Earlier in the war, Ukraine's leadership was more equivocal about pitched battles with high casualties. There's no second-guessing this time. Some analysts say it makes sense strategically.
An analysis by two leading military analysts published last month by the Foreign Policy Research Institute vindicated the attritional fighting. The pitched battle weakened the Russian Army enough for two Ukrainian counterattacks in the fall to succeed, wrote the analysts, Rob Lee and Michael Kofman. Those offensives, in the Kharkiv region in the north and Kherson in the south, delivered two of the most embarrassing defeats to the war effort by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. "The amount of ammunition Russia expended and the casualties they took set up the Russian Army for failure," Mr. Lee said in an…