the_dunk_tank

PSA for confused lemmy.libs who stumble into here:

No, Russia did not wage an ethnonationalist war against Ukraine, nor was it a revanchist aggression from the Putin regime.

The Donbass separatists were not traitors who wanted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. In fact, Donbass separatism started after the Maidan fascist coup regime, upon taking power on 23 February 2014, repealed the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Language Law that granted Russian and various minority languages the status of “regional languages” in the Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada. The very first thing they did after taking power.

Ethnic Russians in Donbass and Crimea saw it as an act of ethnic cleansing from the fascist regime (and of course, compounded by increasing acts of violence by the Ukrainian ultranationalists during the Maidan protests), and began to revolt.

Take this from the “most trusted” source of NATO propaganda wing, the Atlantic Council:

On February 28 [2018], Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ruled the bill “On the principles of the state language policy” unconstitutional and rendered it invalid. The law in question, adopted back in 2012 and known as the “Kivalov-Kolesnichenko language law,” granted Russian the status of a “regional language.” It was precisely the abolition of this law by the Verkhovna Rada on February 23, 2014, right after then-President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country, that Russia saw as an aggressive gesture against the “Russian-speaking population” of Ukraine and later used as a pretext to justify the annexation of Crimea and military aggression in the Donbas.

Take this from Wikipedia’s timeline of the Maidan revolution:

On 23 February [2014], the second day of national mourning, parliament voted to abolish the law on language policies that had given the Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian languages the official status of regional languages in some areas.[3][232] However, this measure was later vetoed by the acting president, who said he would not sign the bill until new legislation protecting minority languages was developed.[233]

…

On 23 February [2014], parliament adopted a bill to repeal the country's law on minority languages. If signed by the president, the bill would have disestablished Russian as a minority language of Ukraine, although regions like Crimea are populated by a Russian-speaking majority.[286] The Christian Science Monitor reported that the bill "only served to infuriate Russian-speaking regions, [who] saw the move as more evidence that the antigovernment protests in Kyiv that toppled Yanukovych's government were intent on pressing for a nationalistic agenda."[287] Acting President Turchynov vetoed the bill on 28 February.[288]

Also on 23 February, clashes erupted in Kharkiv between thousands of equally sized pro- and anti-government rallies, and Mayor Kernes was blocked from entering the City Council building.[289] Pro-Russian protesters stood guard over the statue of Vladimir Lenin in the city center,[290] but the deputy head of the Regional State Administration announced that the city would dismantle the statue regardless on 25 February.[291]

The fascist Euromaidan Press called the language law a “Kremlin’s Trojan Horse”. Yes, because a law granting minorities to exercise their rights and freedom to use their native languages in the society is actually Putin’s devious plan to destroy the great Ukrainian civilization.

You can be as cynical as you want about Putin’s regime, but Russia had two options:

1. Sit back and let ethnic Russians in Donbass and Crimea slaughtered by the Ukrainian nationalists, like what the Israelis are doing to Gazan Palestinians right now, or
2. Militarily intervene to prevent a genocide from taking place, responding to requests by the Donbass separatists

In other words, Russia’s hand was forced and deliberately provoked by the US, which led to a heavy sanctions against Russia in 2014. The idea that Russia would choose to be economically sanctioned by the rest of the world, which wiped out their GDP growth since the 2000s, just because they wanted to gain some Ukrainian territories, the second poorest country in Europe, simply does not make any sense on a geopolitical level.

In fact, we can even give Russia some benefit of doubts about its military intervention. After the Ukrainian Civil War ended in 2014 and 2015, the Minsk Agreement was initiated with the explicit intention of returning Donbass (but not Crimea) to Ukraine, but with extra conditions:

3. Decentralisation of power, including through the adoption of the Ukrainian law "On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts".

In other words, Ukraine is not allowed to commit ethnic cleansing in Donbass. The Minsk Agreement, which Ukraine accepted and then violated, specifically included a local self-governance provision to Donbass such that Kyiv’s Verkhovna Rada cannot simply impose cultural bans on Russian and other languages without the authorization of the local governments.

If Russia’s intention had been to take Ukraine’s territory, then why would they choose to return Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukraine? It is very clear that Russia wanted to keep a congenial business ties with the EU (which it sold oil and gas to and made huge profits from it) rather than dealing with a Ukrainian civil war.

Of course, this EU-Russia economic ties was seen as a threat to the US imperialists, and it had to be severed at all costs. This came to a blow when Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines finished its construction in 2021, but repeated interventions by the US stopped the pipelines from starting their operations.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian fascists had repeatedly violated the Minsk Agreement since 2014, and both Merkel and Hollande had to drag Putin back to the table for Minsk II, which the Ukrainian violated again.

The fascists had no intention of maintaining a truce with Russia - their intentions have always been to re-take Donbass and Crimea militarily and purge the regions of ethnic Russians. This was why NATO was arming the Ukrainian fascists for 8 years while Russia was watching by the side, still waiting for Ukraine to fulfill its end of the Minsk protocol.

Alarmed by such development, the US-Russia Summit was held in June 2021 to resolve the security concerns that Russia had raised about Ukraine. Not even two months later, first in August 2021, then in December 2021, the US shipped Stingers and Javelins to Ukraine. The message was clear from the Biden administration: there is no option for peace. And the longer Russia waits, the more the Ukrainian armed forces would be allowed the preparations to retake Donbass and Crimea. It was a now or never situation for Russia.