By Dmitri Kovalevich, Al Mayadeen English, Feb. 20, 2026
The end of February 2026 marks exactly four years since the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine by the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Typically presented in Western media as a ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine, in reality, the Russian military intervention was an extension of a long-running, civil conflict in the historic Donbas region that lies between Ukraine and Russia.
Like Crimea before it, Donbas is the scene of a longstanding fight by its population for political self-determination, dating back to the founding of the Soviet Union following World War One. The early leaders of Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union decided in their wisdom that, due to its heavy industry and despite its majority Russian-speaking population, Donbas should be joined to the new Soviet Ukraine in order to boost the development of a sovereign country. This did indeed result, but at what price? The catastrophic war by Nazi Germany against Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union launched in June 1941 caused incalculable destruction whose consequences continue to reverberate.
Over the past four years, Ukraine has lost millions of its population due to massive migration, eastward and westward, and due to war deaths and injuries. Some estimates place Ukraine’s current population at two-thirds of what it was at the time of secession from the Soviet Union in 1990-91, at some 25 million. Other sources speak of even less than that. There has been no census in Ukraine for more than 20 years. In addition, the country has lost significant territory, as well as much of its previously impressive industrial base. Despite that grim record, Ukraine's Western allies continue demanding and expecting that the governing regime in Kiev continue a war effort against Russia.
Paramilitary coup in 2014
The background to this current war is the violent, paramilitary coup in Kiev in February 2014. The violence quickly radiated from Kiev to the rest of the country but met stiff resistance in Crimea, Donbass and other regions of the former Soviet Ukraine. Below, I recall the chronology of these events as a Ukrainian and a direct participant.
In November 2013, the elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, postponed the signing of a trade and investment agreement with the European Union, rightly worried that Ukraine's weaker economy would suffer serious losses once protective measures were lifted in the name of ‘free trade’. Russia had countered with a better agreement. The European Union had offered a sweetener in the form of granting visa-free entry to the EU to every Ukrainian citizen at the price of a €35 visa, and since many Ukrainians (especially from the western part of the country) were already working in the EU as cheap labor and more wanted the same, Yanukovych’s about-face caused much discontent.
Western-funded NGOs began stirring protest actions, which became increasingly violent. Groups of students took to protests in the central square of Kiev (called ‘Maidan’), bearing EU flags. But for several weeks, their protest did not attract much attention; various protests voicing social discontent were commonplace at the time. Then one night, police dispersed the protesters’ small camp in the square. Hundreds of Western correspondents had already arrived and were broadcasting from the camp, ofttimes outnumbering the young protesters. Serhiy Lyovochkin, the head of the presidential administration, was then blamed for the police dispersal of the camp, which was conveniently captured on camera by all the Western media present and broadcast to the world.
Having ordered the dispersal of the protest encampment, Lyovochkin soon betrayed the president and government he was supposed to serve by siding with the pro-Western, pro-EU protesters. He resigned from the Yanukovych-led government on November 30, 2013, which helped propel his later rise as a wealthy businessman (‘oligarch’). Today, he is an influential politician of the governing regime in Kiev.
The police dispersal of the relatively small crowds on Maidan Square caused a wave of staged outrage in the West, including threats of sanctions against Yanukovych and other government leaders. Western politicians flaunted their support for the ‘Maidan’ protests and began deepening their interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs. Busloads of protesters began pouring into the city from western Ukraine, where a rising neo-Nazi movement was undertaking bold political initiatives, including training as paramilitaries, many of the ‘peaceful’ students and young people.
A Maidan stage show directed by neo-Nazi paramilitaries
As Maidan protests heated up in December 2013 and January 2014, their front rows were carefully dressed up with students holding flowers. Western media outlets focused on such images and quietly left out images and reporting of the growing numbers of paramilitary, neo-Nazis making up the secondary rows. Meanwhile, a large part of what was once liberal and left-wing political opinion in the West bought into the propaganda being spewed by Western governments and media that blamed Russia for all the discontent. In this, they were incited by prevailing, historic ignorance and prejudices against all things Russian and Soviet. Liberals and leftists either directly supported the protests or stayed silent over the growing violence and anti-Russia, anti-Soviet racism and prejudice out of fear of being labeled sympathetic to the Russian government.
Meanwhile, supporters of the Yanukovych government in Crimea and Donbas, which were historically and culturally close to Russia, began organizing to bring their supporters to the capital city to help block a feared far-right overthrow of the elected government of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. They began staging parallel protests, calling themselves the ‘anti-Maidan’. Both camps now numbered thousands of people, but Western media censored one side of that, showing only the pro-Europe crowds.
