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Kind of the opposite of pushing, really. The Donetsk and Luhansk separists, who started their uprising in April 2014, were only spared a quick defeat in 2014 due to the direct intervention of conventional Russian forces in August, about five months later. Before they did so, the separatists were basically being blockaded in the cities they controlled, as the broader pro-Russian/anti-maidan uprising the Russians were expecting fell flat.
Eastern Ukraine since 2014 is absolutely one of those contexts where the war only lasted as a long as it did due to external life-support and regular intervention. Donetsk and Luhansk had more in common with Kabul than Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, right down to the tepid-at-best local support making local fighters dependent on external military forces.
If the goal was to protect ethnic Russians, the best course of action would have been to let the separatist states fall. Not only would there have been no war around the two cities, but they would have been quickly re-integrated into the post-Maidan political system, which actually would have allowed pro-Russian interest groups a chance to affect internal Ukrainian politics, rather than Russia's attempt to force the Minsk II constitution order change as peace terms. That method had the effect of taking all the pro-Russian influence groups out of Ukraine's politics, a mistake that was noted at the time as a gamble.
Well, yes, that's exactly because Ukraine - or perhaps, one might say, Ukrainian nationalists - fought back. What I meant was that the separatists certainly intended to expand to a vastly larger area than what they controlled in Jan 2022, as indicated by the early attempts to establish DPR/LPR like entities in Herson, Kharkiv etc.
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