DISINFO: West deceived Russia, then carried out a coup in Ukraine unleashing massacre in Donbas
SUMMARY
At first, after the collapse of the USSR, we were promised that there would be no advance of NATO to [Russian] borders. They took advantage of the weakness of [Russian] state - they deceived. The Western united troops are actually already standing at [Russian] borders.
Next, they carried out a coup d'état in Ukraine with the involvement of neo-Nazis. And unleashed a bloody massacre in the east of Ukraine. And this massacre, unleashed by the Kyiv junta, has been going on for eight years already! For eight years civilians, people of the older generation, women, children have been dying. Eight years of bloodshed.
RESPONSE
A mix of several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about NATO enlargement, Euromaidan and the war in Eastern Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a “civil war” and Ukraine's genocide of people in Donbas. An attempt to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The claim about NATO has been debunked numerous times. NATO did not make any promises not to expand into eastern and central Europe back in 1990, which was confirmed by the former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. Back in 2014, Gorbachev said that “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years.”
There was no coup d’état organised by the West in Kyiv in 2014. 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. Far-right groups had a very limited presence during the protests and have suffered defeats in every national election after that.
There is no evidence that either ethnic Russians or Russian speakers were facing persecution at the hands of the Ukrainian authorities, much less the danger of annihilation on grounds of nationality, ethnicity, or cultural belonging. This has been confirmed by reports issued by the Council of Europe, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the OSCE.
These false narratives repeated for many years became a pretext for the Russian invasion of Ukraine launched by the Kremlin on 24 February 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a special military operation against Ukraine citing NATO’s military infrastructure approaching the Russian border as a pretext.
See the EU's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine here along with EU vs Disinfo's Guide to Deciphering Pro-Kremlin disinformation around Putin's War.