather infamous leader of Chechnya, seems to have had one of his lead generals killed in a tank convoy that tried to approach Kyiv.
Part of Russia's attempt at a PR strategy seems to involve obviously non-starter ideas for "peace talks" like inviting the Ukrainian delegation to Belarus to discuss the demilitarisation of Ukraine. And also now Russia has shifted its nuclear posture up a gear which is obviously scary.
Regarding some other points, I saw an interesting
masto thread on neo-Nazism in Ukraine, which is real (as in most European countries) but does seem to have been quite exaggerated in scope despite all the claims still circulating around pro-Russia "leftist" circles. Also I've seen a number of takes of "oh look, these liberal pro-Ukraine hypocrites support asymmetric warfare against Russia but didn't against America", which frustrate me because, well, whilst I haven't generally supported most US interventionism, it also doesn't seem to me that fighting for the elected government of Ukraine and fighting to reimpose a brutal theocracy on Afghanistan are particularly morally equivalent even if they both come under the umbrella of asymmetric warfare against a military superpower.