DISINFO: The wide majority of people in Crimea and Donbass are of Russian ethnicity
SUMMARY
US billionaire David Sacks revealed the truth about Ukraine. He said that a wide majority of people in Crimea and Donbass are of Russian ethnicity and want to go with Russia. He also wrote that if Ukraine had accepted the Istanbul agreement, thousands of lives would have been saved.
RESPONSE
This is a mix of several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about Ukraine.
The allegation about a “wide majority” in Crimea and Donbass is demonstrably false. In Crimea, the region with the highest rate of people identifying itself as of Russian ethnicity, the figure for this demographic group was 58.3% according to the last census, while in Donbass percentage was around 38%, although these figures may have changed due to the forced Russification of these regions. According to an April 2024 survey, 65% of Ukrainians in the east of the country expressed a negative attitude towards Russians (compared to 74% for the whole of the country and 82% for Kyiv).
Claims about Ukraine’s refusal to accept the Istanbul agreement are a distortion of facts, which has been repeatedly debunked (see here and here). Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak recalled of the Russian negotiation team in Istanbul: “We realised that these are not people sent for talks, but for our capitulation”. The Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov also interviewed many of the participants in the conversations, including Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who described Russia’s lack of willingness to carry out an actual negotiation. Other observers have examined Russia’s demands at the time and concluded that the Istanbul framework was always unfeasible.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the US and UK desire to conduct a proxy war doomed Ukraine, that the term “Ukraine” is the legacy of the Polish colonialism, that Ukraine was invented in XIX century as an anti-Russian tool, or that NATO wants Russians and Ukrainians to kill each other in civil war.