Russia isn't retreating from anywhere. They pinned a chunk of Ukrainian army around Kiev which allowed them to surround the main force in Donbas. Now that the main army is surrounded they no longer need to keep troops around Kiev, and so they're redeploying them to help the main force.

The whole notion that they were going to take Kiev is absurd when you look at the numbers of troops. It required around 40k troops to take Mariupol which is a tenth of the size of Kiev. It's pretty clear that 40k troops Russia deployed around Kiev were in no position to take the city.

It's also not at all clear who is responsible for the attacks on the civilians. For example, the fact that the attack in Kramatorsk was from a Tochka-U rocket that's used by Ukraine, but was decommissioned by Russia back in 2019, strongly suggests that the attack came from Ukrainian forces. There need to be independent investigations into these incidents, however UK weirdly blocked the UN meeting to run these investigations.

Russian demands have been clear from the start and haven't changed. The entire war could've been avoided if Ukraine formally agreed to remain neutral and to implement Minsk protocol which it signed.

One of Russia's main stated goals for the invasion were to demilitarize Ukraine. This is well under way with Ukrainian military production capacity having been destroyed. Without capacity to produce ammo and weapons or to repair current inventory, Ukrainian army is not going to be able to continue fighting much longer.

Once the army is defeated then Russia will be able to dictate its terms to Ukraine. These terms will continue to get worse as Ukraine's position continues to become ever more untenable. So, again, the longer this drags on the worse things will be for Ukraine. People of Ukraine gain absolutely nothing from this conflict.