Just remembering some news messages from 2014 and 2015

In the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (both subdivisions of Ukraine) after Russian forces seized control of Crimea, the leaders of that time asked in a referendum whether the people wanted to rejoin Russia as a federal subject, or if they wanted to restore the 1992 Crimean constitution and Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin said he believed in democracy and promised he would the people themselves decide what they wanted and promised he would respect their choice. Though the inhabitants got soldiers at their doors urging them to come to vote, and at the ballot stations the Russian forces were clearly looking at how people voted. As such it was no surprise then that the official result from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea turned out to be 97 percent in favour of integration of the region into the Russian Federation, with an 83 percent voter turnout, and from Sevastopol there was also a 97 percent vote for integration with Russia, with an 89 percent voter turnout.

In response to the Russian invasion, what was called not to be an invasion but a liberation of the people, and subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed in April 2014 a resolution to temporarily strip Russia of its voting rights; its rights to be represented in the Bureau of the Assembly, the PACE Presidential Committee, and the PACE Standing Committee; and its right to participate in election-observation missions.

As if Putin would care about this. In the months that followed, he brushed off any criticism of his policies, refuting reports that he was planning to conquer all of Ukraine as nonsensical talk from troublemakers.

Coat of arms of Luhansk People’s Republic

Following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2014, pro-Russian, counter-revolutionary unrest erupted in the eastern part of the country and on May 12 of 2014 the Luhansk People’s Republic unilaterally declared its independence from Ukraine. The LPR was created by Russian-backed paramilitaries in 2014, and it initially operated as a breakaway state until it was annexed by Russia in 2022.

Putin, the Russian troops nor the pro-Russia rebels did not mind to do attrociaous things to Ukrainian citizens who did not agree with the take-over. Organisations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have reported human rights abuses in the LPR; including internment, torture, extrajudicial killings, forced conscription, as well as political and media repression. No wonder that Ukraine viewed the LPR and DPR as terrorist organisations and asked Europe to consider those people also as terrorists.

On February 10 2015, when Rebels attacked Kramatorsk, while Ukrainian government forces made gains near Mariupol, a Putin aide warned the US over Ukraine arms and accused Washington of seeking to drag Russia into war. That signal was regularly repeated by the Russian government in the international press.
The Russians went out of their way to interpret those reports of wanting to further conquer Ukraine as an attack by the US to discredit them in Europe.

As we now know and remember, the Russians held a large force build-up on the Ukrainian border in 2021, with Russia once again dismissing America’s accusations as trying to incite a war between Russia and Nato.