DISINFO: Local Donbas population has risen against the February 2014 coup in Kyiv
SUMMARY
Large areas of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk were engulfed in a civil war in the spring of 2014 after the local population rose against the February 2014 Kyiv coup.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin narrative about Euromaidan and the war in Ukraine.
There was no coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014; this is a longstanding pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Ukraine's Euromaidan. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was a reaction by numerous segments of the Ukrainian population to former president Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013.
Since 2014, Russia has waged large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine and is also responsible for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, after having illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula and engineered the creation of rebel militias in Donetsk, Luhansk and other places, with its army actively participating in military clashes.
For this reason, the conflict in eastern Ukraine can hardly been called an act of "resistance," given the abundant evidence that the war is an act of aggression by Russian armed forces, ongoing since February 2014.
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