(Donbas) One of the most common tropes used by the pro-Russian crowd in which to excuse the invasion of the Ukraine, is that the Ukraine has carried out a genocide of the Eastern Ukrainians who ceded from Kyiv in 2014. They allege that the Russians were warranted to jump in to protect the Russian speaking Ukrainians living in the breakaway regions of Donbas and Luhansk after suffering artillery attacks these past 8 years resulting in around 17000 deaths primarily of children. So I looked into the subject at hand and using data from the UN who culled it from the OSCE (who have been officially monitoring the region since 2014, I found that the genocide narrative at the hands of the Ukrainians is nothing more than misinformation.Here is a document issued by the UN 27th January 2022 which reports on the deaths which took place in the contested east of the country between the months of Oct to Dec 2021 (page 1) followed by a synopsis of the death toll from 2014 to 2021:
Broken down that adds up to:
3404 Civilians from both sides (which includes the 298 deaths from MH17)
4400 Ukrainian soldiers
6500 Pro Russian Rebels
those stats can found on the last page as seen here:
As you can see, that so called genocide is non extistant , with the vast majority of deaths (from bothsides I should add) at 3039 (out of a total of 3292) taking place between 2014 and 2015. As mentioned the UN grabbed their statistics from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe who have a dedicated web page where you can glean information regards any set day between 2014 to 2021. An example for the 11th of Feb 2020 can be found here, (PDF file) as you can see it goes into great deapth and detail, hence my use of the UN collective article.
