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Gotcha. So are they stating their independence, their allegiance to Russia, or some type of hybrid?

The two break away republics were declared in 2014 over unhappiness with the coup d'etat that took place in Ukraine that year, when the elected President was deposed, forced from office and fled to Russia. These events are mostly described as the Maiden Revolution (although now attempting to be renamed as "the Revolution of Dignity" by supporters.

It bore many hallmarks of other CIA and George Soros supported coups and attempted coups that are known as "color revolutions" by people who analyze these sorts of things.

The Eastern part of Ukraine is more ethnically and culturally Russian, and many of these people objected to the legitimately elected leader, who they perceived as "one of them" being overthrown by forces that they viewed as anti-Russian.

I read this article a while ago about what happened that made these people feel the need to separate, by an author named Jacques Baud I was not previously familiar with, and found it interesting:

The Military Situation In The Ukraine, particularly Part One: The Road to War, which described the events around the Maiden Revolution and what followed in 2014.

As in all things Slavic, I'm sure there are other interpretations of these events, but what I find interesting is how we hear, from our American corporate media, nothing at all about any of this, in any detail. We get a dumbed-down or children's version of events. Like a cartoon our version has "good guys" and "bad guys", and that's set out on the first page of the story. But real life is usually a bit more complicated than that:

Let’s try to examine the roots of the conflict. It starts with those who for the last eight years have been talking about “separatists” or “independentists” from Donbass. This is not true. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность). The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language. For the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the overthrow of President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language. A bit like if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was a fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some massacres (in Odessa and Marioupol, for the most notable). At the end of summer 2014, only the self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk remained.

I recommend the whole article linked above, but this gives a feel for some of the main points.

Imagine if President Trump had been forced to flee the White House after after several months of violent Left Wing protests in D.C., it led to the storming of the White House and the shooting deaths of hundreds of protesters.
After President Trump evaculated to an adjacent State (Camp David), for his safety and security, and in an attempt to de-escalate the violence taking place in the District of Columbia, suddenly a new President was declared on TV by CNN and the other networks.
Presidente Roberto Cortez (a relative of A.O.C) assumed the office of "Presidente of the Transitional Government" and a new Republic was declared. The first act of the new Cortez government was outlawing the use of English in any official business in the USA, decreeing that henceforth all legal documents would be in Spanish, the language of "La Raza".
In such circumstances (admittedly far-fetched) one can certainly imagine multiple State declaring "autonomy", and denying the legitimacy of the new Presidente Cortez and his decrees.