General conclusion:
...
At the moment, our troops are drawn into exhausting offensive battles, continuing (as I have already noted) "to play by the rules proposed by the enemy." And the point is not only and not so much in individual examples of "outstanding bungling" (such as forcing S. Donets), but in the fact that losses incurred in daily offensive battles (not ending in the defeat of the enemy) cannot be quickly compensated by trained replacements. While the enemy continues to frantically prepare its strategic reserves. And where he will deliver his blows, when our troops finally "run out of steam" - no one knows (although this can also be predicted, but I will not do this publicly ... until I do).
...
I am going to allow myself to quote some WW I notes here:
During the war, the liberal nationalist Progressists’ Utro Rossii (Russia’s Morning), published by Moscow industrialists, acquired considerable influence (circulation in 1916: 40,000-45,000; in 1917: up to 150,000). They actively pushed the subject of “German atrocities” on the military front and “German domination” in the Russian rear, while also advocating Slavophile ideas about Russia’s war aims. Most newspapers, highbrow and lowbrow, came under the influence of such ideas in the beginning of the war.
Does this sound familiar?
Tsarist censorship strictly limited the information about military operations that could appear in the press. However, it could not stem the increasing criticism of the government. One of the main features of the Russian press during the First World War was the search for an internal enemy. The press understood the aim of the war to be the transformation of the world in accordance with, depending on the publication’s politics, Slavophile, liberal-democratic, or socialist ideals.
So, next step will be the search for the "internal enemy", this explains the purging of high ranking officers, but soon "internal nazi's" and "gayrope collaborators" will be "found gloriously" by the Russian Intelligence(less) Service.
And lastly...
The fate of Russia and its tsarist government was bound up in the tragedy of World War I. Like other European powers, Russia entered the conflict with a haughty overestimation of its own military capacity and a critical underestimation of how long and costly the war would be. More than two years of total war would place enormous strain on Russia’s underdeveloped infrastructure and social conditions, contributing directly to the collapse of the tsarist regime.
I am starting to see a pattern here. The only issue is that a revolt on a nuclear power is not indifferent to the rest of the world.