The capture of Avdiivka is Russia’s first major achievement in nine months, but it doesn’t leave any side looking good. For Russia, it was a Pyrrhic victory that consumed an army’s worth of equipment and killed or mangled estimated tens of thousands of Russian men to capture a city with marginal strategic importance. Avdiivka is valuable mostly as a set piece for Vladimir Putin’s victory propaganda ahead of the upcoming presidential elections. This means that the four-month operation with the likely five-figure body count was propelled mostly by political goals. However, Ukraine revealed probl…