TLDR:
The war we're watching unfold in Ukraine is very different from the war the U.S. fought over in the middle east, by a few margins, and through a few notable lenses of study. While still being projected as a 'new forever war', the Ukrainian Affair is far more fluid and far more militarily destructive than engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2001-2021.
Content warning: This discusses Genocide, not in gruesome detail, but in a systemic approach which can be just as horrifying. We talk about Crimes Against Humanity waged respectively by the U.S. in Iraq/Afghanistan, and ongoing reveals of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Wars of Conquest vs. Wars of Occupation:
Most people will fail to see the distinction between different types of war, but these labels are noteworthy in their overall behavior in the modern era. Occupational Wars have their start arguably with the British Empire's acquisition of formerly Dutch-held India, though we can also look at the Boer Wars as another example. Occupational Wars are fought on foreign territory with the distinct intention of subjugating the population so-as to exploit their labor or force the occupier's culture/legal structure upon the denizens. They are lengthy, expensive, and tend to go nowhere, but if successful you accomplish the genocidal goals of the other category of war without as much direct killing of masses of people. Occupational Wars can be thought of like the War on Terror: you're doing security actions to protect economic interests using national militaries and mercenaries.
A war of Conquest is different in that genocide is kind of the point. Wars of Conquest are fought not only to capture territory, but also to exterminate the dwellers within certain decision-making frameworks of genocide. We can see this modeled easily with how Hitler washed across most of Europe, attempting to genocide everyone of Jewish Decent or affiliation, plus queers and the mentally handicapped, gypsies, and other minority groups. These wars overwhelmingly focus on destruction of civilians as much or more than the destruction of military adversaries, and that tends to cause an imbalance of priorities which stretches up through the top ranks. That issue with pragmatic approaches to extremist ideologies oriented towards genocide tends to whittle-out the rationalists, leaving only yes men who deny reality until it is so bitterly entrenched around them it can no longer be ignored. You might see why I call the War in Ukraine a war of Conquest -- the Russians intend to erase Ukrainian identity.
No one wages War for War's Sake:
While History youtube channels like Oversimplified (which I quite like) will wash many conflicts as being started because of an unwillingness to address inner turmoil and an unhappy population within a nation, that's not quite how it happens. Despite decades of neglect, the U.S.'s wars after WW2 focused on a form of power projection through Occupation or Police Action. The Korean and Vietnam conflicts were so far removed from U.S. interests that they merely represented flash conflicts of 'containment priority', and like many wars not really intended to be a nation's key focus (one of many schemes), the nation was ill equipped to actually tolerate the hardships of those wars for their so-called ideologically motivated goals. Modeled similarly is more recent 2010's era Russian misadventures in the Middle East, which serve often not as true counter-balance to the "Global West", but specifically as military action to secure certain economic nodes.
Occupational Wars are really long fought in general, since they do involve attempting to bend a population into behaving within the aggressor's perspective. Conquest Wars meanwhile usually just involve flagrant and intentional targeting of civilians, with very minimal work beyond simple propaganda / counter-claims of the nature of the targets. In Ukraine, Russia strikes dozens of civilian structures weekly and claims them as legitimate military targets, leaving often a handful of dead civilians every single time. Russian soldiers in the field are committing noteworthy atrocities that go beyond the simple violations of honorable war conduct: decapitations of PoW's, meritless execution of PoW's, mass torture of PoW's, mass torture of Civilians, mass execution of Civilians, and mass deportation of Civilian Children. This is atop the propaganda which repeatedly is approved by the Kremlin before distribution which insists that Ukrainian identity is non-existent, Ukraine is part of Russia's 'historic claims', and so-on.
Intentional Genocide looks different:
I've heard people compare the genocidal actions of the Russians to U.S. target misidentification in the Middle East. I am sympathetic to calling U.S. military action in the Middle East genocidal, but there is a carelessness that characterizes how the U.S. struck so many civilians so frequently. The headline that broke a while back is that the 20 years of ceaseless war in Iraq and Afghanistan ended the lives of around 370,000 civilian victims. This is an estimate, and it also includes: *"...direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces at the time of invasion through March 2023" Iraq Figure, Afghanistan Figure. Not included are the hundreds of thousands of combatants, not included is the portion of those casualties caused directly by the U.S. and Allies, nor is there much in the way of explanation on how ISIS/ISIL directly contributed to the figure in Iraq in particular. We know as a fact that when the U.S. strikes civilians accidentally, they are in a rush to claim a military target and then sometime later will go "actually we missed" / "we misidentified the target".
This pathetic excuse is tantamount to intending to commit genocide through negligence. The Russians do not attempt much more than "no we shot military structures", their propaganda simply declares facts without much more than the most surface of justification/rationalization almost exclusively for the benefit of pro-Russian Westerners. The political engagement of Westerners is far higher than those of Russians, to the point that it is a genuine cultural feature. In Russia, keeping one's head down is a priority for political action, and very few people are willing to say "naw fuck Putin" outloud. Russia's brief flirtation with Western Democracy produced a generation of dissidents, but many are being consumed by the war itself. In Russia, a lack of truly democratic process chills one's participation in politics unless they are ready to be at risk / directly kiss Putin's ass upon request. It's very Skaven-like, in that the plotting of political opposition is in hushed whispers in the shadows cast by Putin's autocratic spotlight.
Without much accountability to a public in general, without the multi-ideology approach of Democratic identities which split power along demographic divides, and with the unreality of Kremlin-sponsored State Media, decree dictates the intention of the Russian actions. The intentional killing of Civilians and a focus on "ethnic Russians" has been noteworthy for the current war. Conquest is Russia's favored technique. When they can't steam-roll nations with a bunch of tanks by selecting and right-clicking, they will roll out Artillery and blast the shit out of every urban center until all that is left is twisted wreckage. They had started doing that in Georgia, did it multiple times in Chechnya, and engage actively now in the same tactic in Ukraine. If the lower-requirement approach doesn't work, the Russians lob shells from the 70's at the problem until it goes away and they favor demoralizing the population through gradual convenience extermination. "I'm going to swing this knife at you and walk forward, it is your fault if you get stabbed" as a doctrine of war seems a little silly, but that is the Russian Example when they can't drop the Spetsnaz/VDV on the problem and declare victory through government capitulation.
All of that above is to say that it is a net positive in the Russian doctrine book to hit civilians. Civilians are the enemy, they don't shoot back, and you can't just kill them when you want, but if you happen to, good for you. Their military practices the barbarism of antiquity, and if the shroud of informational black-out is lowered over Ukrainians, many civilians die. It is likely that as the conflict grinds forward with the Ukrainian Spring Offensive, any liberated villages and urban centers will have plenty of mass graves of civilians uncovered. If Kherson was any metric of Russian Conquest, we are looking at likely thousands of civilians killed intentionally by Russian Occupiers in the most direct methods possible: torture and execution. If carting ~10,000 Ukrainian Children from captured territory to surrogate parents in Russia wasn't enough to call it Genocide, certainly the bombing of civilian residential buildings, mass executions, and mass torture are.