I’ll just note this post that I made in January (before the invasion):
I was wrong in my expectation that Putin would try to avoid an outright war. Whether I was right that attacking Kyiv was just a distraction / hail mary pass remains to be proved one way or the other, some decades from now. But certainly it’s imaginable - since I did imagine it - that the battle in the North was never a primary focus of the attack and was, almost purely, a diversion.
And, in that sense, the war wouldn’t be shrinking. Maybe it would cover less territory but a million troops across 100 miles of land isn’t more peaceful than a million troops in 20 miles of land.
Likewise, if Russia has taken and is holding Melitopol, and Ukraine isn’t attacking it any more, then that would also not be a part of the war at the moment. In that case, the war is shrinking, not because Russia is losing, but because they won that battle and the new border has (for the moment) solidified in that region.