The Donbas People's perspective: "Trump's failing peace plan and the West‘s unprovoked war of aggression"

We now have a new peace plan for Ukraine. In 28 points, the Trump administration explains that Ukraine should cede large parts of its territory and drastically reduce its armed forces. In order to secure peace, it demands that Ukraine slashes the size of its army to 600,000 and gives up missiles that can hit Moscow. Russia would pay an undisclosed rental fee for de facto control of Donetsk, Lugansk, and parts of Zaporhyzhia and Kherson, officials familiar with the deal told The Telegraph. The plan also calls for Russia to freeze its forces in place in Kherson und Zaporhyzhia and to withdraw Russian forces from Kharkiv and Sumy.

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The Russian side reacted cautiously. Today, I can give you one reason why. The reason lies in the mood of the Donbas people. This is completely unknown or underestimated in the West.

The war in Ukraine is seen in the West as an “unprovoked war of aggression”, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, of course, that it was the Russian army that entered Ukraine. This is the only point Western journalists know. They are following the “3-I-Concept”: incompetence, ignorance and ideology. Like most of our politicians, they never were in Russia or Ukraine, they know nothing about the history of the Donbas and they never were in war zones. That means: They lost the ground of reality.

Unlike many journalists who sit comfortably at their desks and pass judgment on things they know nothing about, as a war reporter, I have spoken to many people in Ukraine and Donbas. It is very clear that I am completely cancelled in German propaganda media. And the journalistic organizations are fighting me, because they subordinated under the power elites and the ruling party cartel.

The historical reality is that NATO’s expansion towards Russia, through Ukraine, and the war waged by the Ukrainian government after the Western organized coup on the Maidan in February 2014, pushed by the West, against the Russians in Donbas, are the real causes of the conflict.

It is absolutely true that, for the Russians, this war is defensive. It is obvious that the Americans and Europeans are the aggressors, having arrived less than a thousand kilometers from Moscow. That is the objective situation. In this perspective, the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24, 2022, but eight years ago, in February 2014, with the coup on the Maidan Square in Kiew and the Maidan massacre, both orchestrated by US, EU and NATO representatives. According to the study of Ivan Kachanovski of the University of Ottawa, “The Maidan Massacre”, who collected more than hundred eye witnesses, evaluated video proofs and went through the investigation files, almost 100 people were killed by snipers placed in buildings occupied by the Right Sector. The snipers came to a large number from Georgia, Poland and Lithuania - professional and militarily trained special forces. The former military leader of the Maidan, Andrij Parubij, was killed in mid 2025 in Lwiw - possibly he knew too much. Ivan Kachanovski quoted eye witnesses, that Western politicians and diplomats were involved in the preparations of the assassinations as well.

After the coup, a wave of violence rolled through Ukraine, against Anti-Maidan protests and demonstrations, who started spontaneously all over the Eastern part of the country. There were many killings, like those in Odessa on Mai 2nd, 2014 and in Mariupol on Mai 9, 2014, when members of the Azow battalion drove with infantry fighting vehicles into demonstrators.

Let me quote some normal people of the war theatre. I interviewed them during the referenda in late September 2022 in Lugansk, Donetsk and Mariupol. The situation was as follows:

At the end of February, Ukraine made a push for negotiations. Moscow agreed. The European Union did not: it supplied weapons worth €450 million. In March, Zelensky offered talks again, and once more the Russians showed themselves willing to talk, but once more the EU prevented this with a second tranche of €500 million. Nevertheless, by the end of March, negotiators in Istanbul had almost reached an agreement. According to this agreement, Ukraine would have regained its territory before the invasion began. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Zelensky on April 2 and visited Kiev on April 9 to urge him to withdraw his proposals, otherwise the West would stop its aid. Thus, it was the West that prevented peace. This reverses the question of who is to blame for the war—to the detriment of the West. In response, Moscow decided to freeze the status quo and incorporate the oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia, and Kherson in the Russian Federation to rule out a return.

The referenda, which in the West can only be described as sham referenda, took place in late September 2014. Here characteristic voices:

Irina Dikaja, the head of the election commission at a school in Lugansk, a woman in her 50s: “People are lining up to cast their votes. Yesterday it was pouring rain, and people stood under their umbrellas here in front of our school and in front of the election buses throughout the city. Older women cry when they receive the documents and put the ballot in the box. People with disabilities call us and ask us to send someone over, saying, ‘We want to cast our vote.’”

