Don’t you understand, they were breaking the Minsk agreement by fighting back! As if they were independent political entities that weren’t recognized on the international stage or something.

I think the weirdest part of watching this thing is people not understanding how pissed people in Russia were that Russia wasn’t giving full military backing to the DNR and LNR. And I don’t mean ‘oh the government was trying to drum up support for the eventual war’. No, I mean, they were cracking down on ‘pro-war’ and ultra-nationalists both IRL and online to the degree they could get away with it, people who were calling for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that very year.

This was when the Russian government was literally hosting the Winter Olympics, they were trying to make nice and play the larger political game even after the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ and the subsequent annexation of Crimea. I think the problem is that we are now at a point where those elements that seek negotiation in Russian society are completely out-weighed by those that want the confrontation, the war, and I completely misjudged how large those elements in Russia were because of the language barrier and Russian censorship. They are still there, in the Russian banking and finance sectors, but the Western attitude and negotiation towards Russia has been cutting their feet out from under them for years. It is always one-step forward, two-steps back diplomacy, never any trust on either side. It was bound to erupt at some point, but I thought it would be preceded by another crisis (which I guess, COVID was?).

I really recommend that you just watch most of Patrick Lancaster’s reporting from before the war even started. He covered most of this stuff in detail, most of which never reached official press on either side. It depends on if you trust his translation and if he is getting honest interviews (which imo he is and he is, as even now most people generally have mixed feelings on both the Ukrainian and Russian military, and mostly want tbe fighting to stop, with their only real difference being that when Russia comes in they usually bring food and water, but most universally condemn the neo-Nazi groups that were there previously). It’s a lot of shit, no one article, which is why it is difficult to convey.

As far as I can tell the ‘ethnic cleansing’ hadn’t actually started in earnest, mostly due to the efforts of the DLR and DPR. What had happened at that point was the outlawing of teaching Russian language in schools (a direct violation of the minority rights that had been formally guaranteed by the Constitution), the killing of open leftist political members who demonstrated, and roving gangs of neo-Nazis outside of places like Mariupol who were known to beat, rape, or murder people after dark regardless of ethnicity.

That being said, large sections of these neo-nazi and none neo-nazi groups definitely talked about ‘cleaning’ the Donbas on a regular basis, though what exactly they meant by that was always cagey. However, from what we can see from towns that have been ‘liberated’ from Russian control, this basically means killing or jailing anyone suspected of being Russian collaborators, which would have meant most of the DNR and LNR, basically every military aged male.