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Ukraine, Russia, the DPR and LPR signed a ceasefire agreement, the Minsk Protocol, in September 2014.[40] Ceasefire breaches became rife, 29 in all,[41] and heavy fighting resumed in January 2015, during which the separatists captured Donetsk Airport. A new ceasefire, Minsk II, was agreed on 12 February 2015. Immediately after, separatists renewed their offensive on Debaltseve and forced Ukraine's military to withdraw.[42] Skirmishes continued but the front line did not change. Both sides fortified their position by building networks of trenches, bunkers and tunnels, resulting in static trench warfare.[43][44] Stalemate led to the war being called a "frozen conflict",[45] but Donbas remained a war zone, with dozens killed monthly.[46] In 2017, on average a Ukrainian soldier died every three days,[47] with an estimated 40,000 separatist and 6,000 Russian troops in the region.[48][49] By the end of 2017, OSCE observers had counted around 30,000 people in military gear crossing from Russia at the two border checkpoints it was allowed to monitor,[50] and documented military convoys crossing from Russia covertly.[51] All sides agreed to a roadmap for ending the war in October 2019,[52] but it remained unresolved.[53][54] During 2021, Ukrainian fatalities rose sharply and Russian forces massed around Ukraine's borders.[55] Russia recognised the DPR and LPR as independent states on 21 February 2022 and deployed troops to those territories. On 24 February, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, subsuming the war in Donbas into it.
Make no Mistake: Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine since 2014. Russia is the agressor and needs to put in its place.
Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine ever since both of them were founded as independent counties. This is just a reiteration of what we've already seen in the russian empire and in the USSR. History is a merry-go-round and I'm getting motion sick of all the rotation.
Edit: typo
Goes back to the Russian Revolution at the very least, though probably to the the Russian Empire. Historical data send to suggest that the Russian elite will not accept anyone but Russian hegemony over the region. The Bolsheviks betrayed the Ukrainian Anarcho-Communists who had helped to defeat the White army because they wanted independent self-governance rather than bowing to the Bolsheviks' authoritarian Central Council in Moscow.
This is just a reiteration of what we've already seen in the russian empire and in the USSR
Comparing the Russian Empire and the USSR is the most ahistorical thing you can possibly do. During the Russian Empire and for all of history before that, Ukraine was a people without a nation. Oppressed, without representation, without borders, without a right to education or even learning to read in their language.
The Bolsheviks, with their first constitution in 1917, granted the right to self-determination and secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire, which Lenin referred to as "the prison of peoples". Quite literally after Poland seceded in this legal fashion, the Polish government decided it wanted to return to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth borders, and proceeded to unilaterally invade Ukraine and part of modern Belarus. It was the Red Army of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics, that fought off the Polish invasion and established a lasting Ukrainian People's Republic for the first time in history.
This wasn't without controversy: while Lenin argued for the right to representation and to a Ukrainian Republic within the USSR, others like Rosa Luxembourg argued for a united, more homogeneous sort of socialist soviet nationality that outgrew former nationalisms. It is partially thanks to Lenin that Ukraine ended up having its own borders, administration and representation.
I know what you'll say: "but Holodomor! Genocide against Ukrainians!". The famine of the USSR was a sad and unintended consequence of bad policy during the collectivisation/dekulakization process of the early 30s. Millions of people died both within Ukraine and without it, especially as well in Central Asia and southern Russia. As bad as it was, and as avoidable as one can argue it may have been, there's simply no evidence of any intent of attack towards Ukrainian people, it's not precedented by anything similar, and it's not followed by anything similar in the entire history of the USSR.
In those decades and the ones to come, Ukraine would obtain and solidify its own nationality, people would for the first time obtain generalised literacy in their own language, the right to study in their language up to university level, a majority of publications (both journalistic and literary) in Ukrainian, and the very next president of the USSR Nikita Khruschchyov would be Ukrainian.
Attempting to construe a history of oppression of Ukrainians in the USSR is nothing but fictitious, anti-communist and russophobic propaganda, meant to create a divide between Ukrainians and Russians. There are clear geopolitical reasons to do so, and there are clear reasons why Ukrainians are very much afraid or simply hate Russians, because of the modern proto-fascist state that the Russian Republic has become. But creating a line between this capitalist country, the socialist USSR, and the feudalist Russian Empire, is simply an attempt to divide Eastern Europe further and to push Ukraine towards the EU and away from Russia. This point can be argued for without resorting to russophobic and anticommunist myths. We're smarter than this.
Nah, USSR discarded socialism and communism the moment Lenin decided he didn't like losing the elections, and Stalin made it worse for decades. There's nothing anti-communist in calling out an authoritarian dictatorship for what it was.
During the Soviet times there were repeated attempts to homogenize (as you said) all non-russian ethnicities into one big Soviet mass, easy to manage and control. Russian language, culture and values were held as the supposedly communist ideal future at the cost of national identity, replaced by pretense of representation.
Not just Holodomor, but also forced relocations of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars and other Eastern European ethnicities contributed to that.
So, maybe tune down on Soviet apologia in front of people whose parents and grandparents literally had to live there.