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Notes -
I think you nailed it with why does Zelensky speak Russian first?
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine. Speaking in Russian does have some symbolism, and the symbolism is “I’m not your enemy”. Refusing to even speak the language of the people you are supposedly fighting a war over certainly signals something.
Imagine Mexico invaded the US because El Paso, TX votes to secede from the US and rejoin Mexico.
What would be the symbolism if the Governor of Texas, in this thought experiment, spoke Spanish first, but refused to talk to the people in El Paso in that language, but instead insisted that he and by extension they, all spoke English.
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.
If these Ukrainian people are so intent on fighting to keep control of the Donbas and Crimea, then why the need for conscription?
In such a scenario, what makes you think Putin would either respect the ceasefire (see point 7 in the OP) or not just use the time to prepare and re-arm for another invasion?
Where does this logic lead you other than genocide of the Russian people and complete destruction of Russia as a nation?
This is the exact logic that the US has used for every ridiculous war we've gotten into for the last 70 years.
It's worth pointing out that the breaking of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines did not require the genocide of thier respective peoples.
I think it's true that the Axis war machine was broken without genocide, but after the war both nations had their borders redrawn at bayonet-point, with Germany being split in two and millions of Germans forcibly relocated. Hundreds of thousands of them died and others (including civilians) were sent to forced labor camps. This policy was (in part, at least) approved by the "big three" (UK, US, USSR) during the Potsdam Conference and wasn't just something the Russians "got away with" after the Iron Curtain came down, and Western countries, including the US, UK, and France used POWs as forced labor until the late 1940s. Similarly in Japan, the Kurils were occupied by Russia with American assent and the Japanese inhabitants removed. It seems fair to say that no genocide was committed, but it might be worth remembering that what we would today call ethnic cleansing was a part of the Allied postwar strategy.
Even bigger than that was the removal of ethnic Japanese from Manchukuo, as well as from China proper
Oh interesting, although I can't say I am surprised. Do you have numbers on the removals there? I think there's an intuition to look at what happened in Manchukuo or Poland and say "well [some of] those people wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for [Axis actions] so it only makes sense to kick them out." But that's not true of what happened in Kaliningrad, or the Kurils.
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