FLBear5630 said:
Sam Lowry said:
Mothra said:
Sam Lowry said:
Mothra said:
Sam Lowry said:
Mothra said:
Realitybites said:
You're forgetting one major point: After the Victoria Nuland coup of 2014, the provinces that the Russian military is now in declared independence from the new government in Kiev. The war started then, with the Ukranian Armed Forces attacking these eastern provinces. Only after Kiev's unwillingness to honor the Minsk accords did the Russian military move in. This war did not magically start a few years ago because Putin got up on the wrong side of the bed.
It appears you're glib to another major point: Russia invaded the breakaway provinces prior to the commencement of hostilities. Who the hell do you think the Ukrainian Armed Forces were fighting? Ukrainians?
LOL.
So you don't actually know who they were fighting? Interesting.
No, but apparently you do not:
Toward the end of February 2014, unidentified military figures, later confirmed to be Russian personnel, surrounded the airports in Crimea, a majority-Russian peninsula in Ukraine. The Crimean autonomous assembly was then seized by Russian reservists and pro-Russian forces. In March 2014 the assembly issued a declaration of independence and a subsequent referendum on union with Russia was held.
In the days that followed, other groups appeared. These were genuine volunteers, who had come from Moscow to join what they saw as the liberation of Crimea.
There was no significant fighting in Crimea, nor is it one of the eastern provinces.
Is it your position Russians troops did not take part in the fighting in Donbas as well?
Of course not. But it's your position that Ukrainians didn't?
Donbas is in Ukraine!
Only because the Bolsheviks drew the border that way.
What about what the people in the actual region wanted?
[it was the
Bolsheviks who emerged victorious in the struggle for power at the end of World War I, who had to solve the problem of the border between Russia and Ukraine. Drawing the boundaries of a new country within a previously centralized empire was no small problem, especially since the provinces that were to become Ukraine had not had any special status or autonomy in the tsarist empire. In the nineteenth century, the territory of today's Ukraine was divided into three general governments encompassing various provinces: the General Government of Kiev (northwest), the General Government of Little Russia (northeast), and the General Government of New Russia and Bessarabia (east and south). After the gradual liquidation of the general governments, this de facto subdivision into three regions persisted.
Based on this language-based data, the Central Rada drew up a list of provinces that were to be considered Ukrainian, which included Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava, and Chernigov, but also the eastern and southern provinces of Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kherson, and Taurida (without Crimea). Although the large cities were the centers of colonial domination and spoke Russian...
The idea of a Donets-Krivoi Rog republic, uniting eastern Ukraine and the industrialized part of the Don oblast, seemingly emerged among the Kharkov Bolsheviks under the influence of some militants coming from Rostov-on-Don after the conquest of this neighboring Russian region by anti-Bolshevik general Alexei..
The main question remains why, long after the defeat of the Ukrainian nationalists, the top Soviet authorities continued to support the conception of a "greater Ukraine" while ruling out any possibility of a Russian or independent Donbas. Wasn't the main mission of this project namely to combat the Ukrainian nationalists now complete?
As Terry Martin rightly points out, the Bolsheviks' strategy was "to assume leadership over what now appeared to be the inevitable process of decolonization." This is why, first in theory and then in practice, Lenin opted for a national principle in building the USSR. Each Soviet nation was thus to have its own territorially and administratively delimited "national home" a difficult plan to implement in a continental empire like Russia's. Indeed, the tsarist empire had a multiplicity of geographical areas, halfway between metropolitan and colonial status.
Eastern Ukraine represented such a zone of hybridization: its urban centers, economically and culturally oriented toward Russia...]
https://jacobin.com/2022/03/bolshevik-soviet-republic-donbas-ukraine-national-question-lenin-putin-ussrNot to mention that Crimea was not even transferred to Ukraine until the 1950s
[On April 26, 1954 The decree of
the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring the Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_Crimea_in_the_Soviet_Union#:~:text=The%20decree%20was%20first%20announced,SFSR%20to%20the%20Ukrainian%20SSR.