And: “We did not expect such a high turnout. The mood is very positive. Voters hope that this referendum will bring about change. They are voting in the hope that their lives will improve. That is the mood in a nutshell. They are optimistic about their shared future with Russia.”

A 60 year old man: “ This election is very important to me, to my family, and to my country, the Republic of Lugansk. We have been waiting eight years for this referendum. The people of Germany should know that Russian people live here. Everything connects us to Russia: politics, economics, religion; we celebrate the same holidays. We don’t want this kinship to be torn apart… That’s why I want the war to end quickly. And I have great hope for Russia, politically, economically, and in the field of education. I hope for myself, my children, and my grandchildren. Russia is our country, and we are returning to our home port. And I‘d like to tell you something else: we cast our votes without anyone standing behind us with a gun. No one forced us to go to the ballot box. We followed the voice of our hearts.” This voter recalled that the regions east of Dnjepr were originally Russian. These regions were transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in the year 1922, because they wanted to create a unified administrative zone in order to straighten the Dnjepr River and build a hydroelectric power plant.

A taxi driver on September 24, 2022: “That’s your damn market economy. Where are the EU subsidies? We haven’t seen a penny of them here. We starved here in the 1990s. My father was a miner, my mother a housewife, and we were three siblings. We didn’t get paid for months. That was the capitalism that the West brought us. No one knew when there would be money again, when we would be able to buy something to eat. Things only got better after around the year 2000.” This is how the people of Donbas experienced the blessings of the free West.

A man in his 60s: “I am glad that it turned out this way. Russia was in ruins, and since Putin began to rebuild the country, people have been able to hope again. The year 2014 showed that a country that forbids you to speak your native language, robs you of your culture, and humiliates you, has plunged the Donbas into civil war.”

A female voter in her mid-50s wearing a purple down jacket at polling station No. 5 in Lugansk: “I cast my vote so that peace can finally reign again. So that our People’s Republic of Lugansk can become part of the Russian Federation. So that it can develop, become stronger, and we can finally have peace again. We are all eagerly waiting for things to improve here again. We all hope for that very much.”

A second voter in her mid-50s, passport in her hand: I hope the war finally ends. That the shelling finally stops and no more children die. I really hope so. Because the Ukrainians fired at us. We were one people in Ukraine. Why couldn’t we come to a peaceful agreement? Why did they always bomb us? It was terrible, people disappeared, children were killed. It was like fascism.” According to the OSCE, 14,400 people were killed between 2014 and 2021, and according to unofficial figures, more than 50,000.

Viktoria Litvinova, deputy election supervisor at Secondary School No. 60 in Mariupol, at polling station No. 36 013, clearly shows that she has had a difficult few months during the siege of the city, and the street fighting is still fresh in her memory, the city still was completely destroyed by heavy fighting: “There are also people who have a different opinion, and that is their right. Everyone has the right to his own opinion, and here voters can express it. But as I see it, that‘s the minority. People really like coming to the polls. Older women come and even bless the ballot boxes. I hope for peace, prosperity, and tranquility; that’s what the election should bring. But the most important thing is peace.“

A man with the name Wladimir Jewgenjewitsch Tulow, a teacher of Lugansk: “Everything must change. The economic, political, social, and military situation. The most important thing is that people can regain hope. Because we have been living in a circus state run by clowns. In a banana republic where these honorable people talked about sovereignty while simultaneously abolishing it. We have been living in a bandit state. It is still 100% a fascist state. I mean Ukraine, of course, what else?” I could quote hundreds of voices like these.

The results of the referendum: in Lugansk, 98.42% voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation; in Donetsk, 97.51%; in Kherson, 87.05%; and in Zaporhyzhia, 93.11%. Anyone unfamiliar with the situation on the ground might easily think these results were fake. But the results reflected the mood of a population that has either been shelled by the Ukrainian army in the separatist republics or arrested, beaten, and terrorized by fascist battalions in formerly Ukrainian areas such as Mariupol. According to United Nations definitions, both fulfill the criteria for genocide.

The results of the referendum also corresponded to the results of previous opinion polls in the region, for example during the election of President Yanukovych in 2013 or a survey conducted by a Ukrainian newspaper in 2016.

