“Putin Pledges To Protect All Ethnic Russians Anywhere.”
The 2014 article has some history that people interested in the current subject should read about.
The reason Putin waited 14 years before he started agitating on these ethnic pieces of bullshiite is that in 2012, oil & gas reserves were discovered there. It is just an excuse. Otherwise there’d be a long & wide record of such issues going back to before 2012, before 1994 and the Budapest Accession, right back to 1991 when Russia had hegemony over the region. It is simply an excuse, and a weak one at that, very similar to Hitler’s Sudetenland excuses.