Quote from: SneakyFrickinRussian on Yesterday at 23:27:06This is the sad game, which being played since by both opponents. And please don't call separatists as Russians - initially only Donbass locals with a very few exceptions were trying to separate from ukraine. Your ukrainian friends will be upset for your stances, since they count all Donbass citizens as being ethnically ukrainians - despite almost 90% of them speaking only Russian language and not less than 60% of them calling themselves as Russians. Real Russians were very slow to enter, basically not earlier than August 2014.
Ukraine doesn't count the people there as ethnically Ukrainian or ethnically Russian, they count them as Ukrainian citizens. Only Russia makes a fuss about classifying ethnicity and they count anyone who speaks Russian as Russian ethnicity. And they use that as an excuse to go to war
The only reason Ukraine clarifies Ukrainian ethnicity is because they don't want to be labeled as ethnically Russians by Russia because as Russia is concerned, they see themselves a rulers of anyone labeled as such
That said, as far as the census went in 2001, 56.9% of people in Donetsk see themselves as Ukrainian, and 38.2% as Russian. Luhansk was 58% Ukranian, 39% Russian
Quote>To which the Russian separatist leader admitted on video that "yes we use you as human shields, but it lets us win"
They won because Donbass being ethnically and culturally Russian for many decades.
What nonsense are you talking about? Did you not get the context of the statement. He is saying by using Donbas citizens as human shields made it harder for the Ukrainian army to fight back, thus it let them win. Has absolutely 0 to do with ethnicity or culturally
QuoteIn fact, Chechnya is much less Russian than Donbass. I was born there about 39 years ago, had relocated to Russia about 34 years ago, and I still have relatives living there. I've visited Donbass almost every year since, and could see what was happening here over years. ukraine was failed state for many years, and Donbass was her unloved child. ukraine as a state did almost nothing to economically, culturally and socially develop Donbass. I've seen it degrading for many years. If you live in Europe, I bet you couldn't even approximately understand how deep was Donbass dive from urbanized highly developed region with excellent infrastructure to degraded depressive place since ukraine gaining independence. Western-oriented ukraine leaders always knew who populated Donbass, and they both never had any dreams or misunderstandings about each other.
Ukraine was a failed state, many places, not just donbas saw their quality of life fall even compared to Belerus, let alone Poland which grew well economically
Part of the failure in Ukraine has been due to corruption, and a lot of that corruption was tied down to Russia. Ukraine wanted to break free of that and join the EU to become like Poland and Latvia. On top of that, by starting the process to join the EU would have forced Ukraine to comply to EU standards and laws which would have helped reduce corruption significantly
As far as Ukraine is really concerned, as long as Donbas doesn't want to join Ukraine, they would be fine with letting them go if they really wish (and not being threatened by Russia). But the problem there is 2 things
1. Russia doesn't care about Donbas, they only want 2 places, Crimea and Kyiv. Donbas is just a stepping stone to have an excuse to take Kyiv. It is the same method that Hitler used, claim that "ethnic Germans were being prosecuted", use that as an excuse to take a portion of the land, hold a referendum at gun point and integrate the land, then use it to invade the entire country
2. It would make all agreements worthless between Russia as Budapest already exist under which Russia promised to not to invade Ukraine and guarantee their borders. So it would be like acknowledging any future agreement between Russia can be easily broken by Russia at their convenience
Thus, any yielding just means delaying the war for tomorrow with Russia coming in later with stronger position as they would fortify their supply chains on the conquered land
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