Conventional Western operational doctrine has long treated the operational pause as a regrettable, primarily logistical interruption between phases of decisive action — a moment when the attacker has exceeded the culminating point and must consolidate. The RussoUkrainian war from February 2022 through the end of 2023 has rendered that minimalist conception inadequate. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship in Survival, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Defence Studies, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, and Small Wars and Insurgencies, together with RUSI tactical reports and a granular reconstruction of the campaign's first twenty-two months, this article — written in early 2024 with the benefit of two full campaign years of evidence — introduces the Operational Pause Function Typology (OPFT). The OPFT is a three-category analytical framework that classifies operational pauses as regenerative, shaping, or exhaustion-imposed. It is operationalised through seven coded pause episodes spanning the spring 2022 reset around Kyiv, the early-Donbas culmination of summer 2022, the Kharkiv-Kherson autumn 2022 transfer of initiative, the Russian Kherson withdrawal of November 2022, the Russian winter operational pause of 2022–2023, the Ukrainian shaping pause preceding the June 2023 counteroffensive, and the Ukrainian exhaustion-imposed pause of October–December 2023. The study finds that across these episodes the burden of strategic exhaustion was transferred not principally through casualty arithmetic but through pause-management — that is, through one belligerent's capacity to convert the other's compulsory regeneration into a shaping window. Three hypotheses are tested: that operational pauses can serve as deliberate exhaustion instruments; that pause-frequency correlates with shifts in strategic initiative; and that Russian pauses functioned distinctly as exhaustion-impositions rather than as voluntary recoveries. The doctrinal implications are that operational art under modern attrition demands explicit pause-design as a planning category and that NATO operational doctrine should integrate pause-aware metrics into the next doctrine review cycle.