Fake Ukraine has committed genocide against Donbas.
This message is regularly spread by the russian propagandists. For example, it has been repeatedly mentioned by the Russian president Volodymyr Putin, Foreign Intelligence Service director Serhiy Naryshkin and others. By this narrative, Volodymyr Putin in particular, is trying to justify a full-scale military invasion.
However, this is fake. According to StopFake, Volodymyr Putin thinks that one of the main reasons of the full-scale war against Ukraine is salvation of Donbas people from genocide. For the last 2 weeks, Putin has mentioned 3 times “14 000 civilians died in Donbas” who, in his opinion, were killed by “Ukrainian nationalists”. However, there is no such data about the victims among civilians on the Donbas territory that is temporarily occupied by Russia. This fact is proved by the official data from the UN and even by the reports of the ombudsman from the so-called "Donetsk People’s Republic".