It turns out that friends and even relatives often stop listening if you repeatedly tell them something they don't like to hear, as many Ukrainians have found out.
This works perfectly in two ways. Donetsk is shelled for 8 years bu Ukrainian Army, nobody was interested enough to stop it. "naah those separs are shooting themselves"
The "8 years of shelling" talking point is one of the dumbest, I have trouble imaging who would believe it. We both know that Russia doesn't care even about its own people, let alone anyone else, with the sinking of Kursk and sieges of Nord-Ost and Beslan being shining examples of that. The indiscriminate destruction of large cities in Eastern Ukraine full of ethnic Russians is just another datapoint.
According to the UN, civilian deaths in Russian war on Donbas were 25 in 2021, lowest since the war began in 2014. How many have died in 2022?
If Russia wanted to stop needless bloodshed, all it had to do was to pull its armed forces out of Ukraine and leave rest of the world alone. Nobody wants to be a part of your pathethic "Russian world" of poverty and hopelessness, and now that everyone's seen the true "might" of Russian army, you've become a laughing stock of the world. Nobody even pays attention to the threats you make in regard to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
You don't even need to go to the UN. According to DNR government itself, Ukraine was ostensibly responsible for 77 deaths in 2021 - and only 7 of them civilians (which kinda gives you the indication of what they were aiming at).
And yes, you're absolutely correct: again, according to their own official claims, by May, they have already lost about 50 times more civilians since the beginning of the war than they did in the year before. So if the point of the war was to protect the civilian population of Donetsk, it's already objectively a failure of truly epic proportions.
And this is all before accounting for mass forced mobilization and the resulting mass casualties, because untrained office workers are sent to assault fortified enemy positions with Mosin bolt-action rifles. It got bad enough that several prominent public figures on the Donbas separatist side called it "genocide of the male population of Donbas by Russia".
That said, it is true that civilian casualties in Donbas were much more significant in 2014-2015 - over a thousand per year - and many of those were undeniably due to the actions of the Ukrainian military. It's also true that some people in Ukraine denied that any of that was happening when it did. I'd be surprised if there's any war in which this doesn't happen to some extent, though - what's unusual in the current situation in Russia is the sheer scale of it.
(There's a similar issue within Russia across generational rather than national lines, by the way - a family might not have any relatives in Ukraine, but the millennial kids are anti-war and generally pro-West, while their elderly parents call them Nazi sympathizers and cheer Putin.)
