I’m not going to defend the source to the death, my point is that there are numerous sources on both sides of the conflict that have reported on Ukraine shelling civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk.

That's actually not really true. A lot of people were getting shelled in those places, some of them combatants and some of them civilians. It's not all that clear who was doing how much of the shelling. Although, the idea that ethnic Russians were getting genocided at scale was a common Russian excuse for why they needed to start to commit murder on a much wider scale than anything they'd even bothered to claim was happening.

You said you wanted to disengage, so I won't bother to defend that point. But regardless, the deeper point is this:

This is going nowhere, and you’re only here to try to provoke responses, so this isn’t productive for either of us.

Incorrect. This is productive.

We started talking about horrifying attacks on civilians. Rape, attacks on power plants in winter, attacks on apartment blocks, hospitals. Schools. Torture. Abduction of children. And somehow, when we started talking about that, you wanted to start to make excuses for it. Why, I sincerely don't know. But, I realized looking at it that that really shouldn't be normal on a humanistic social network. It should get called out, every time. Someone should start asking questions, and highlight how disgusting it is. That's productive. It has a good effect on the network as a whole. For as long as that's what you like to advocate, you should feel unwelcome and like people will pop up to disagree with you. That's how conversation and social relations work, in a healthy environment that can protect itself against violence and excuses for same.

I'm not sending you offensive images or assigning you some kind of insulting nickname. I'm not dogpiling senseless abuse at you, like your friends at you-know-where would have done. I'm just highlighting what you're saying. You can't bring yourself to say it's sabotage of a peace deal to agree to a peace deal and then immediately break it in overt fashion and at a large scale. Because admitting that wouldn't fit your narrative.

Why is that your narrative? I genuinely don't know. I did carry some kind of hope that you would be able to realize what you're actually saying, that these questions really should have straight answers from someone who claims to care about human rights and geopolitics and the safety of people from imperialism and violence.

I haven't been cursing at you, insulting you, refusing to engage with things you're saying or pretending you're saying something else. Nothing like that. But yes, I'm not-very-politely highlighting the bullshit of what you're saying. You're making excuses for genocide and murder, and then putting on a self-righteous cloak of "wanting peace" or being "practical," but the inability to answer or address certain questions really highlights what's actually going on.

Hey, look at it this way: At least I didn't blow up your apartment building and then blame you for not wanting peace! That would have been really rude of me, much more so than my typing.