Post by @robear@lemmy.zip

2026-09-15 15:26 UTC

As you mentioned Donbass, I’ll make three arguments with some evidence: The majority of people in the Donbass did not support seperatism: www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2019/04/12/7211983/ While I agree the repeal of the language law was unnecessary and ill timed (and Ukraine was even advised against it by the EU), it did not amount to suppression of minorities. If you define a minority in Eastern Ukraine as a Russian speaker, they are in fact a majority. When Russia started the seperatist uprising, they did not defend Russian speakers against western Ukrainian speakers, they forced the minority of Russian speaking Ukrainian seperatists to fight against the majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians who wished to remain part of Ukraine. husj.harvard.edu/…/language-status-and-state-loya… While pro-Russian misinformation often talks about CIA maidan operatives and NATO cyborg mercenaries, the seperatist movement which became Russia’s causus belli for the full scale invasion was completely reliant on Russian state funded ultra nationalist paramilitaries and regular Russian army volunteers on “vacation” as a fifth column: themoscowtimes.com/…/10-years-later-russian-volun…

Replies (1)

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2026-09-15 15:39

Regarding claim 1, I both fail to see the relevance of the point nor do I think linking a Ukrainian-state affiliated source drawing on a poll based in Kiev is particularly compelling evidence. Even if the numbers were true and properly sourced, this does not mean that secession was somehow inorganic, and it further does not mean that after the beginning of the Ukrainian Civil War, that these numbers did not dramatically change in favor of secession. Regarding claim 2, this again does not logically follow. You appear to be erasing Russian as an ethnicity, and instead see this as a problem of language, and not ethnicity. Ethnic Russians form a minority of Eastern Ukraine, despite Russian being more widely spoken even among ethnic Ukrainians. The fact that the fascist forces that had taken over Kiev were popularly and organically opposed by primarily ethnic Russians does not mean Russia forced them into doing so: As far as Russian volunteers are concerned, nobody is denying that they exist. Rather, what’s important is that it has been the Banderites in Kiev that overthrew the democratically elected president at the support of NATO, which threw the entire country into crisis. This sparked the Ukrainian Civil War, which Russia entered after Kiev escalated the massacres of civilians and accelerated buildup of forces along Russia’s border, with missiles pointed directly at Moscow. In all of this, there are two things you have not accounted for: The primacy of NATO and western imperialism in provoking the war The right of self-determination for the Donbass region, which after a decade of war with Kiev wishes to be integrated into Russia.

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