Agencies with boots on the ground can give statistics that are meaningful. Agencies with no boots on the ground, and no statistics to offer, are unreliable witnesses. If you refuse to trust in ANY of those agencies on the ground who can collect stats, but will trust implicitly any old random internet nut who plucks figures out of thin air and won't tell you where they come from, then what is the point of truth?
Example:
Even the Donbas People's Republic's own curator of wartime casualty statistics has confirmed, the civil war more or less ended in 2019. And yet we CONSTANTLY get this message from the pro-Russian camp, that there was still a genocide going on in January.
Why do they say that? Because Putin says so, and so does his TV station, and so does Lavrov. Have any of them EVER provided any proof? No. Have they even SAID they have proof? Again, no. Sound familiar? It's FAKE NEWS. It's as fake as some of the accusations from the Trump-bashing playbook. Why do we need evidence, we gotta be right.
This is a link to the DPR's OFFICIAL publication of its casualty statistics. Relevant document is the first PDF titled: "ДОКЛАД УПОЛНОМОЧЕННОГО ПО ПРАВАМ ЧЕЛОВЕКА В ДОНЕЦКОЙ НАРОДНОЙ РЕСПУБЛИКЕ ЗА 2020 ГОД".
Inside the PDF, scroll down to page 22. The DPR numbers for 2018 to 2020 are 154, 160 and 44.
The below image is taken from the official verified statistics as documented by the UN. You can easily grab those from any English language source, as they are in the public domain and are considered to be the "agreed facts".
So you can literally compare (possibly understated) UN numbers to (possibly overstated) DPR numbers, side by side. In fact, there isn't a single official statistical source from ANYWHERE - and I'm including the DPR, LPR, Russia, Ukraine, the EU monitors, the UN monitors, or any humanitarian NGO - which has collected casualty numbers from January 2019 to January 2022 AND posted a higher civilian death count above 44 for any year after 2020.
Even if it was 50 people a year, for three years straight, that isn't a sodding genocide. Not by ANY sane definition. But people fall for this regurgitated bullshit time and time again.
A lie often repeated can become truth only if you let it. None of us are immune to propaganda, or confirmation bias, and sometimes people accept as truth something that they must surely know is fundamentally, demonstrably false in order to further a completely different rhetorical argument.
But some people are willing to point repeatedly to a nonexistent fake genocide purely to make the argument that a far more well-evidenced REAL genocide isn't happening.
And there's at least one poster I've butted heads with here on FR, who appears to be doing exactly that just because he's so totally pissed off about what happened to Donald Trump that he's justifying any and all levels of Russian destruction and brutality in Ukraine because, in effect, "GOOD, that'll teach the libtards a lesson."