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Whenever you remind people of the fact that the armed conflict in Ukraine has been going on for 8 years, someone will say that "Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014" and that the existence of the Donbass Republics is a Russian aggression. Recently, military historian Yevgeny Norin got into such a discussion on Facebook and took a look at the facts (translation our own, reposted with his permission):

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0. Armed violence as such in Ukraine was triggered by the Euromaidan protests. This was an armed uprising and it led to the fall of the government. It is not immediately obvious that rebelling against the government is good in Kiev, but bad in Donetsk.

1. By the time the Russian army entered Donbass, the war was already in full swing - if we are talking specifically about the army, companies, and battalions made up of soldiers and officers on duty. By the time the Russian Federation started supplying weapons en masse, the war was, again, already going on. Yes, the moment when there were ill-supplied men at militia roadblocks was not very long, but it existed, and the Russian Federation brought weapons into an already ongoing conflict in which the opposing side was using firearms, including artillery and armored vehicles.

2. By the time of the first organized armed detachment, which can be called Russian (which is a stretch, by the way: Strelkov's personal status is vague, and 80% of the detachment were Ukrainian citizens, including Crimeans), the State Security Service building in Lugansk had already been captured & local armories had been opened, and in Kharkov there were already people killed in firefights. In addition, if we take for granted the thesis that Strelkov "started the war", a cartoonish picture emerges in which 50 people have taken Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Liman, Artemovsk, Druzhkovka, Konstantinovka and a number of smaller towns and cities, giving as many as 7-8 occupiers for each city. In reality, even the reason why Strelkov went to Slavyansk is known - a large local detachment was waiting for him there.

Local commanders dominated the whole first stage of the movement (the bright personality of Strelkov somehow overshadowed the less bright Zakharchenko, Khodakovsky, Mozgovoy, Bednov, Tsvyakh, Dremov, Plotnitsky, Bolotov, etc.) and locals until 2022 constituted 75-90% of the rebel groups at all phases of events, which can be easily proven by name lists of republic soldiers KIA. Even at the peak of Russian involvement until 2022, in August 2014, citizens of Russia and other countries were not more than a quarter of the dead, and soldiers and officers on duty were not more than a quarter of that quarter, the bulk of Russian citizens were just volunteers who went to fight at their own risk.

4. In those places where attempts at pro-Russian protests were suppressed, including violently, with murders, Russian direct influence was virtually undetectable. In Odessa, after the mass murder of pro-Russian activists, exactly one citizen of the Russian Federation was captured alive, who did not play any significant role there and was worthy of a separate mention only by the fact of citizenship; in Kharkov, after the defeat of the group trying to create the Kharkov People’s Republic, there were zero Russian citizens among the captured, as far as I know. Thus, the thesis that 2014 was an invasion by the Russian Federation is incorrect: both the key events, including the seizure of administrative buildings and the search for weapons, took place before the appearance of organized units from Russia, and the composition of the units opposing the government are mostly locals from start to finish. An invasion in which all the infantry are citizens of the invaded country is obviously nonsense: in Poznan or, I don't know, Székesfehérvár, Strelkov would have immediately become a General without an army.

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