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.)
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.)