Talk:Russo-Ukrainian war

Discrepancies

@Asarlaí, there are several discrepancies between the contents of your latest edit and the source that you used.

  1. Strelkov's unit wasn't heavily armed at first. It's not described as such by the source (Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022) which says that they only got heavy weapons after raiding Ukrainian warehouses in Sloviansk.
  2. You describe the members of the unit as "Russian Armed Forces volunteers" while the source says that "many, if not most, seem to have been Ukrainian citizens from Crimea or mainland Ukraine"

Could you review your edit and fix the issues? Alaexis¿question? 22:48, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The descriptions "heavily-armed" and "Russian Armed Forces volunteers" were taken from the other reference: Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War. I think my edits here and here should fix the issue. – Asarlaí (talk) 15:17, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the clarification and for amending the article.
I think that "Russian Armed Forces volunteers" is not the best term. In Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War the word volunteers is in scare quotes. Using the term without them changes the meaning. Driskoll (p. 148) doesn't use the term but says that they "had joined militias in Crimea". Von Twickel (p. 60) says that Strelkov admitted they were volunteers (without scare quotes) so it's a bit unclear whether the author believes him.
Given that the sources' accounts differ a big, and considering that this is the main article about the conflict, I think it's better not to call them volunteers or 'volunteers' and instead use a neutral term like fighters. Alaexis¿question? 20:52, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What about using the term "military-grade weaponry"? Maybe more exact than "heavily armed".

What is more, the group carried military-grade weaponry via Russia into Ukraine. In a 2017 debate with Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalnyy, Girkin admitted that he had obtained weapons for the Sloviansk operation in Crimea (Girkin, Navalnyy, and Zygar 2017). Girkin´s associate and group member Tikhiy also confirmed that the group carried automatic rifles across the border (YouTube 2020a, at 5:30).[1]

Jo1971 (talk) 21:20, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That could be a good option. Alaexis¿question? 21:32, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Hauter, Jakob (2023). Russia's Overlooked Invasion: The Causes of the 2014 Outbreak of War in Ukraine's Donbas. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Vol. 270. Stuttgart: Ibidem. p. 139. ISBN 978-3-8382-1803-8.

Neutrality

Reason Minsk II agreement was not implemented.

I believe greater attention should be given to the reasons that Minsk II was never implemented, and an analysis of who was to blame for this failure. If Minsk II had been implemented, it is possible the 2022 Ruso-Ukrainian war would have never happened. Revered analysts like Jeff Sachs place the failure of Minsk II implementation on the West and Zhelensky. We need elucidation on this important point. ~2025-43937-52 (talk) 00:45, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What sources would you suggest to use that satisfy the WP:RS criteria and what exactly should be added to the article in your opinion? Alaexis¿question? 21:33, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Just found this one, would that be ok?

At the outset of the war, Putin had no plans to swallow up eastern Ukraine the way he had done with Crimea. He wanted the Donbas to be a part of Ukraine that Russia could control. “It’s a typical Trojan horse,” one of Putin’s close associates told me. “Let them give these regions a special status, some autonomy, and have the Western partners convince the Ukrainians to go along. That would be what we call a suitcase without a handle.” Ukraine would be burdened with a region devastated by war and influenced by Russian propaganda. Its residents—some 3.5 million of them—would support a strong pro-Russian bloc inside the Ukrainian parliament, and they would hinder any of Kyiv’s attempts to integrate with the West. Over time, they might even field a candidate strong enough to take power across the country, just as they had done with Viktor Yanukovych during the elections in 2010. Embedded in the fine print of the Minsk agreements, this was Moscow’s plan, and the Russians talked about it openly.
[…]
The crux of that deal, he said, was the concept of decentralization, which would allow Russia to control the regions of Ukraine that “share the Russian point of view on all the big issues.” The local authorities in these regions would remain loyal to Moscow. The Kremlin could assist them in running political campaigns and launching TV stations. In a pinch, their loyalty could be bought or extracted through blackmail. “Russia would have its own soloists in the great Ukrainian choir, and they would sing for us,” Zatulin said. “This would be our compromise.” If the government in Kyiv accepted this arrangement, he told me, “We would have no need to tear Ukraine apart.”[1]

The fundamental problem with the Kremlin’s position was that it was based on a lie. Putin had always denied the deployment of Russian forces in the Donbas. Their presence in the war zone was well-documented. The world had seen them in news footage, in satellite images, even in the social media posts of the Russian soldiers themselves. But Putin continued to claim, as he had done in Crimea, that these were all local rebels and “self-defense forces,” which Moscow could not disarm.[2]

