War is run bureaucratically and with political aims in mind, so it doesn't proceed with the efficiency you might be able to apply to a chess match or a video game.

If you examine what happens on the front lines of the Ukraine conflict in day-by-day summaries(of which there are a few Youtubers who regularly post videos), by this point in the war, both sides have some degree of war exhaustion. They don't want to commit to major offensives to claim or reclaim territory. So, why is there no cease fire? Why were the Russian energy industries targeted now, and not years ago? It's the politics.

In the early part of the war, it was unclear that Ukraine would hold out; nobody wants to support a "loser" so this was really a test of national strength, that the government held together and its ministers didn't flee right away. When that passed, support came flowing in, because there are opportunistic reasons to destabilize Russia while putting Ukraine on a debt leash. But oversupplying Ukraine is not the game: it has to be drawn out so that the fight remains a stalemate, and the tendency is to send over old junkers and munitions first; when a war stays hot, ammo stockpiles from peacetime deplete rapidly, and this has led to a spinup in production of artillery rounds in the US solely to supply Ukraine. And the drone strategy of "cheap, light, disposable" was not preferred in peacetime: going big and expensive is attractive when you are trying to max out your budget so that it doesn't get taken away. Hence, Ukraine's command structure has had to figure out how to be competitive on its own.

The escalation in targets is a gradual thing. The early war was intended to be a bloodless takeover. When that didn't work, Russia moved towards destruction of civilian infrastructure, demoralization and subjugation. Russia's fighting doctrine and equipment favors this - it is not precise like the NATO stuff. On the Ukrainian side, the allies were cautioning against escalating in kind, but as the equipment came in and the front line situation stabilized, they became more willing to escalate. I would put the turning point of this as when they took down bridges in Crimea, cutting off supply lines to the forces across the river. The thing is, the front lines have still barely moved, and this is fine for Ukraine - the war has strengthened their national integrity - but terrible for Russia, because the Russian casus belli is that the troops have to come home with gains. That is coming directly from Putin: the war is conducted by way of being a scapegoat for domestic problems like the collapse in oil prices back in 2020. It has to succeed, or else Putin looks like a weak leader, and his power starts to evaporate. So the commanding officers, valuing their jobs and livelihoods, and asked to achieve the impossible, repeatedly send out an attack, lose almost everything, but get a few meters of progress for a few days. It is pointless: they are not going to succeed, but neither are they going to stop. The only way this will stop is if Putin passes away or the domestic situation forces the troops to come back, and with the energy infrastructure getting wiped out, the latter is impending.