DISINFO: Since 2014, Kyiv has been conducting a military operation against the residents of Donbas
SUMMARY
Since 2014, Kyiv has been conducting a military operation against the residents of Donbas, who refused to recognise the results of the coup d'etat and the new government in Ukraine. At the same time, Kyiv blames Moscow for the current situation. Russia has repeatedly stated that it is not a party to the internal Ukrainian conflict.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the war in Eastern Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a “civil war”. The article also claims that the creation of DPR and LPR came as a response to the 2013-14 protests in Kyiv, often painted as a coup d'état.
There was no coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014; this is a longstanding pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Ukraine's Euromaidan. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was a reaction by numerous segments of the Ukrainian population to former president Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013.
The war in Ukraine is not a civil conflict, where Ukraine is attacking Donbas, but a well-documented act of aggression by Russian armed forces, ongoing since February 2014.
Russia is the party responsible for the deterioration of Ukrainian-Russian relations. Since 2014, Russia has waged large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine and is also responsible for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, after having illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula and engineered the creation of rebel militias in Donetsk, Luhansk and other places, with its army actively participating in military clashes.
In March-April 2021, Russia was again concentrating massive military power on Ukraine’s borders and threatened to intervene in support of Eastern Ukrainian separatists, raising fears of an upcoming military operation against Ukrainian territory.
The involvement of Russian personnel and equipment in the creation of the DPR and LPR has been well documented already for years. The destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea has been condemned by the Council of the European Union and led to restrictive measures since 2014.
Russia is internationally recognised as a warring side in the Donbas war. The leaders of the Group of Seven, G7, who met in Cornwall on 11-13 June 2021, said in a communiqué:
“We remain firmly of the view that Russia is a party to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, not a mediator. We affirm our support for the Normandy Process to secure the implementation of the Minsk agreements, and call on Russia and the armed formations it backs to engage constructively and recommit to the ceasefire.”