The shift reportedly includes general practitioners, paramedics, and nurses who are being sent into trenches with assault rifles. This decision follows a spike in Russian casualties caused by frequent Ukrainian drone strikes.

In my opinion one reasonable way of determining whether a military has effectively collapsed or not is to answer the question "Can the military make use of its healthcare staff for anything more useful than charging machine gun nests and dying?"

If the answer is no, then the military is essentially less effective than even a guerilla style insurgency force where at least the inability to concentrate force without devastating losses is recognized and integrated into tactics with regards to survivability. Here russia is just pretending it can still fight a ground war against a near peer opponent without it just being a brutal death lottery for everyone involved on the russian side...