Come on, Bob. That old claim has been disproved over and over. One would think Putin could have come up with a better excuse, and not have had to resort to an old Hitlerian one.
Pro-Russia FReepers routinely trot out the old fiction that the Ukrainians killed 14,000 civilians before Russia invaded in 2022 as some sort of rescue mission. Those same FReepers engage in the time-honored ruse of the left: Misrepresentation.
The fact is, between April, 2014 and the end of 2021 there were 14,200 - 14,400 TOTAL deaths as a result of the Donbas civil war. Of that number, some 3,400 were civilians. There were also some 400 - 500 Russian TROOPS killed in Ukraine in the first full year of that civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
Your source is Wikipedia? What a joke.