Rhetoric gets heated in times of war, but the Ukrainian government has made it clear that they're not out to kill Russians for the sake of killing Russians.
Russian Lives Matter, the Russian language matters, Russian culture and literature and artistic achievement matter. As much as I hate Putin, all that is obvious and self-evident to any Western observer, especially in a country like Ukraine with a huge population of Russian-speakers, and that includes the President of Ukraine himself.
Russian has been a lingua franca in Ukraine for centuries. Russian influence is never going away from Ukraine, nor should it, though that also has no bearing on Ukrainian independence.
Should large chunks of the American Southwest be given over to Mexico simply because this region of the U.S. has a lot of Spanish speakers and Hispanic heritage? Obviously not.
Back on the topic of Russian Lives Mattering, Ukraine treats Russian POWs better than the Russian state treats its own conscripts - who are being press-ganged into Putin's vanity war without prior experience, with a week of boot camp or less, without being provided proper equipment, and while being served expired and maggoty food (or no food at all). Some Russian conscripts were told to take their girlfriends' feminine hygiene products with them as a rudimentary first aid kit - lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "tampon gun."
What is genocide, anyway?
I would say that the indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure (including hospitals, schools, playgrounds, and power plants, etc.), capturing civilians and forcing them into "filtration camps," all while pumping out state propaganda that denies that "Ukrainians" constitute a legitimate people, and that explicitly seeks the dissolution of the Ukrainian state all amounts to genocide.
Guess who's been behind that?
