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Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine announce mass evacuations

Friday, February 18, 2022

• Unrest in the Donbas: mass evacuations, suspicious announcements from separatist leaders, and why Russian lawmakers asked Putin to recognize the breakaway ‘republics’
• An American scholar digs up evidence supporting one of Putin’s bitterest complaints

🚨 Mass evacuations raise fears of a major event looming in eastern Ukraine (3-min read)

Eastern Ukraine’s Russia-backed separatists have announced mass evacuations, urging women, children, and the elderly to relocate to Russia. Denis Pushilin, the head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, explained that refugees would receive all the basic necessities at shelters in Russia’s Rostov region, where the governor appealed to President Putin for emergency support. The president promptly dispatched the acting head of Russia’s Emergency Management Agency to the region to organize accommodations for incoming refugees. Putin also ordered the Russian government to pay 10,000 rubles ($130) to each evacuee arriving from the Donbas.

Shortly after Pushilin’s statement, the head of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, also announced a mass evacuation, urging all non-essential workers and residents who have not been called to arms to relocate temporarily to Russia. Several hours later, Pasechnik said “things are approaching full-scale war” and speculated that refugees pouring into Russia could number in the hundreds of thousands. Separatists say rising tensions in the region necessitate the evacuations, though Ukrainian officials deny any plans to attack the Donbas.

• 💾 Metadata reveals that DNR and LNR leaders recorded evacuation announcements two days in advance (the finding suggests that Friday’s events were planned in advance and coordinated)

♟️ Meduza uncovers why the Russian State Duma asked Putin to recognize the breakaway ‘republics’ in eastern Ukraine (7-min read)

The tensions surrounding the Russia-Ukraine crisis have continued to escalate with no end in sight. On Thursday, February 17, U.S. President Joe Biden said that there’s still a “very high” threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, warning that this could happen “in the next several days.” The Kremlin, meanwhile, underscored that it has no plans of backtracking on its demands for comprehensive security guarantees from Washington and NATO. Moscow raised the stakes again earlier this week when the State Duma adopted an official resolution urging President Vladimir Putin to recognize the self-proclaimed “republics” in eastern Ukraine. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev uncovers why this step was taken and how it was orchestrated.

🕊️ Declassified British documents from 1990–1991 show that senior Western diplomats believed they had, in fact, pledged NATO non-enlargement (Boston University Associate Professor Josh Shifrinson shared his discovery with Der Spiegel. The records he found indicate that Western officials conveyed during negotiations on the Two Plus Four Agreement to reunify Germany that NATO would not expand to Poland or beyond the Oder River in in Central Europe. For years, the Putin administration has insisted that NATO broke a promise not to expand eastward, while NATO officials and Western leaders deny this claim.)

Yours, Meduza