Not to belittle what is experienced by Ukrainians, but the Russian Federation is truly not at war - yet.
The mobilization has barley started and seems to be mismanaged, the industry has not been transformed to war effort, the legal system was not adjusted ( there is a challege to the legality of mobilization, military with contracts were allowed to break those) political system hasn't changed to support war style decision making.
It is not clear if the RF can do all these things without tearing itself apart.
Yes, they do everything not to call this war a war. But practically speaking, even if they haven't transformed their industry into total war machine yet (they started the process already), the war has been going on, it's just a question of semantics.
As someone not into war, I didn't know those words meant anything different from just large scale war or all out war. From Wikipedia, yes it seems total war is what is meant:
> Total war is a type of warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, mobilizes all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare over non-combatant needs.
A war you say? What would you call what was going on until now then?