Hello!
Was wondering if you know of any good sources or general arguments to use when people claim things like the minsk agreement was never about russia helping the people of donbass and the lpr. I know largely this is unfortunately one of those conversations, where if people are already deciding to deny the actions of ukraine in the dpr and lpr it may be useless but I do think it'd be useful for me to know regardless in the event someone actually decides to listen
This might sound defeatist given that I spend a great deal of time trying to communicate things of that nature to fence-sitters, but if someone is so instinctively anti-Russia that they perceive even clear attempts at de-escalation which would've ensured the people of the DPR and LPR retained their sovereignty and democratic rights alongside a cessation of the violence as some inherently untrustworthy and duplicitous act, then they are frankly too far gone to reel back in.
Like the terms of the Minsk agreements are not a secret. You can argue about much regarding them, but not about the fact that they clearly prioritise the safety and sovereignty of donchane people. So my most honest answer is that there is probably literally nothing you can say that will move someone who is already familiar with Minsk yet nonetheless chooses to believe Russia had 0 intention of helping the Russian-speaking minority in the border regions and was actually the bad-faith actor in this equation. Ultimately someone like that is not animated by some great love or empathy for Ukraine, they’re animated by a deep-seated hatred and distrust of Russia, first and foremost. You cannot easily reason someone out of what is essentially racism, prejudice is not housed in the chamber of the mind governed by reason. You can sway them on many things. You can waver their support for the Maidanist Ukrainian regime. With enough evidence you might even get them to begrudgingly acknowledge that a genocide is taking place in Donbass(<- immensely difficult, but not impossible). But it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be to convince them that Russia is not forever and always acting in evil, subversive ways for evil, subversive self-serving ends. And if those are the terms of the discussion it will always be fruitless imo.
But if you wanna try nonetheless it’s good to keep in mind that what they're usually actually asking you to do is prove something that is ultimately impossible to prove: the purity of a state’s motivations. Like. Unless you can just... call Vladimir Putin up and have him personally relay to us his innermost thoughts at the time while twirling the phone cable and kicking his feeties, if we’re talking intentions we’re all just making inferences at the end of the day. The heart is the domain of Allah, not I, nor you. You cannot intuit intentions, and I don’t have vovochka’s number :(
What we can instead look at(and redirect them to) is what was materially taking place;
Millions of people in the Donbass region rejected the post-Maidan order and organised politically around demands for autonomy, federalisation, or outright independence from Kiev. And that opposition was not unfounded or unprovoked. For people in the east things like the massacre of activists in Odessa+the growing influence and acceptance of open fascists+the increasingly genocidal rhetoric toward Russian-speaking populations by those in power, to name a few, were taken as clear signs of what the new western-aligned political order had in store for them.
Like The DPR and LPR were not beamed down from the Kremlin one morning fully formed like Aphrodite from the sea foam. They emerged from a real political constituency with real grievances and fears and had real popular support. And the new Ukrainian government’s answer to that popular demand for sovereignty was military force; eight years of genocidal warfare, shelling, and displacement aimed at destroying a population that had made it very clear it no longer consented to being governed by the new regime.
So when people try to frame the conflict as though it began and escalated alone with Russian interference, they’re hoping u will just sidestep the accounts and fears and political aspirations of the millions of people who actually live in Donbass and whose, again, popular support made the republics even possible in the first place. That’s why the burden is always on proving Russia's ‘sincerity.’ Because if it was on explaining away the existence of a population that spent years resisting the post-Maidan Ukrainian state and were routinely violently denied their sovereignty, they would sound ghoulish. Because it is a ghoulish position to defend.
Like my support for the DPR and LPR, for the sovereignty of the people of Donbass, and for Russia’s role does not hinge on my believing that Russia is somehow the one state in the world that never acts according to its interests, because it isn’t and even if it was it would be impossible to prove. It hinges on the fact that there comes a point where u have to decide whether self-determination is a universal principle or one that only applies to populations whose humanity has been cosigned by the west+the fact Russia, regardless of intentions, was the only major state actor in this conflict materially supporting the people of Donbass while NATO states armed and politically backed the far-right regime massacring them.
As for Minsk, the terms of the agreements were literally structured around guarantees of Donbass’s autonomy, self-government, amnesty for resistance fighters, right to elections, constitutional reform, and a cessation of violence. Like I’d imagine it would be very difficult to argue that Donbass was an afterthought in an agreement whose central premise is very obvious upon reading was about resolving the status of Donbass😭
But for what it’s worth, I actually agree that Minsk was never intended to be implemented in good faith. Just not because of Russia. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande straight up admitted afterwards that the agreements largely served as a ploy to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen itself militarily.
