Ukraine's post-Maidan government came to power as a result of a coup d’état.
Summary
Russia calls on the international community to recognise the fact of the civil war in Ukraine and to impose an arms embargo on this country, which is destroying its own population.
The Ukrainian authorities prohibit opposition political parties, dissent, destroy the free press, journalists.
Disproof
This is a mix of several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the war in Eastern Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a “civil war” or a war of Ukraine against its own people in Donbas. The claim also contains a disinformation narrative about discrimination of Russian language media in Ukraine.
There is no civil war in Ukraine. The war in Eastern Ukraine is actually a well-documented case of Russian armed aggression. The EU has repeatedly condemned the clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity by acts of aggression by the Russian armed forces since February 2014, and the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia.
The European Union stated in July 2014 that "arms and fighters continue flowing into Ukraine from the Russian Federation". Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted Russia's military presence in Ukraine in 2015.
Putin has repeatedly stated that Moscow will continue to support these territories, for example by systematically issuing Russian passports that can be then used as a pretext to claim the 'right to protect' and perhaps intervene militarily. Russia is also reported to be using the occupied territories as a testing ground for new weapons.
Ukraine continues to stress that Donbas is a part of Ukraine and that the residents of temporally occupied territories are citizens of Ukraine.
Pro-Kremlin outlets often claim that the closure of three television channels - 112 Ukraina, NewsOne and ZIK - is a violation of freedom of speech and suppression of the opposition. In reality, these channels were taken off the air on 2 February 2021 after sanctions were imposed on their owner, Taras Kozak.
The closure of these channels was not an encroachment on free speech because Taras Kozak was suspected of dealing with the illegal Moscow-backed separatist entities in Eastern Ukraine, which are the so-called DNR and LNR. Detector Media, a Ukrainian NGO and media watchdog, said in a report in October 2020 that these channels were spreading pro-Kremlin narratives claiming that Ukraine is not a state in its own right, that it is controlled by Nazis and that it is governed from outside.
The recent actions of the Ukrainian government have nothing to do with what pro-Kremlin outlets and politicians call infringements on democracy. These are only Ukrainian attempts to finally get rid of Russian influence (for example, the concepts of "Russian world", "One nation", Crimea is Russian, the claim that Ukraine is the second state of the Russian people, military intervention, hybrid war and continuous undermining Ukrainian statehood) and continue its pro-Western course.