The number of civilians killed in the separatist regions of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk has steadily declined since 2014 – until the start of the Russian invasion. Statistics thus do not support the Kremlin’s claim of a “genocide of the Russian-speaking population”, which led to the invasion of Ukraine.
Statistics on civilian deaths in eastern Ukraine do not support the Kremlin’s claims, the BBC reported on its Russian-language website today. He recalled that the Russian leadership claimed that the military operation in Ukraine began because of the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population” in eastern Ukraine and because of the popularity of right-wing, nationalist ideas in Ukraine.
But according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations, as well as the separatist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, the number of civilians killed during fighting in eastern Ukraine has steadily declined since 2014 – until the Russian Invasion began.
Mostly civilians, according to the United Nations, 2,713 people lost their lives during the active phase of the armed conflict between Kiev and Russian-backed separatists, from April 2014 to February 2015, when a peace treaty was agreed in Minsk.
In 2016, 112 civilians died, 87 in 2017, 43 in 2018, 19 in 2019 and 12 in 2020.
Support for radical parties by the Ukrainian population has also continued to decline: in the 2012 parliamentary elections, the nationalist Svoboda party won 10.44 percent of the vote. In 2014, radical parties won a total of 6.4 percent of the vote, and in the 2019 election only 2.15 percent of the vote, concludes the BBC.
He knows Putin very well. “Don’t back down from him. He’s a bandit,” said the former oligarch. | Video: Related Press
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