the reason liberals call the ukraine was a genocide is because war is so normalized to them that calling it a regular war isnt enough for them, they have to call it genocide to convince themselves this is different than what libs themselves want to do
I agree, but it also serves a few other purposes.
First, it makes the concept of peace negotiations impossible to libs. Peace is completely unacceptable if the Russians are going to execute everyone in occupied territory, so the only possible conclusion is that the war must continue until, at minimum, Ukraine has taken back all territory they've lost, including Crimea and the DPR/LPR.
Second, it allows libs to draw a comparison between the current war and WWII, which is universally regarded as a "just war" (nevermind that the allies couldn't have given less of a shit about the jews, roma, disabled, LGBT, etc who were actually genocided).
Third, which builds off of the first two, is that if things get bad enough, it allows them to encourage direct NATO intervention to stop the "genocide". Look at how much propaganda of the US invasion of Afghanistan was centered around being liberators stopping the big bad evil taliban.