This is so true.
I’ve posted this on another thread - we’re in the process of getting a Russian family out of eastern Ukraine. The mother and young kids have left Ukraine because they are fleeing RUSSIAN troops not Ukrainian ones. Two are staying behind in Zaporizhia Oblast to shore up the defenses against Russian occupation.
There’s a ludicrous amount of disinformation in the mainstream media (on all sides, and certainly in Russian media) about what’s been happening on the ground in DPR and LPR since 2014. Zelenskyy won the election in part thanks to the support of Russian-speaking communities, who had reason to be hostile to Poroshenko but not enough to actually want a sell-out turd like Yanukovych turning Ukraine into the next Belarus on Putin’s dime.
How do we know this is what Russian Ukrainians really think? Easy... NGOs are talking to Russian families from the DPR, who fled WEST, on a daily basis. There are hundreds of thousands of them in the border towns of many other countries, either giving their accounts directly to journalists or just creating social media accounts and doing their own video diaries. Nobody’s putting a gun to their heads. They can say exactly whatever the hell they like.
What’s Russia’s counterargument? Seriously? All they keep showing us is a handful of videos recorded by a bunch of people stood ten feet away from Russians with machine guns, and no independent witnesses.
If Russia is not lying when they say that over 100k Russians in East Ukraine “willingly” took up offers to relocate to Siberia, why are there no social media video clips being sent to families to let them where they are and confirm they’re well? Why is there no TV coverage with unbroken footage showing the great positive stories of these successful, voluntary relocations to the most inhospitable parts of Russia?
Not only is the difference between how Russia treats its own and how Ukraine treated them well-evidenced, there’s also the fact that after his election, Zelenskyy did begin to pull troops out of the contested areas, and even faced down Azov:
Zelenskyy also oversaw changes in the law, to eliminate parliamentary immunity from criminal prosecution.
Elections to the Rada returned fewer hardliners and definitely no Azov.
Where do I get that from? Russians. In Ukraine. The very people Putin puffers reckon needed protecting FROM Zelenskyy. If you ask them which is worse - risk getting harassed by a couple of Azov thugs on patrol for being Russian or risk being harrassed by a Kadyrovite brute squad for being Ukrainian, I would put hard cash down on the answer being the same every damned time - they were far less bothered by Azov than they are now by Putin’s brute squads.
Did Russia need to displace 4 million people, flatten the entire city of Mariupol, mine half of the DPR, forceably transport over 100,000 people to Siberia, bomb hospitals, schools and railway stations, forceably occupy Chernobyl; bring in Kadyrovites, Chechens, Tatars; blackmail Russian citizens from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan into signing up, and more, all to deal with a lunatic fringe that wasn’t even big enough to fill the seats at the Rhoads Softball Stadium in Alabama?
No. And if Russia ever had been going into this with the best of intentions, bussing in Islamists and neo-nazi execution squads wasn’t the best way to go about it.
Thank you so much for your information about Donbas Ukrainians.
bttt