The objection that the opponents of the separatists had already fled is also unfounded: Of the more than 6 million people living in Donbas in 2014, just over 1 million were internally displaced persons, meaning they remained in the region, while more than 1 million fled the war to Russia and only a few sought refuge in the West of the country.

The reasons for these results are obvious: 1. The Ukrainians waged war against the population of Donbas from April 2014 onwards as part of a so-called „Anti-terror operation“; people do not flee into the arms of their enemies. 2. Many Donbas residents have relatives in Russia and thus learned that people in Russia had been slowly getting better off since 2000, while the situation in Ukraine was becoming increasingly difficult. This is an important economic reason. 3. The cultural dimension: the language laws of the coup government, with their suppression of the Russian language and culture, were seen by the people of Donbas as an attack on their identity and human rights. In fact, democracy also means being able to live one’s language, religion, and culture. That is why they saw Ukraine, which has even enshrined an ethnically pure state in its constitution, as a terrorist state. Many of the people I spoke to confirmed this. That is why the Donbas people are seeking refuge in Russia.

With the aggression against the Donbas population, the coup government in Ukraine and their Western supporters created the situation that they are currently critizising. It is the responsibility of the West that these people are Russia-oriented. No one in the West cares what people in this war zone want. They are treated like subhumans. This is also a kind not only of Russophobia; this is a kind of racism of Western politicians and Western media.

It is fascinating that these aggressors think they are being attacked and that they are forced to defend themselves. There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe. Especially the media are trigger happy and blood thursty. They are boosting NATO propaganda and trying to bring people into a war hysteria all over Europe. Therefore, those journalists are responsible for the continuation of the war and for hundreds of thousands casualties. These journalists have blood on their fingers. They must be held criminally responsible. The first thing to flow in war is ink.

These journalists are belonging to a degenerated Western elite, together with mad politicians, academics and company managers, who want to drive their own countries deeper and deeper into the war in Ukraine. They seem to have a narcissistic passion for the destruction of things, the destruction of men, the destruction of reality. The current psychological state of the West is partly this: nihilism, which leads to a passion for war in people’s minds, and a preference for war in geopolitics. We understand the moral background to the West’s new preference for war. The two main elements of narcissism, according to Sigmund Freud, are: Loss of reality and megalomania.

I will mention some of the wars for which the West is responsible, but without Westerners, who are nihilists without knowing it, being able to understand their responsibility: Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008. That is what is striking today: Westerners provoke wars and fuel wars by telling themselves that they are on the side of justice. But this is not true. This shows that the NATO countries start a century of new wars, because it cannot cope with its own decline.

But since 2014, the people of Donbas have achieved more than just challenging the megalomania of Western politicians. They have stopped the imperialist expansionism of NATO countries against Russia, thereby preventing Russia from being weakened and robbed of its natural resources, as openly demanded by US analysts such as George Friedman (Stratfor) and Zbigniew Brzezinsky, or Republican Senator Lindsay Graham.

Thus, the civil war in Donbas and the ensuing war have initiated and accelerated the decline of the West. This war will claim many more victims. Because neither side can back down. If NATO wins the proxy war in Ukraine, there will be a Russian nuclear strike. If Russia wins and keeps Donbas, stabilizing its economy, then the invincibility of the US will be gone, and the European Union will collapse under the costs of war and reconstruction. After the many sacrifices they have made, the people of Donbas will then stand alongside the rising BIRCS states. Because the future belongs to the multipolar world.

TrumpÄs 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is dead on arrival. This plan is a non-starter for Russia. Public opinion in Russia would turn against President Putin, causing his approval ratings to plummet from about 80 per cent. A DPR soldier told me after heavyn shelling in Donetsk: “Putin has let us down. He should have invaded and come to our aid back in 2014. There would have been far fewer deaths here.” For this soldier, a Russian intervention back in 2014 would have avoided the war. Nor, Russia cannot abandon the Donbas anymore. The people refuse to do so and would continue the fight for their rights; the war would go on, because Donbas people would stand up to a return to Ukraine at all means. THis shows that it is easy to enter a war. It is much harder to find a way out.

Peace will not come by Trump’s new peace plan. Peace will only come by accepting Russia’s conditions: the four eastern Oblasts remain part of the Russian Federation; Ukraine remains neutral and does not join NATO; and Ukraine has to be denazified, meaning regime change in Kyiv. The 28-point plan will fail because Donbas people will make it fail.