DISINFO: Crimea, Donbas separated from Ukraine after Nazi coup in Kyiv
SUMMARY
The Nazi core of present-day Ukraine is forcing the country to wage a fratricidal war against the Donbas. Crimea and the Donbas were unwilling to bow to the Nazis following the Nazi coup d'etat in February 2014.
Crimea avoided war by rejoining Russia. The Donbas, on the other hand, fell victim of a large-scale retributive operation, during which Ukraine's Nazi battalions committed war crimes en masse.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin narratives painting the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests as a violent coup d'etat; exaggerating the influence of Nazi/Fascist/far-right actors on Ukrainian politics; blaming Kyiv for the unleashing of Russian armed aggression in east Ukraine.
The Euromaidan was an organic reaction by numerous parts of the Ukrainian population to former President Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013. See the full debunk of this disinformation claim.
Far-right groups had a very limited presence during the protests and went on to obtain abysmal results in the 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections. During the 2019 election cycle, the far right managed to sustain an even more tremendous failure; the highest-rated nationalist candidate, Ruslan Koshulynskyy, won 1.62% of the vote whereas Svoboda won 2.16% of the national vote, falling far short of the 5% minimum guaranteeing entry into parliament.
No international body recognises the so-called referendum held on the 16th of March 2014. On the 27th of February 2014, when the so-called referendum was announced, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution which stated that the referendum in Crimea was not valid and could not serve as a basis for any change in the status of the peninsula. A year later Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted that the plan to annex Crimea was ordered weeks before the so-called referendum.
Following the covert Russian invasion of “little green men,” power in Crimea was vested in a makeshift executive headed by Sergey Aksenov. The new Crimean regime conducted the referendum hastily and at gunpoint, barred impartial observers from entering the peninsula, and instead invited dozens of fringe politicians and activists to “monitor” the procedure, most of them far-right Kremlin loyalists.
For its part, the armed conflict in east Ukraine is a well-documented act of Russian aggression against sovereign Ukrainian territory, ongoing since February 2014. See the full debunk here.