Donbas war

The Donbas war began with the 2014 Obama administration-backed Maidan coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine..^[1] Following the upheaval, Donetsk and Lugansk in the Don River Basin (or Donbas) of Eastern Europe declared their independence from Kyiv and became known as the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, collectively known as the Donbass region.

Since 2014, the region has been at war with Kyiv. The two sides negotiated a truce in 2015 in the Minsk II Agreements.

In February 2022 Russia accused Ukraine's military of committing "crimes against residents of the eastern Donbas region" in a report filed with the United Nations.^[2] The Russian news outlet Sputnik reported that the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal investigation after the discovery of mass graves of civilians in Donbass. "The remains of at least 295 civilians who died as a result of indiscriminate shelling by Ukrainian armed forces in 2014 were exhumed from them. It is already known that among the remains there are bodies of women of different ages," a statement from the committee said.^[3] Russian President Vladimir Putin called the events in Donbass a "genocide,"^[4] saying that the Ukrainian government continues to violate human rights, including by legalizing the discrimination of the Russian-speaking population in the country. On January 16, 2022 Tass reported that Ukraine mandated all print media are to switch to the Ukrainian language.^[5]

• Crisis in Ukraine