It’s a liberal cesspool full of people who refuse to listen when you speak. I explained how the SMO in Russia was justified going all the way back to fucking WWII and Stepan Bandera to Russia not wanting Ukraine in NATO and some dickhead told me to “tOuCH gRaSS”. Didn’t even address any of my points, just that “dEnAziFIcaTioN iSnT a gOoD rEasOn, iT’s aS bAd aS wMDs”.
Fucking moron. I hate that fucking place so fucking much.
Except that there was and still is a civil war. A large part of those fighting on the Russian side are Ukrainians, and not just from the Donbass either. The civil war started in 2014 after the Maidan coup, and the first rebels had virtually zero support from Russia, they had to fight with whatever they could get their hands on. Most of their equipment was actually acquired from units of the Ukrainian military and police who deserted to the side of the rebels, and from the units they went on to defeat. Russia was heavily criticized by many of the people living and fighting in the new Donbass republics and by more hardline Russians for not doing more to support the rebels at that time, and even intervening to stop their advance when they had just inflicted a massive defeat on the Kiev regime forces. It was because of Russia’s insistence on stopping the fighting and trying to get a diplomatic resolution that the rebels had to leave the liberated Mariupol - one of the first cities that rose up against the Maidan - which then was re-occupied by Azov Nazis who went on to torture and brutalize the local population for years until Russia finally recaptured it last year.
And why shouldn’t Russia arm the side of the civil war which chose to reject the undemocratic, western engineered fascist coup that overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine if the West was backing the other side, giving them money, weapons, training and more? Why the double standard? By the same logic you could say that without western interference the coup would not have succeeded in the first place or that the regime would not have survived after the coup.
The fact that you see the Maidan regime as legitimate, and the rebels (who by the way did not start out as separatists, merely as people who rejected the violent overthrow of a government they had elected and whose initial demands were merely for autonomy; portraying them as “Russian backed separatists” to delegitimize them is a characteristic of pro-Maidan propaganda) as illegitimate just shows which side you stand on.