They also force Russia to dedicate tactically significant resources to a region far away. This in turn weighs on logistics.
It also weighs on morale, every time Ukraine can show that Russia is not as invincible as they like their opponents to believe it helps their adversaries, who in turn can also apply more pressure on the Russian military war machine.
Allies of Russia mainly use Russian military equipment and in the current situation, exports of the Russian military industrial complex are 0 or below (they buy back previously sold equipment). So buyers of this equipment start looking for other sources of equipment, which many other countries will gladly supply. Causing the customer base of the Russian manufacturers to shrink, making development and production more expensive and alternatives more interesting. A lost customer here is usually lost for decades of not forever.
Because all the future conflicts that where prepared for where low intensity high tech skirmishes, or curb stomping terrorists in caves.
Too many people in the decision tree believed that high intensity positional warfare that uses over 10k shells a day where a thing of the past.
Just look at the stats of south Korea’s artillery stockpiles. They know how to party.
If you want to field even 20pct of the artillery at war strength 800 artillery pieces that each fire 10 shells a day. That would be 8K shells a day.
If you calculate for a 90 day engagement you would need a stockpile of 720.000 shells. Based on the fact north Korea supplied several million shells to Russia, and south Korea loaned 500k shells to the US, you can imagine the stockpile south Korea has will also be several million shells. But in Europe, ammo stockpiles run dry with 2 weeks of bombing Libya.
And it is not as if military leadership was not yelling about this. But the peace dividend was spent on other stuff than war stocks. While Russia stocked it’s war machine (and funded super yachts).
We all have to thank our lucky stars for the corruption in Russia… because if they would have spent effectively and organized effectively and actually trained. They would have rolled up to the Polish border.