Of course, the people of the Donbas were just sitting there peacefully doing nothing when all of a sudden the Ukranians started shelling them. That was the start of the military action, silly me. Good thing all those vacationing Russian soldiers happened to be there a the time to defend them.

I wish the AFU had the courage to not waste the lives of their soldiers and come to the negotiating table so that no more lives are senselessly wasted

What’s to negotiate? Russia has seized Ukrainian territory. Ukraine wants it back. There’s nothing for Ukraine to concede.

The only side “wasting” lives here is Russia, if they’d just go home the war would be over. Ukraine’s not going to try seizing any Russian territory.

How dare the people rise up against their rightfully-installed rulers and decide they want someone else. What did they think this was, a democracy?

Anyone that “knows” they will completely overpower Ukraine apparently stopped paying attention to reality many years ago. They’ve been proven to be incapable of it.

Russians, without any double meanings that Russian sympathizers could jump in and say “aha, racists!” or “aha, russophobes!” over.

The overall “pattern of the war” is that Russia took a bunch of Ukrainian territory early on, and then has spent the past year having its meat ground and losing big chunks of occupied territory back to the Ukrainians again. Bakhmut has been notable because it was an exception to this overall pattern. We may now be seeing the pattern reassert itself there, though.