This level of destruction appears to be the outcome of modern urban warfare against an entrenched and motivated defender every time. At https://news.sky.com/story/the-battle-for-mosul-how-the-reca... and https://www.csis.org/analysis/real-lessons-mosul-and-sixteen... you can see similar pictures of Mosul, a city around 50 times the size of Bakhmut, after it was reconquered by a US-led coalition in 2017. Do you have trouble looking at it and deciding that the US is on the right side of anything? If yes, you will run out of "right sides" very fast; if not, your criteria for determining the right side are actually not mostly about the reduction of real functioning cities to rubble.
Well, sure - now apparently we've established that you can in fact turn cities into ruins and remain on the right side, and are just, as they say, haggling over the price. Ask the Russians, and they would tell you that to leave Bakhmut in Ukrainian hands would be to condemn its residents to a cultural genocide, pointing at various laws Ukraine passed prohibiting Russian-language schooling, ethnically Russian political parties being repressed and pro-Russian activists being killed extrajudicially, and most recently supposed pronouncements from members of the current Ukrainian government about eliminating disloyal residents after reconquering Russian-held territory. Do you think that cultural genocide is below the threshold where a reasonable person could support a siege which results in a city's destruction, but an extreme patriarchal regime is above? If yes, are you so certain that this threshold is universally agreed upon (and are you confident that you would not yourself be willing to shift it if someone were to dig up a conflict against a lesser evil than ISIS in which the US pulverised a city)?
(Note that without a critical failure of theory of mind, a retort that the Russian charges against Ukraine are obviously false while the American charges against ISIS are obviously true is not meaningful. Can you say with confidence that growing up in Russia, you wouldn't have the same certainty that the Russian narrative is basically correct while the Americans are spouting self-serving propaganda? Is there some way you can imagine yourself convincing a Russian that American media is to be trusted without making your proposed chain of trust circular?)
