“The information war is ongoing. And now, in the MSM, there are too many things that are simply not true,” says Donbass mother.
QUICK FACTS:
- Residents of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region describe in interviews how they’ve been marginalized, attacked, and gaslit by hostile military forces, contrary to the Western media’s portrayal of Ukraine, NewsWars reports.
- Donbass is the contested Ukrainian region composed of Donetsk and Lugansk, recently recognized as sovereign territories by Russia.
- In recent interviews published by American independent media organization RAIR Foundation, residents of the separatist regions discuss suffering PTSD after repeated attacks from the Ukrainian military over the past 8 years.
- “It all started around June 2014, when we decided to separate from Ukraine. So they started shelling us… mornings and nights,” one woman recalls.
- “My husband and I went to vote in the referendum,” she continues. “We were walking there while they were shooting at us, under artillery shelling.”
- An older woman agrees, saying she remembers seeing leaflets telling residents to leave the area around the same time, NewsWars notes.
- “They were dropping leaflets on us in 2014 saying we should leave immediately, take ourselves and get off the land because it does not belong to us,” she says. “They don’t need the people who live here; they want our land and our coal, but they don’t need the people.”
WATCH:
WHAT OTHER INTERVIEWEES SAID:
- “Ukraine was shooting at us,” an interviewee recalled realizing. “They hate us.”
- “When they started bombing us, killing children, women and the elderly, I understood that they hate us, even though we didn’t do anything to them,” she continued. “We didn’t start a war against them. They started it.”
BACKGROUND:
- After Putin recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DRP) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), he announced his country’s military operation in Ukraine.
- “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime,” said Putin. “To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not only rejects the claim that his government is committing genocide against its own people, but has called for Russia to lose its voting power as a member of the U.N. Security Council, alleging Putin’s military operation itself amounts to “criminal actions” that show “signs of genocide.”
