Drones have a problem. The reason they're so effective right now is because they're dirt cheap. A $10,000 drone can take out a $10,000,000 tank. And it gets into the issue of how money isn't stuff. Because that $10,000 drone isn't made of much and can be easily pumped out pretty quickly, whereas that tank involved a massive amount of supplies. Even if you have all the money in the world, this is a losing battle.

But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.

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Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.

In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.

Leaving the price formation nuances of some US peace-time military artifacts aside, my point is that manpower a.k.a. human soldiers become more and more obsolete and should not be treated as a main criteria perhaps already in the current Russian-Ukraine conflict.

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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).

War was, remains, and will probably always be a deadly game of logistics. Even relatively small divisions of soldiers will go through literally tons of supplies per day. And so getting the stuff to supply these soldiers is essentially what war is. It's why the Russian winter is so famous a weapon in war - it's not just literally freezing invading armies, but making logistics vastly more difficult while simultaneously imposing new requirements on those logistics. This is the reason things like cities are important in war. It's not just some abstract concept of strategic/defensive value, but because they are key points for organizing and advancing logistics. And throughout this entire process humans are the key driver of your logistics, both literally and figuratively.

Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.

Well they were never aiming to occupy the entire country, the armistice negotiations were for once the decapitation attack on Kyiv succeeded they could negotiation territory annexation and a puppet government.