As the pro-European protests began to slowly die down, armed provocations by the rightists began to take place in the form of sniper shootings from rooftops. This was used to stir renewed anti-government protests. Physical clashes between Maidan and anti-Maidan protesters multiplied. Neo-Nazi militants quickly took the lead in this among Maidan (pro-Europe) supporters, while the opposite camp was being led by communists and others seeking to uphold the legacies of Soviet Ukraine. The growing ideological confrontation was spreading to other cities and regions of the country, often unfolding at and around monuments to Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet symbols. Pro-Soviet protests were now routinely attacked by supporters of the ‘European choice’ now increasingly joined with defenders of the grim record of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine during the period of the Second World War.
On February 21, 2014, the Yanukovych-led government, under pressure from the leaders of Germany and France, signed a political agreement with the leaders of the pro-European Maidan, agreeing that a national election would take place that same year. (According to the Ukrainian constitution, the next national election was scheduled for April 2015.) The government withdrew police from the center of Kiev. The day after the signing, violent crowds led by the far-right and joined by naïve liberals and pro-European Union ideologues stormed the legislature and presidential administration in Kiev, which were no longer closely guarded in accordance with the political agreement. Yanukovych fled to Crimea and soon continued on to Russia. A violent coup d’état had been staged, in flagrant defiance of the peace agreement one day earlier.
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The remaining anti-Maidan supporters in Kiev began to disperse, in fear for their safety and even their lives. Already on February 20, a bloody massacre occurred in the small town of Korsun, located some 150 km south of Kiev on the road to Crimea. Maidan vigilantes ambushed eight buses carrying some 300 anti-Maidan supporters returning to the peninsula. People were forced off the buses, beaten and dispersed, and the buses were burned. Crimean (Russian) sources report seven people killed and some 30 disappeared. Ukrainian sources deny any killings but acknowledge assaults on bus riders and the burning of the buses.
Crimea defies the coup in Kiev; Donbas not so fortunate
As it turned out, Korsun witnessed the first shots of a civil war to soon be unleashed by the now-emboldened, far-right of western Ukraine, confident that its every move would now be supported by Western governments and prettied up in Western media. Ten weeks later, on May 4, another, and worse, massacre of anti-coup protesters took place in the city of Odessa, killing more than 40 people.
After the attack in Korsun, residents of Crimea began organizing self-defense units and barring roads to block rightists now threatening to invade the peninsula and suppress anti-coup protests. Some 20,000 Russian soldiers were already stationed in Crimea by virtue of a 1997 political agreement between the governments of Ukraine and Russia. They began to conduct peacekeeping patrols. All this helped to keep the peace in Crimea, in contrast to the violence and mayhem now engulfing central and western Ukraine. The new authorities in Kiev did not dare to undertake military operations to impose their coup on Crimea. Indeed, the large majority of Ukrainian military personnel and special services employees already stationed in Crimea declared their opposition to the coup during the weeks following, according to a news report some years later. Many of these personnel eventually agreed to transfer to equivalent army and police units of the Russian Federation (thereby significantly increasing their salaries, pensions, and conditions of service).
A unique feature of Ukraine and Crimea history saved the Crimean people from the violence now engulfing Ukraine. That was the status of autonomy of Crimea under the Ukrainian constitution, achieved through hard political struggle during the chaotic first years of post-Soviet Ukraine. (See a highly informative history of Crimea in the 2014 book by Gwendolyn Sasse: The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict.) As a result, the peninsula was the only part of Ukraine with a local, representative government, not so different from the constitutional status of US states and Canadian provinces. Then, on March 16, 2014, the government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea organized a referendum on the future status of the region. A large number of voters agreed to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Subsequent polling of the population by Western sources, no less, in late 2014 and again in 2019, revealed even higher levels of support for the measure, compared to the original vote.
The events in Crimea, in turn, inspired the residents of the Donbas region to take up a struggle for political self-determination. This was centered in the two Ukrainian oblasts (provinces with very limited political status) of Donetsk and Lugansk. However, unlike in Crimea, there were no Russian troops present that could protect the populations from the violence of coup-supporting vigilantes that began to mobilize paramilitary units and invade the region. And further, Donbas does not have geographically defensible borders as was the case in Crimea.
As neo-Nazi paramilitaries and the Ukrainian army began to invade Donbas, a rushed independence was declared in each of Donetsk and Lugansk. The Donetsk Peoples’ Republic proclaimed independence on April 7, 2014; the Lugansk Peoples’ Republic on April 27, 2014. The two declarations spoke of state sovereignty and the desire to unite into a confederation. Referendums were held in both republics on May 11, 2014, confirming the declarations of independence. Then, on May 14 and 18, respectively, new constitutions forthe Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were adopted.
