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“For the past eight years, Russia has been protecting the life and health of civilians in Ukraine.”
From its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia manufactured the very humanitarian crisis it claims to be relieving.
Prior to the February 24, 2022, full-scale invasion, Russia’s eight-year aggression in eastern Ukraine left 14,000 dead and more than 1.4 million registered internally displaced persons, according to the United Nations. Since the Kremlin further invaded Ukraine in 2022, the bombardments and brutality of Russia’s forces sent 6.5 million Ukrainian civilians fleeing from their homes to seek refuge in neighboring countries and internally displaced millions more.
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Ukrainians wait for a food distribution organized by the Red Cross in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on Monday, April 18, 2022. (© Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo)
2/9
“Ukraine’s ultra-right political forces that came to power via unconstitutional means in 2014 have taken punitive military measures against residents of the ‘Russian-speaking’ regions of the country who refuse to recognize the government’s legitimacy.”
No ultra-right political forces came to power in Ukraine in 2014.
Russian speakers in Ukraine are able to freely exercise their human rights — freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association — unlike Russian citizens under Putin’s autocratic and increasingly repressive rule. Putin’s so-called “special operation” to allegedly “liberate” Russian speakers in Ukraine has killed thousands of civilians in predominantly Russian-speaking cities such as Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolayiv, not to mention Mariupol and the Donbas region.
Ukraine’s 2014 "Revolution of Dignity" was a popular democratic movement that took to the streets in support of Ukraine’s fuller integration with Europe. After a vicious crackdown that killed more than 100 peaceful protesters, then Kremlin-backed President Yanukovych fled the country for Russia. The quickly formed transitional government scheduled presidential elections for May 2014 and parliamentary elections for October 2014.
The far-right party "The Right Sector" failed to gain 5% of the vote required to enter Parliament and was not part of the new government.
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Ukrainian citizens stand in line to receive their ballots at a polling station during presidential and mayoral elections in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, May 25, 2014. (© Sergei Chuzavkov/AP Photo)
3/9
“The Minsk agreements are proof that the international community recognized the poor treatment of the Russian-speaking segment of the Ukrainian population and Ukraine’s responsibility for creating the overall humanitarian crisis.”
The Russian Federation — not Ukraine — initiated the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
In April 2014, the Russian Federation sent special operations forces into Donetsk and Luhansk to take over the administration of the region and establish proxy statelets. It soon followed up with regular armed forces from Russia. The Russia-instigated fighting prompted diplomatic efforts to establish a cease-fire through the Minsk agreements. Russia repeatedly violated its commitments under the Minsk agreements and continued to sustain a deadly eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine, causing untold suffering for the predominantly Russian-speaking population it was purportedly protecting.
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Injured Natalia Rudneva, 59, reacts as her son was hospitalized after a night of shelling in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Thursday, May 5, 2022. (© Andriy Andriyenko/AP Photo)
4/9
“Despite the Minsk agreements, over the course of the past eight years, the government of Ukraine has laid siege to Donbas, shelling civilian residences and destroying medical and civil infrastructure.”
Russia has itself to blame for the death and destruction.
The Donbas is Ukraine’s territory that Russia invaded and that the Kremlin’s proxies control by force. Ukraine is not laying siege to the Donbas. Ukraine is defending and fighting to reclaim its own territory, invaded by Russia and its proxies.
Russia and its proxies seized control of parts of the Donbas and in so doing took the moral responsibility for providing the population access to services, while rendering it impossible for the Ukrainian government to do so in the areas it did not control.
The Ukrainian government established clinics, including COVID-19 vaccination centers, along the line of contact between the forces of Ukraine and those of Russia and its proxies, and Ukrainian citizens living in the Russia-controlled areas had to cross checkpoints to get access to those services and visit family. Beginning in March 2020, Russia’s proxies used COVID-19 as an excuse to close checkpoints, further preventing Ukrainian citizens from moving freely within their own country.
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A local resident injured in a bombardment by Russia’s forces rests in a hospital in Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. Two rockets struck the town early in the morning, causing at least four injuries. (© Francisco Seco/AP Photo)
5/9
“As this full-scale humanitarian catastrophe grew, Russia stepped in to provide assistance to the affected populations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, including medicines, medical equipment, and medical care.”
