> Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.

Search for "Kherson human safari". Russians are deliberately targeting civilians, this is proven beyond any doubt.

There's a pretty simple way to challenge your assumption here. Here is the Wiki for your example. [1] Apparently a ballpark of 200 civilians were killed there in the years between the war's start and late 2025. So let's assume you're right and Russia genuinely wanted to just go kill civilians in Kherson. It's a city that had a pre-war population of about 280,000.

How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaign)