Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin, who fought for Russia in Donbas, admitted that Russia invaded Ukraine back in 2014.
According to him, Putin sent military specialists and Wagner Group troops to Donbas, who fought against Ukraine under the guise of Donetsk militants.
Putin denies that Russia has been fighting against Ukraine since 2014 and calls those events a "civil war." In reality, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began 12 years ago.
Nothing Russia does in Ukraine is "retaliation."
Russia launched this unprovoked war, struck warehouses first, and committed war crimes from day one.
Claiming Moscow is merely retaliating when Ukraine fights back is ignorant or complicit
Take a close look at these two photos.
Thirty years ago, in 1996, on this day, August 31, russia and Chechnya signed a peace agreement. Russia had failed to destroy Chechen independence by force, so it signed a “peace agreement.”
Three years later, in 1999, russia invaded again.
Russia used the three year peace to prepare for revenge. Chechnya was devastated by war, economically isolated, politically destabilized, and largely abandoned by the outside world. Moscow portrayed Chechnya as a failed state and exploited their weaknesses.
When russia returned, it finished what it had failed to accomplish in the first war.
This is why neither Ukraine nor any other country of the world can trust russia to uphold a ceasefire or peace agreement. A ceasefire that allows russia to rebuild its army while Ukraine is pressured to demobilize, Western military support declines, and the world gradually moves on is simply an intermission before the next, even more devastating war.
Ukraine needs peace. But it needs a peace that leaves Ukraine strong and russia unable to attack again. History has repeatedly shown that Moscow interprets weakness as an invitation. The only language russia understands is the language of force. Without strength and credible deterrence, today’s peace agreement can become tomorrow’s preparation for another war.
Russian fascists spell out their goal of genocide against Ukraine and Ukrainian people in plain language.
Their objective has been and will be to erase everything Ukrainian - people, history, culture, identity.
Only defeating Russia militarily can prevent this outcome.
russia's 'Donbas genocide' propaganda was so fake they had to hire the victims.
We Finns know this trick. When Moscow was allied with Nazi Germany in 1939, the Soviets shelled Mainila, blamed Finland and invaded four days later.
The colonial playbook, page by page, currently open on Ukraine:
Rename the territory ("Novorossiya"). Deport the children, re-educate the survivors. Settle your own population in the emptied cities. Rewrite the schoolbooks, reissue the passports, redraw the parishes. Call resistance "terrorism" and occupation "liberation."
Europe spent seventy years apologizing for running this playbook overseas — and can't recognize it running in real time on its own continent, in HD, with receipts.
Decolonization's last chapter isn't in Africa or Asia. It's at Europe's eastern border, and it's armed.
On this day in 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and carved up Europe as allies.
Moscow wants the world to forget this.
Russia holds no moral high ground on Nazism and only fought Hitler after he betrayed them in 1941
Russians have proudly posted their murder of a boy on a bicycle in Ukraine's eastern town on Kramatorsk.
The "human safari" in which Russians have long engaged in southern regions has now spread to the east.
A boy on his bike near Kramatorsk was just murdered by a russian drone. They posted this video of their crime. This is evidence this war has nothing to do with territory. It’s an attempt to wipe out an entire civilian population of an innocent county while the world watches.