Russia’s war of aggression caused this humanitarian catastrophe.
Russia’s government alone is responsible for the deterioration of humanitarian conditions. With its further invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia exponentially expanded the humanitarian crisis.
Russia’s government instigated the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 using its intelligence services and Kremlin-backed proxies. Since then, the Kremlin has cynically used the issue of humanitarian aid for propaganda purposes.
According to media reports, during the eight years since its initial invasion in 2014, Russia had attempted to disguise its funneling of arms and military equipment from Russia across the border into eastern Ukraine, claiming the convoys were delivering “humanitarian aid” to Ukraine. During its current unprovoked all-out war against Ukraine, Russian forces reportedly raided actual humanitarian convoys. Russia created the humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine’s southeast and controls the area, rendering it impossible for Ukraine to provide medical services such as airlifts in the area Ukraine does not control.
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Yana Stepanenko, 11, is carried by a doctor at a public hospital in Lviv, Ukraine, Friday, May 13, 2022. Yana and her mother, Natasha, 43, were injured April 8 during Russia’s shelling at the train station of the eastern city of Kramatorsk, where they traveled from their village near the front line. They were planning to catch an evacuation train heading west and, they hoped, to safety. (© Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo)
6/9
“In February 2022, things deteriorated further when Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, informed the UN Secretary General that the Minsk agreements will not be implemented ‘on Russia’s terms.’”
Russia is not interested in living up to its agreements or settling the conflict.
Russia failed to implement the Minsk agreements — not Ukraine. From 2014, Ukraine took steps to implement the Minsk agreements. It was Russia that failed to uphold a cease-fire and withdraw its forces, as required.
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Anna Shevchenko, 35, reacts next to her home in Irpin, near Kyiv, Tuesday, May 3, 2022. The house, built by Shevchenko’s grandparents, was reduced to wreckage by Russia’s bombing in late March during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (© Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo)
7/9
“After Ukraine indicated it would not comply with the Minsk agreements, it began deploying heavily armed forces and threatening the lives of more than four million citizens in the region. The goal? To create conditions for the elimination of the population of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking territories.”
Experts on Nazism and World War II voiced their strong opposition to Putin’s attempt to compare Ukraine and its democratically elected government to that of Nazi Germany.
A group of notable historians and academic scholars signed a letter condemning the Russian government’s “cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression.”
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A mass grave is exhumed by local authorities on April 8, 2022, as they attempt to identify the bodies of civilians who perished during the time Russia’s forces were in control of Bucha, Ukraine. (© Andalou Agency/Getty Images)
8/9
“And while the Russians are providing care and treatment for injured Ukrainian servicemen, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are destroying medical infrastructure. They’ve turned medical institutions into military warehouses and have gone so far as attacking ambulances and medical workers.”
“They’re even stealing and reselling humanitarian aid.”
During its unprovoked war against Ukraine, Russia’s forces reportedly raided humanitarian convoys.
There are intercepted phone calls and numerous reports of Russia’s soldiers looting homes in Ukraine, taking ordinary household items ranging from washing machines to nail polish and shipping them via Belarus back to their families in Russia.
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Captured on a cell phone, a store’s video surveillance camera shows a Russian soldier dressed only in his bulletproof jacket, gun, balaclava, flip-flops, and underwear, looting the same devastated store where the photo was taken on April 22, 2022, in Trostyanets, Ukraine. (© Gaelle Girbes/Getty Images)
9/9
“International organizations like the UN and the World Health Organization should really do something about Ukraine’s complete disregard for humanitarian law, the destruction of healthcare facilities, and their inhumane treatment of civilians and Russian servicemen.”
In 2014, Russia seized Crimea by force and instigated the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Today, Russia wages an unprovoked and unjust full-scale war against Ukraine.
Among other bombardments, Russia used cluster munitions, hitting health care facilities and other civilian infrastructure, turning the city of Mariupol into an unlivable disaster zone.
The United States has assessed that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. The information from a growing number of cities shows further evidence of atrocities by Russia’s forces.
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The bodies of men reportedly killed by Russia’s soldiers lie in a yard on April 5, 2022, in Bucha, Ukraine. Hundreds of bodies have been found in the days since Ukraine’s forces regained control of the town.(© Oleg Pereverzev/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images)