Jo1971 (talk) 22:50, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Shuster, Simon (2024). The Showman. Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. New York: William Morrow. pp. 166–168. ISBN 978-0-06-330742-1.
  2. ^ Shuster, Simon (2024). The Showman. Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. New York: William Morrow. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-06-330742-1.
No. As Sachs and others have pointed out, the issue started in 2008 with the US push to include Ukraine in NATO, and make it an advance military base against Russia and destroying it's neutrality. This is consistent with persistent US statements about the desirability of Balkanising Russia, and the violation of the agreements not to extend NATO eastward. Russia stated that they viewed this as an existential threat. The Minsk I and Minsk II agreements followed were ratified by the UN and disregarded while Ukraine military was built up by the West. The Maidan revolution was a US regime-change operation. The laws against Russian speakers were a major human rights violation, as they constituted a large portion of the population. After the incursion of Russia into Ukraine in 2022, negotiations for peace in Istanbul happened, which would have meant Donbas would be retained by Ukraine as an autonomous area. The agreement was scotched by the West, who wanted the war as a proxy war with Russia. This has been admitted to various extents by the US. ~2026-35585-9 (talk) 03:35, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You said many things , so I made a selection of examples. Which "reliable sources" for these affirmations ?
First example , you say that there are US statements about the desirability of Balkanising Russia.
Which sources mention these ? I don't know any statement of this kind.

Second example , you say that there was a violation of the agreements not to extend NATO eastward. Which agreement ?
There was never a formal written agreement concerning this topic.
Third example , you say that the "Maidan revolution" was a US regime-change operation. Which sources say that ?
Anatole-berthe (talk) 06:20, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
WP:DENY. Rsk6400 (talk) 07:32, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Should the Causes section be more specific about NATO perceived threat?

Specifically, were the statements and actions of the US Secretary of State in the one year global press tour leading up to the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit provocative enough to be considered cause? Plans also included a new missile shield in Poland, pointed east.

See the November 2025 speech to the European Parliament by John Mearsheimer.

"William Burns, who was recently the head of the CIA, but was the U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time of the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, wrote a memo to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that succinctly describes Russian thinking about bringing Ukraine into the alliance. “Ukrainian entry into NATO,” he wrote, “is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he said, “would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze…. It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

"Burns was not the only Western policymaker in 2008 who understood that bringing Ukraine into NATO was fraught with danger. At the Bucharest summit, for example, both Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy opposed moving forward on NATO membership for Ukraine because they understood it would alarm and infuriate Russia. Merkel recently explained her opposition: “I was very sure … that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”"

https://braveneweurope.com/john-mearsheimer-europes-bleak-future

Most European leaders were more circumspect, so "NATO" may be overly broad when the cause was a small number of people in one country. Gaskew7 (talk) 19:00, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ukraine didn't join NATO and instead passed a neutrality law in 2010;[1] Russia invaded in 2014 anyway, while that was still in effect. Similar story for the missile defense shield plan.[2] In any case, whether Russia was "provoked" by comments in 2008 (or whether joining a treaty of alliance is even a provocation), a few years after Putin himself said Ukraine could join NATO, and then waited six years to invade a neutral country, is for not us to decide. We go by what the vast majority of reliable sources say. LordCollaboration (talk) 19:54, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
this feels like wp:or, not in the least because Ukraine didn't join nato—blindlynx 21:44, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Laos should be added as a belligerent

Laos reportedly sent 50 combat engineers to Kursk Oblast to help with EoD in the region, this makes them a defacto belligerent in the war https://kyivindependent.com/russia-seeks-to-involve-laos-in-war-against-ukraine-military-intelligence-claims-06-2025/ https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-seeks-involve-laos-war-100352937.html ~2026-63431-9 (talk) 01:57, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Not really, as this is what we might term humanitarian assistance, mine clearing. Slatersteven (talk) 10:15, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It's not humanitarian assistance when you send armed soldiers to an area being invaded(at the time). If they came across Ukrainian soldiers or were seen on drone footage they would be legitimate targets. At the very least they should be a non-combatant belligerent, as they're actively operating in a warzone at worst and contributing to the genocide of Ukraine at best. ~2026-63431-9 (talk) 19:12, 3 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Anyway, we cannot use our own reasoning here. We call a certain nation a "belligerent" if and only if reliable sources do so, see WP:OR. Rsk6400 (talk) 06:00, 4 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There is a small bit about Laos on Russo-Ukrainian war (2022–present), I don't know if there has been anything notable regarding the country's involvement since. TylerBurden (talk) 13:52, 4 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russo-Ukrainian_War