"As we all know, there were two areas in Ukraine that were Russian speaking, that were Russian populated, who refused to comply with the new dictatorship that banned the Russian language among other things.
So this was the Crimea and Donbas. Now, Putin could not say no to Crimea because it voted by itself, without any encouragement from Moscow, to secede and send a delegation to the Duma and the Duma couldn't say no, and in a sense Putin had to agree.
Now the same thing happened in the Donbas. They voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine. And Putin said, I remember exactly his words, 'referendum results should be respected,' but he didn't. He insisted on a compromise formula that he held onto the next eight years all the way to the 22nd of February 2022.
Now, his formula was Donbas should remain Ukrainian but it should have autonomy and this is known as the Minsk accords. Now this is very important because Putin kept on repeating, day after day, year after year, that there's no alternative to Minsk accords. So he was pushing Donbas to remain in Ukraine as long as they have their autonomy.
By the way, there are a lot of people in Donbas who don't like Putin at all and who basically say to him now that in 2014 they could've joined Russia without any loss of human life, or at least in 2015 when there was the first battle. And it was Putin who ordered them to stop the Donbas army when they were approaching Mariupol. And now it took them many, many more efforts and thousands of more lives in order to achieve taking over Mariupol eight years later." - Vladimir Brovkin, from 6:22 - 8:22 in the video below.
Video Title: The US and Russia at War. Source: Vladimir Brovkin. Date Published: June 6, 2022. Description:
In this segment of Modern Russian History, I discuss the origin of the current conflict between the United States or NATO, which is the same, and Russia, starting with the political situation in 2003 when Russia, Germany and France opposed US war in Iraq. That generated American fear that Russia and Europe would become so close that NATO would become obsolete. Fast forward to the 2014 coup d'etat in Ukraine and plans to integrate Ukraine into NATO. Then followed Putin's ultimatum and the actual fighting. What would it lead to?
