the context people miss here is that the Russians have little incentive to bomb civilians. they are mostly operating in the separatist donbass region where LPR/DPR declared independence 8 years ago. A civil war has been raging for 8 years between West Ukraine and the Donbass separatists. The Donbass separatists are largely sympathetic to the Russian military, and so the Russian military has a strong incentive to minimize the casualties of these residents, both for propaganda purposes, as well as because they are allies. The people in Donbass speak Russian and have been getting shelled by the Ukrainian military for 8 years. They have had their language outlawed in schools and media. They have had their rights curtailed. There's plenty of evidence that shows this and it's not just random grainy cell phone footage but 1080p interviews conducted by independent journalists in the war zone. Russian state media like RT shows this stuff too but you can also get it through other outlets. Non-combatant DPR/LPR residents testify over and over that the method of the Ukrainian military is to station artillery in residential areas in order to put the Russian military in a tough position. If they strike back at Ukrainian artillery, there will be collateral damage and civilian casualties. If they don't strike back, they will suffer artillery fire as they advance. Additionally the Russian military has provided green corridors for civilians and surrendered troops to evacuate through. The Ukrainian military holds people hostage and refuses to let Donbass residents use these corridors. In any case I would rather watch 100 "sketchy" telegrams of documentary footage taken on the ground by civilians and cross reference them and read international documents and draw my own conclusions than let Anderson Cooper or Tucker Carlson tell me what is happening. Many of the war telegrams largely consists of interviews of civilians and I've done a lot of work to archive some of this footage.

Another context people miss is that Zelensky really doesn't have any say here, which is exactly why he's the face of US/NATO propaganda. He wanted to pursue Minsk II (as did the German, the Russians, and the Polish) but he's clearly afraid of the Ukrainian far right. He's a Jewish man and a Russian speaker so he's convenient for presenting a sanitized image of the Ukrainian government but he himself isn't really in charge. Every time he has tried to pursue peace he has been sabotaged by the far right in the military. He was even cajoled into banning 11 different parties for the sake of "national unity". Conveniently Right Sector and Svoboda were not on that list.

What we have here is a war that was completely avoidable. Everyone wanted Minsk II except 2 groups: The USA, and the Ukrainian far right. Russia wanted Minsk II. Germany wanted Minsk II. Zelensky wanted Minsk II. This is to say nothing of 30 years of NATO expansion after 1989. A military alliance that was predicated on preventing "soviet aggression" continued to exist after the collapse of the USSR precisely because it was a convenient way for the USA to establish military dominance in Europe through lily pad bases, weapons sales, military interoperability, and pursuing "prompt global strike" (A US/NATO program to be able to strike any coordinate on earth with conventional weapons in less than an hour)