And I totally get where you're coming from. But even if we agree with that standard, some people may argue that it's still not clear who won. After all, Russia is not the only country that had objectives before this thing started; so did Ukraine. One of Ukraine’s central objectives, if you believe Zelensky and his officials, was to preserve the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. They're clearly going to fail at that. So now we're left to rank which central objectives are more important, since one could argue both sides failed to meet some of them. I think on the whole that Russia's failure to bring Ukraine back into its strategic dominion is more relevant, and so on this criterion I would say that Russia lost.
But more broadly, and to get philosophical for a second, I don't think there's a fixed or Platonic definition for victory in warfare, or for any other concept for that matter (since I reject Platonism categorically). I think the meaning of victory is tentative and provisional. It's subject to social, political, and historical conditions. A victory in one time and place might be considered a defeat in another. So I myself reserve judgment on who "won" the war, because I don't think it's a meaningful discussion to begin with. I'm more interested in how this war will shape the future of the world, economically, politically, strategically.
Given the benefit of hindsight, I would have chosen exactly the strategy the Russians have picked now: get the Donbas, land bridge to Crimea, destroy Ukraine's military by the summer.
