Previous Subchapter → 7.2 The Culture War
And the proof is in the data.
Before the invasion of 2022, more people were dying from car accidents than war deaths in the Donetsk region, in 2021 there were 77 deaths from the conflict on separatist territory, only 7 of these being civilians.
Naturally you will ask, where does this data come from? How can we trust that this isn’t NATO or Ukrainian propaganda aimed at covering up unthinkable atrocities?
Well, the data comes from the Pro-Russian seperatists themselves, yes, really, the same separatists pushing the genocide line, telling us tales of a modern day holocaust to create a pretext for Russian intervention.
We found this data from an Anti War Russian publication known as System Block, and they sourced it from an official of the Donetsk People’s Republic government, their “human rights ombudsman”, who has published official statistics on the conflict annually.
This is the least Pro-Ukraine source you could get, official data from the faction fighting Ukraine, and it still doesn’t even come close to validating sensationalist charges of genocide.
Donetsk is a region with over 2 million people in its population: Divide 2 million by 77 and you get 25,974, so let’s assume the conflict had continued at this death rate, with no Russian intervention, year after year, it would take the Ukrainians over 25 thousand years to wipe out Donetsk.
Now in fairness, 77 was just for 2021, in previous years the numbers varied from as high as several hundred to as low as 44, so it might not be 25,000 years, it could be 30,000 or 10,000, but the point is, if the Ukrainians are attempting a Holocaust they are certainly in no rush.
Now of course, if we were to look at data from 2022, post-invasion, when Ukraine retaliated against Russia with its own accusations of genocide, things would be very different in the scale of losses: The UN has recorded almost 7000 civilian conflict deaths from last year, over double the total from the previous 7 years of the Russo-Ukrainian War, if we were to include military figures as well the number would likely be in the hundreds of thousands by now.
And the reason for this spike is obvious, it’s because the scope of the conflict has massively expanded, with many more regions being involved in the hostilities and much more active fighting taking place, it was the Russians who decided on that expansion, not the Ukrainians.
Putin has developed an image of his forces as protectors, yet their actions have doubled the casualty count of the Russo-Ukrainian war in only a fraction of the time.
But nonetheless, these events didn’t take place because the Russians suddenly decided to join the Hitler reenactment society, there is a high bar to prove genocide including both actions and mindset that simply hasn’t been met, genocide isn’t just a pattern of behaviour, it’s also a pattern of mindset fixated around extermination, of branding the target group with a sense of “otherness” to justify the crime.
If we look at official rhetoric, Russian leaders, especially Vladimir Putin, have promoted the opposite mindset, “togetherness” rather than “otherness”, through their skewed view of history that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, this is not the kind of mentality a genocider would hold, you would never hear a leader like Hitler declaring Jews and Germans as one people, there is a clear attempt to attack the Ukrainian identity here, but not the Ukrainian people, this is the key difference, it’s a saviour complex, not a murder complex.
