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Notes -
That's not being cute, that's being clear on what happened, including not making silly false equivalences on the nature or even timing of support.
The separatist republic conflicts weren't a result of there being an organic uprising, and then the Russians moved in forces. The totally-not-Russian-government-supported Russian paramilitaries using Russia military equipment moved in forces to seize control (the filibuster element), and then when those forces failed to instigate a popular uprising and were being systemically pushed back by the Russians sent the army to directly fight to preserve their seized enclaves. It was only after the Russian military intervention that the filibuster-installed governments began to mobilize / conscript the locals in appreciable number.
Calling it a civil war before that point would simply be obfuscating the nature and role of the Russian instigation of the conflict, and calling it a civil war after that point would be obfuscating the nature and the role of Russia in directly intervening to secure and preserve those republics, whose claim to local support was, shall we say, lacking in externally verifiable evidence.
For the American support of Kiev to be just like the Russian support for the separatists, the Americans would have needed to instigate an filibuster invasion of Ukraine from the border, and then sent in armored columns when said filibuster force was resisted. This, notably, never happened.
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