Russian generals: Hey, so we're behind in terms of tactics, intelligence, morale, and we're constantly short on manpower. We've been fighting this thing for years now, and the distance we've penetrated into Ukraine is shorter in a lot of places than some of the longer footraces. And the more Western countries take this whole thing seriously, the more of their functionally infinite economic resources they're going to devote to making sure we keep losing. We have figured out one good thing we can do, though: Cheap drone munitions including a lot of decoys, just spamming to overwhelm the defenses, since a lot of Western defenses are organized around single-shot ordnance that costs a ton of money. If we can launch 30 drones that each cost $15k, and it costs $3 million to shoot down each one and there aren't even all that many of those $3 million missiles in the launcher, we can overwhelm the defenses and get some bombing done.
It doesn't help too much with the war, but we can at least kill some civilians, which everyone knows is always productive. So: The plan is to make sure the West's focus is elsewhere so they don't start committing lots of energy and resources to us as an issue, and attack Ukraine focusing on cheap ordnance so that what resources they do commit are going to be as disadvantaged as possible.
Putin: Or, hear me out here,