The pro-coup forces in Donbas suffered humiliating military defeats early on in September 2014 and again in early 2015. These led to the signing of the ‘Minsk 2’ peace and political agreement on February 12, 2025 (text here). The agreement was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council five days later.
From invasion of Donas to proxy war against Russia
The invasion of Donbas beginning in the spring of 2014 ultimately failed to take Donetsk and Lugansk, but anti-coup protests were brutally and successfully suppressed in the neighboring Kharkiv region and in Odesa. The worst of this occurred in the city of Odesa on May 4, 2014, when some 48 anti-coup protesters were massacred by neo-Nazi formations that had traveled there from western and central Ukraine for the express purpose of political suppression. Meanwhile, in the years following, the towns and cities of Donetsk were turned into military strongholds by the Kiev regime, including the major Black Sea port and industrial city of Mariupol.
The new authorities in Kiev did not have full control over the Armed Forces of Ukraine they inherited from the coup. They began dispatching neo-Nazi paramilitary formations along with army units into Donbas, and quickly learned that soldiers could not be relied upon to shoot or otherwise violently suppress anti-coup protests. This sparked a process of completely overhauling the leadership ranks of the army to align them with the new, neo-Nazi ideology now in power in Kiev. Furthermore, conscription remained in place and was now becoming a naked tool of violent, political suppression of civilian populations.
Thus, a civil war was brought upon Ukraine by the new powers in Kiev. In the years following 2014, the Western powers and their tamed media increasingly incited this war with money and weapons and with harsh, anti-Russia lies and propaganda.
The Russian government initially sought to avoid a complete political rupture with the West by limiting its direct military support to the anti-coup movement. But a decisive rupture gradually took shape in the years following Minsk 2 as it became clear that Kiev, and more importantly, the Western powers, had no intention of respecting the agreement. In fact, leaders of Germany and France shamelessly admitted this in subsequent years, saying that for them, the agreement was little more than an opportunity to re-arm and re-equip the Ukrainian army and paramilitaries following its defeats in 2014 and early 2015. They betrayed the Minks 2, which they had agreed to accept as ‘guarantors’, reluctantly as matters turned out.
The West supported civil conflict in Donbas and rejected any possible ceasefires during the years after 2014 due to the events that unfolded in Crimea. There, the Russian government sternly refused to ‘obey’ Western diktats that it do nothing to support the pro-autonomy movement, which instinctively realized that nothing less than secession from coup Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation could bring peace along with social and economic development. Crimea has always been an underdeveloped region of Ukraine ever since it was administratively ‘attached’ to Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1953.
As a result of its actions in Crimea, the main target of Western imperialist aggression became, and remains, the Russian Federation itself, deemed to be setting a ‘bad example’ that risked inspiring the rest of the world to rebel against the West and its self-declared ‘rules-based order’. Back then, the Western calculation was that if Russia failed to come to the aid of Donbas, this could be used over time to provoke internal discontent and a weakening, if not overthrow, of the Russian government itself.
Over time, then, the conflict in Ukraine escalated into a direct conflict between the West and Russia. This exploded into world view in February 2022 when Russia, responding to continued military provocations by the West and its Ukraine underling, commenced what it called a ‘special military operation’ to defeat the neo-Nazi regime in power in Kiev and return Ukraine to a status of neutral and non-belligerent country. This remains Russia’s goal in the conflict.
Soon after the start of the Special Military Operation, peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey, offered hope for a political settlement, a chance to calm the outbreak of war in Ukraine before it widened. However, as Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš explained in February 2026, that opportunity was quickly lost due to the interference of Western powers, in particular the notorious visit to Ukraine by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2022.
Currently, Ukraine is losing territory with each passing month and losing its population because of warfare and citizens fleeing the country. However, as Wolfgang Ischinger, head of this year’s Munich Security Conference, said in February, the European powers want Ukraine to fight for as long as possible.
In an interview with the monthly US conservative magazine The Atlantic in the US on February 12 of this year, Kiev regime head Volodomyr Zelensky says he prefers continued warfare (made possible by money and weapons from the West) to what he calls a “bad” peace.
Western leaders are today falling over themselves to avoid attention and acknowledgement of the growing defeat of their proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Fingers are being pointed, and accusations are flying between them, with the US government falsely presenting itself as a ‘peacemaker’, all the while continuing to supply arms and money to the Kiev regime and continuing to impose harsh economic sanctions against Russia. All Western leaders are united in their support of the genocidal regime in "Israel" and of sanctions and other threats of war against Iran. This is an ongoing story that this writer will continue to analyze in forthcoming reports.
Posted March 11, 2026