This is my last post about politics before I go into hiding again, but it irritates me immensely that so many “pro-Russian” posts here are published solely from a geopolitical perspective. It's hard for me to find the words to express what I'm talking about, but it seems that even people who reject Ukrainian propaganda are so zoomed out. Discussions about the war against Donbass have somehow managed to exclude us: in all their analyses of multipolarity, NATO, and the history of the Cold War, everyone happily ignores the fact that thousands of my compatriots have died. Genocide is not a cute terminological trick that we, the residents of Donbass, use to attract more attention. In the villages of Donbass, Ukrainian drones fly from street to street, blowing up house after house until nothing remains of the village. Ukrainian troops are forcing Donbass families to “evacuate” their cities, leaving adults in the middle of winter with nothing in the fields and taking children away to unknown locations. They shell humanitarian aid collection points, and when they retreat from our cities, they kill everyone they see on the street, knock on our doors, and shoot those who open them. They burn our apple orchards and rose gardens as they leave our towns and mine the dead bodies of our family and friends and our cemeteries with explosives. If you try to organise for your rights you can be imprisoned for months, years, over a decade. I have spent my childhood Christmas’s praying for people’s sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, aunts, uncles, brothers who to this day remain in Ukrainian prison for separatism. There are over six cities in Ukraine where Russian language culture is illegalised. Donbass refugee children in Ukraine rarely attend school due to the threat of violent bullying, and most adults have unstable housing and employment if any at all. I am not saying that we should not take a step back and look at this whole situation from a geopolitical point of view, because without that, your analysis will be very weak, but don't obscure the fact that Ukraine has been committing genocide since day one, and that it is likely that the number of Donbass civilians murdered by Ukrainian Armed Forces has well eclipsed 20,000. The people of Donbass should not be an afterthought in the discussion of the war in Donbass.