Nonsense, one of the early Russian separatists, Colonel Igor Girkin said locals don't want to fight for the Russian side.
"In a nearly nine-minute video recorded in a spare office with a paper-strewn desk and a local map hung on the wall, Girkin – using his nom de guerre Igor Strelkov (Igor “the Shooter”) – berates the men of Donetsk province for refusing to fight. Because of their cowardice, he says, he has no choice but to humiliate them by publicly inviting the women of Donetsk province to take roles in the liberation of eastern Ukraine that properly belong to real men...
The few local men who have joined his militia are those aged over forty who were raised in Soviet times, and there is a complete absence of youth in his rebel ranks, Girkin says. “Where are the young people?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIHdrSm6jrU
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-separatist-commander-appeals-for-volunteers-says-he-is-short-of-fighters/
Maybe they didn't want to be part of Ukraine, either, and that why the created their own republic.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/254-rebels-without-cause-russias-proxies-eastern-ukraine
The result is three distinct groups in the east: a proxy leadership financially and politically dependent on Moscow but with no clear policy goals or local base of its own; ideological separatists whose hopes of joining Russia have been dashed; and the majority of the population, worn out by war and frustrated at the seeming indifference of both Kyiv and Moscow.
The point is that is a mess we should stay out of it with no clear moral distinction between the sides.
This was not a situation created by Putin or Russia. It was mess created by failed leadership in Ukraine.