Volt. But in order to understand the connections, we have to go back at least to the Second World War.
The Donbass region was occupied by German troops at that time (1941-42). Adolf Hitler considered the resources of the Donbass very important for Operation Barbarossa. Thousands of industrial workers were deported to Germany to work in factories. During the occupation, 279,000 civilians lost their lives in what was then Sztálino, today's Donetsk county.
During the strategic offensive of the Red Army in Donbass in 1943, Donbass came back under Soviet control. During the reconstruction, a large number of Russian workers arrived here to repopulate the area, which changed the population balance. In 1926, 639,000 Russians lived in the Donbass. By 1959, the population of Russian nationality was already 2.55 million.
By the time of the 1989 Soviet census, 45% of the population of the Donbass region identified themselves as Russian. According to the 2001 census, 58% of the population of Luhansk County and 56.9% of the population of Donetsk County were Ukrainians. Russians made up the largest minority, 39% and 38.2% of the two regions, respectively.
Modern Donbass is a predominantly Russian-speaking region. According to the 2001 census
Russian is the main language of 74.9% of residents in Donetsk County and 68.8% in Luhansk County.
The proportion of native Russian speakers is higher than that of Russians, because some Ukrainians and other nationalities also list Russian as their mother tongue.
All of this is important to understand: from Moscow's point of view, the two "people's republics" of the region, Donetsk and Luhansk, can be considered Russian in their language and in the ratio according to the above figures, even if they are part of Ukraine.
When President Putin gave a speech on the morning before the war, he said:
"We see that the forces that carried out a coup in Ukraine in 2014, seized power and actually retained it with the help of decorative election procedures, have finally abandoned the peaceful settlement of the (Donbass) conflict. For eight years, an infinitely long eight years, we did everything we could to resolve the situation peacefully and politically. It's all for naught."
Then he added:
"It was simply impossible to bear all this. This nightmare had to be stopped immediately - the genocide against the millions of people living there who rely only on Russia and hope only in us. These people's aspirations, feelings, and pains were our main motivation in making the decision to recognize the Donbas people's republics."
And that brings us to the issue of "genocide". Are Ukrainian "fascists, extremists, etc." have the Russians been exterminated in the two People's Republics since 2014?
In fact, on February 17, the Russian government launched an investigation after the head of one of the pro-Russian breakaway areas told the Russian state news agency that they had found mass graves in which Ukrainian forces had buried massacred Russian-speaking civilians. As this investigation has no results yet, we cannot know if it is true or not.
As for past data, according to a recent UN report , between April 2014 and December 31, 2021, approximately 14,000 people died in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including at least 3,400 civilians, 4,400 Ukrainian soldiers and 6,500 armed separatists. Around 40,000 people were injured, including 7-9,000 civilians.
We note that one of the flagships of the left misinterpreted Putin's statement like this: "in order for this to be considered genocide, the Ukrainians would have to persecute the Russians throughout the country."
No, dear Telex, the Russian president meant the term "genocide" only and exclusively for the two people's republics in question!
We are also not sure that Putin was talking about genocide under international law. But if we consider "only" 3,400 civilians as victims out of the 14,000 dead (if the UN figures are correct at all), it can easily be considered genocide in the general sense of the word. After all, just as the Telex quotes one of the UN conventions from 1948, the
"genocide means the commission of any of the following acts with the intention of the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such: killing members of the group."
And this actually happened.
Photos (18+) of the civilian victims of Donbas who were bombed with white phosphorus can be viewed HERE
Photo: Facebook / Russian News
