As to your story about the Donbas, prior to 2014 the
breakaway parties that started the insurrection had a negligible following in the polls. They only achieved traction because Putin poured in arms, mercenaries and false-flag military units to back them.
Before the violence, opinion polls suggested that around 25% of the population supported some kind of a split. Compared to, say, the numbers of Scots that want to split from England, or the number of Catalans that want to separate from Spain, this number is very low.
And that was asked in the context of a constitutional separation, so we can assume that an even smaller percentage support the violent insurrection.
Putin engineered the breakaway and sent in Russian special forces.
Read up on the Minsk 1 /2 accords. Signed by the Ukies, Russia, France Germany. The Ukies violated it by not allowing the Donbass provinces elections on self governance ( limited Independence from the Ukies).
The corrupted beggar Zelensky really needs to ditch those ethnic Russian provinces, they have been a huge problem for the Ukies since 2015.
Vlad will secure them at all costs. His war speech outlined his three major “ special operations “ objectives. Very nice of him to address his nation of his exact objectives. Like it or not- Vlad, like Trump, does what he says. Vlad does have his Duma ( Congress) approval and backing for now, something the US seems to never do when entering foreign “ entanglements”.