ISW is a propaganda outlet run by Vicky Nuland, so if that’s where you get your information from that explains a lot about your world view. The fact that a lot of people in the west guzzle propaganda isn’t really an argument.

Therefore, you you should stick to actual facts of the situation instead of making stuff up.

If you were concerned about the truth then you wouldn’t be pretending that the uprising in Donetsk was somehow orchestrated when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

here’s how the election in 2004 went:

this is the 2010 election:

As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

The reality is that the population in these areas is largely ethnic Russian and after US sponsored coup regime started doing things like banning Russian language, these people rebelled against it.

Furthermore, here’s what CNN was reporting the regime doing in Donbas back in 2014 https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296

Here’s an article from the human rights watch https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions

And here’s a whole documentary of the atrocities these people suffered https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs

Pretending this was somehow orchestrated as opposed to directly caused by the oppression of the regime is the height of dishonesty. Which is pretty weird to see coming out from somebody who seeks the truth.

Plenty of western experts have been talking about this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started. Here’s what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:

https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/

As for a Kupyansk, I’m not at all surprised because as you say, there has been give and take along the border for the entire duration of the war. And since Russia still has its inventory a large amount of artillery, any town is at risk of attack.

Except Russia made many kilometres of progress there and Ukraine is now evacuating from the area. That’s not give and take, that’s Ukrainian position collapsing. Russia isn’t evacuating anybody at any single point that Ukraine was trying to break through for the past 10 weeks.