DISINFO: Zelensky’s team is a bloody dictatorship waging the civil war in Ukraine
SUMMARY
The “team of Zelensky” is a bloody dictatorship. They killed thousands of their own citizens. The war did not begin in February 2022. The war has been going on for eight years, since armed bandits in Kyiv seized political power. Then began the civil war in Ukraine. Ukrainians openly speak about the “utilisation of Russians” in Donetsk.
RESPONSE
The message presents a collection of by now well-known and widely debunked disinformation narratives about Ukraine and Russia's full-on war on Ukraine.
There was no coup d'état in Ukraine. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was an organic reaction by numerous parts of the Ukrainian population to former President Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013. See the full debunk of this disinformation claim here.
Ukraine is not a dictatorship. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected during free democratic elections in 2019. He supported more than 73 per cent of voters. Petro Poroshenko, head of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, was not re-elected and lost elections with the result of 23 per cent of support.
There is no civil war in Ukraine. Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity have been violated by continuous acts of aggression by Russian armed forces since 2014. Russia 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. Finally, on February 24, 2022, Russia started unprovoked military aggression against Ukraine.
For more information see EU vs Disinfo's Guide to Deciphering Pro-Kremlin disinformation around Putin's War.