Putin’s information bubble is a very interesting phenomenon. He never uses Internet. For anything. Ever. So, all OSINT goes completely missing on him.

His aides probably do print blog texts off the Internet for him to read in paper format, but of course those can be hand-picked and even altered to suit the aide’s needs. Atop that, Putin puts a high emphasis on trustworthiness when choosing aides. Skill is much less important than loyalty. And it looks very much like the definition of trustworthiness is that the aide’s reports show roughly the same data as other aides’ reports. The current aides give him strongly falsified reports and anyone writing something contradictory gets sacked.

This means, Putin’s understanding of many situations is extremely skewed, because he only receives information through his aides and his country’s official news. It is likely that he is being told highly inflated numbers for Ukrainian losses. Or, I’d be very surprised if the numbers weren’t inflated at all, and the only question is to what extent they are exaggerated.

If his understanding of the relative losses is strongly skewed, the strategy you’re guessing makes sense.