Cogitation in the Time of War #13 - 8 years of War in Donbas

Antes de passar ao tópico da dissertação queria dizer 2 coisas:

1. Happy International Women's Day, in particular to the warrior women of Ukraine.
3. "In war, truth is the first casualty" (please watch this video); and I just like to add that the winners are the ones that write the History books.

Let's move on to the issue at hand, the 8 year period since March 2014 till Putin's Invasion, a period during which Ukraine and Russia were already at war but unofficially.

There is a documentary by a French journalist called "Donbass" released in 2016 that is making the rounds in the social media these days in a way to show that Ukrainians are not the good guys.

I haven't seen it completely; I started but got a bit upset about the angle and had to stop. Need to view it fully again and try to be as neutral as possible. For that reason I'm not sharing the link to it because this is not a review of the documentary. This is to talk about the War in Donbas, one of the reasons, at least from the Moscow narrative, behind Putin's invasion.

It started in 2014 after the Euromaidan protests that lead to the change of government (that the Russians claim to have been a coup). It started as a perfectly normal and legitimate movement of a largely pro-Russian population that lives in the 2 regions (oblasts) that make the Donbas. They were not happy with the change at Kyiv, meant to turn the country away from Moscow's influence and westwards. But due to the annexation of Crimea (planned by Moscow all along as they later admitted it) these protests evolved to a separatist movement, also triggered by Russia that sent a lot of troops there and sparked the entire mess (the results of the referendums were discussed before the vote even started, between the separatists leaders and Moscow).

With the military support from Russia, including many Russian volunteers, war broke out with the Ukrainian government forces for control of the region.

And in a war, as I mentioned before when talking about other conflicts, no side can claim to be "pure". Both will kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure. Some of these will be collateral but others will be from direct and purposed attacks. The quality of life in the conflict area severely deteriorates by actions from both belligerents.

Usually people on both sides commit war crimes and atrocities.

Even fighting Nazi Germany (and unless you are a neo-nazi we all agree they were the bad guys), the Allies, not just the Soviets, executed prisoners of war, raped women, and caused huge civilian destruction with the sole goal to lower morale (not a true military objective).

So of course in the Donbas, the Ukraine government forces for sure did their part of the atrocities. But any opinion or message that suggests they were the sole responsible for the humanitarian crisis is very difficult, if not impossible, to take it seriously.

In particular since that war was actually started with the direct external intervention by Russia, so they cannot sweep that under the carpet.

And just to clarify some numbers being thrown out in comments and posts (based on what is also said in the documentary, from what I could observe): it is estimated around 14500 deaths in the Donbas since 2014 but of these the big majority were combatants. Around 3500 were civilians.

Of course no one can believe that all deaths were caused by just one side when both sides used widespread artillery attacks on civilian areas.

Whenever someone tries to pin all casualties on one side only, it's just propaganda or stupidity (or both).