Warning! Political rant:
For those who say that the DPR and LPR only exist on the life support of Russian armed forces and money, here is the "2014 Proclamation of the ACT of the Creation of the Luhansk People's Republic." A lot of people are forced at gunpoint, don't you think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWHtJV5tD0&list=LL&index=1&t=1s
When Putin said, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," he got a lot of flak from the western media, but what he really meant was that it created a complicated situation in which people suddenly stopped being citizens of one country and did not necessarily agree with their new found government and were definitely not willing to move away because of that.The thing is, eastern Ukraine was mostly pro-Russian and western Ukraine was pro-European mostly because the east was always Russian territory and the west was part of Poland or Germany at some point. The fragile balance of interests ended with Yanukovych, and only God knows how it's all going to end. One thing is certain: everyone will suffer as a result of this.