Thank you for inviting me to elaborate.

I agree with your overall impression.

Ukrainian governments based in Kiev have been waging a civil war against the separatists in the Donbas region, including Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. They’ve used military methods similar to those Putin is using against Kiev itself right now — air strikes, tank assaults, artillery, commando units.

The separatists resisted using weapons that came from local armouries, and from sections of the Ukrainian army that surrendered or changed sides. Some of their weapons allegedly came from across the Russian border as well.

The fighting became less intense after the Minsk 2 agreement of 2015, but it never completely stopped, and the separatist regions have remained under constant threat.

What is the conflict about? One underlying reason is that people in the Donbas region are mostly Russian-speaking, while in Kiev more people speak Ukrainian. The two languages are rather similar, but the differences matter to those who speak them.

For instance, in the Russian language Ukraine’s capital is called Kiev, whereas in Ukrainian it is Kyiv. And Donbas is actually a Ukrainian place name; in Russian it is Donbass, with two esses at the end instead of one.

There are other factors, to do with culture, history, and religious denominations. all of which result in the Donbas (or Donbass) region being comparatively Russia-friendly, while the west of Ukraine is more friendly to Germany, the EU, the USA and NATO.

Things came to a head in February 2014, when crowds of protesters in Kiev and Lviv took up arms against Ukraine’s then President, Viktor Yanukovych. It was a pro-western insurrection, much welcomed by western governments and media.

But in the Donbas the insurrection was a lot less popular.

Why? Firstly because it removed an elected President whom many in the Donbas had voted for. Secondly, because it signalled the rise of a powerful new wave of hard-right Ukrainian paramilitaries, whose orientation Donbas people found repugnant.

So people in Donetsk and Luhansk organised their own counter-demonstrations, formed their own paramilitaries, and proclaimed their regions to be independent republics…

I agree with you that it would have been better if Ukrainian governments (since 2014) had treated the Donbas people as brothers and sisters.

However, Kiev (or Kyiv) seems to have been gripped by a form of nationalism and European-ism which caused them to see pro-Russian separatists as their natural enemies.

Does all this make sense to you, Mfmatusky?