While researching a book I wrote in 2018 about Russia, for the chapter that covered the Ukraine conflict, I actually contacted the OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission for Ukraine which had been monitoring the Russian/Ukrainian border since April of 2014 and asked them if they'd ever seen the Russian military cross over into Ukraine (would seem hard to miss). The answer was no.
Yes, Russia helped with providing weapons and encouraged Russians who wanted to go fight on a volunteer basis to do so (Russian domestic politics would not have allowed any Russian leader to allow ethnic Russians in the Donbass to be slaughtered by Kiev), but Russian forces were not actually fighting in Ukraine. When the Minsk II agreements were negotiated in Feb. 2015, the talks were agreed to by Russia (and the DPR/LPR forces at the encouragement of Russia) even though the DPR/LPR were advancing on the battlefield. They didn't have to negotiate at all. But they did, so that along with Kiev's actions, doesn't seem to support your contention.
Russia is steadily advancing in Ukraine. There are nowhere near the number of Russian casualties as some western sources claim (75,000). They are going slow and steady and will stop when they think their objectives are met. I don't agree with the war, but that is my assessment based on following the reality on the ground. The west is only throwing weapons at Ukraine so it can prolong the war and "weaken" Russia. US military experts have privately acknowledged months ago that Ukraine can't militarily defeat Russia. Unfortunately, the US-led west took a country that they knew was divided and exploited those divisions (from at least 2013 on) in order to use it as a battering ram against Russia on behalf of their agenda to maintain US hegemony (see Wolfowitz Doctrine and Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard for insight into US elites thinking). It's unfortunate that Ukraine will be wrecked and the US will simply wash its hands of it when the time comes. With friends like that, Ukraine doesn't need enemies.
As for your ideas about Russians and propaganda. During the times when I actually visited the country and talked to a cross-section of Russians, they all were quite aware of western media (they had access via internet and satellite) and they found its depictions of their country and their leadership to be extremely distorted, compared to their lived experience. As for propaganda, Americans never saw the images of eastern Ukrainians (including many civilians, women and children) blown apart by Kiev's shelling after it decided to conduct an anti-terrorist operation against its own citizens rather than negotiate a resolution. Indeed most Americans don't even know about the thousands of deaths in Donbass since 2014. It kind of makes a difference in terms of understanding context. But western media is so superior, they never lie about foreign conflicts like Gulf of Tonkin, babies in incubators, WMD's, Qaddafi Viagra rape soldiers, Afghanistan Papers, etc. But they must be telling the truth and nothing but the truth about this one.
