That tells us nothing about whether the people of the region want to be part of Russia.
For that, we have to look to polls, like the one I cited, which tell us that the people living in the region do support Russia.
Which isn't that surprising, considering that the elected President they supported was driven out of office by a revolution. That kind of thing would make anyone question their democracy. If you must compare it to Jan 6th, it's as if the Jan 6th riots had lasted for weeks and at the end, the President preferred by the rioters took over.
Nor would I put much value on polls conducted in conditions where people can get murdered for publicly supporting some of the answers. I wonder what Parisians in 1940 would've answered if they got a phone call asking if they wanted to be a part of Germany - while people were disappearing.
That's a fair point - polling is difficult and unreliable in a contested region - but what other evidence can we look to?
Perhaps this: "an occupation against a hostile local population requires far more soldiers than a peaceful occupation of territory" as we've seen recently when Russia occupied regions not controlled by the separatists.[1]
And the Russian forces in the separatist regions before 2022 were far from sufficient to hold the regions if the local population had been hostile, especially with Ukrainian forces also fighting them.
> Yanukovych was removed from the office by the parliament
This isn't accurate. "On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych ...left the capital for Kharkiv, saying his car was shot at as he left Kyiv, and travelling next to Crimea, and eventually to exile in Russia."[2]
Then, because he had fled, "the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from his post...on the grounds that he...effectively resigned."[2] He was not impeached.
It's more accurate to say that he was driven out of office by the riots, a fact that Parliament merely recognized.
(Also, your analogy to Jan 6th makes no sense, because in any such analogy, the rioters have to end up with the President they want, just as they did in Ukraine.)
1: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/01/politics/ukraine-assassinatio...
The key part is Mexican army invading Arizona and Texas under the pretext of separatism, seizing the oppurtinity that internal turmoil offers. The specifics of that turmoil are largely irrelevant.
Do you have sources for that? It's the first I've heard of it and I'd like to learn more.
> The key part is Mexican army invading Arizona and Texas under the pretext of separatism
Ok. Then to use an analogy that actually happened, perhaps the US invading Cuba under the "pretext" of separatism from Spain?
Or the US sending the navy to Panama to support its independence from Columbia (in exchange for the canal zone)?
Perhaps the best analogy is the Mexican-American war, in which the US took Texas (already de facto separate from Mexico but still claimed by them) and other territory from Mexico.
Anyway, what's the point of this analogy?
* Arsen Pavlov, bomb in elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsen_Pavlov
* Alexander Zakharchenko, bomb in cafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zakharchenko
* Mikhail Tolstykh, rocket lauched at his office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tolstykh
* Aleksey Mozgovoy, car bomb and ambush with machine guns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Mozgovoy
Resistance mostly takes the form of hit-and-run attacks and sabotage against infrastructure. Here's a 2019 video of DNR communications facility being blown up: https://medium.com/dfrlab/blast-highlights-mgb-detentions-in...
The video was posted on social media with the following message:
> This was done with the goal to draw attention to the inhumane torture in the basements of the MGB. Cruel treatment and tying wires with electric current to peoples’ extremities in the “people’s” republics has become the norm. The people of the Donbas must protest against torture, or the fascist republic will remain unconnected.
The very effective use of long-range weapons against targets deep inside occupied territories has also been attributed to intelligence provided by locals.
Like with Kherson, we can expect detailed stories after LNR and DNR are liberated and it's safe to reveal what went on and how it was accomplished.
> Anyway, what's the point of this analogy?
The war in Ukraine has nothing to do with separatism. Whatever seeds of that may have existed in the first days, they were hijacked by Russian intelligence services and armed forces very early to prepare the stage for military invasion and occupation. The treatment of representatives of occupied territories as independent leaders even as late as of February 2022 (when they supposedly called Russia for help) is unsupported by facts. You can stage such "separatism" anywhere in favorable conditions when police and armed forces are overwhelmed and won't react fast enough.
Does not dehumanize at all. Ukraine fell into political turmoil similar to January 6 riots in the US, and Russia used intelligence operatives to instigate further violent riots, quickly invaded parts of Ukraine taking advantage of the confusion, and established a military occupation. The so-called separatists were directly funded and supported by Russia in the earliest days, and then under the full control of the military admin after tanks rolled in.
As I've told before, the European Court of Human Rights has confirmed the same when they were investigating whether Russia is responsible for MH17 shootdown, which happened on occupied territories. Since Russia had full control, ECHR found them responsible.
Locals have had as much freedom to choose their future as Parisians in 1940.