You can compare this "mass destruction" with the Grozny's state after the second Chechen war or, if you want a more recent example, with Mosul and Hudaydah.
Constant aerial bombardment and complete immediate domination would massively increase the civilian casualty count and its clear from Crimea, Odessa, and other cities in the Donbas region, that Russians have a large Ukrainian support base that are anti-banderite and consider Zelensky's cooperation with Nazi groups a betrayal.
Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter regardless of what some western media outlets might claim. Sad that many smart people voluntarily or involuntarily turn their brains off when jingoism is back in vogue.
For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
> Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter
Certainly not, but applying Occam's Razor to such a trivially debunked argument might?
> For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
It's not "applying Occam's razor" to insist that the reason Russia failed to take out the Ukrainian air force on day one and didn't start levelling cities in earnest until its ground based units were in range is due to Ukrainian enthusiasm for being invaded. The simplest possible explanation for Russia flying few air sorties doesn't involve Ukrainian attitudes towards the Azov battalion, it simply requires looking at their aircraft attrition rate.
The biggest difference is that the cities are much bigger, so it takes more time to completely level them.