Donetsk People's Republic

[musique intrigante]

Je considère qu'il est nécessaire de prendre une décision qui se profile depuis longtemps : reconnaître immédiatement l'indépendance et la souveraineté de la République populaire de Donetsk et de la République populaire de Lougansk.

[musique intrigante]

Les accords de Minsk restent la seule base pour un règlement du conflit dans le Donbass.

The others are Mamuka Pipia and Giorgi Edamadze of the pro-Russian Solidarity for Peace Party, and Nikoloz Jganidze, founder of Sezoni TV.

UK says all four joined a delegation that met the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

The measures freeze assets and ban travel to the UK.

Abuladze mocked the decision on Facebook, saying he was embarrassed that Britain had not sanctioned him sooner.

When I was in the Donbass in 2015.

I was there in order to visit a new entity, a new country sort of, because there had been the People's Republic of Donetsk and of Lugansk just created after the Minsk Peace Agreement.

For me as a country collector who didn't have a clue about the local politics, It was interesting to go there and to sort of tick off this new country as one of the first in the world.

So I made my way in to Donetsk from Russia because it's not possible until today from the Kiev side, from the Western Ukrainian side.

And it was however easy to cross the border.

There was a real passport control.

There were already new number plates and new uniforms and everything was a new country, the People's Republic of Donetsk.

I go to the hotel at the time was the Ramada Hotel, the place to be.

They encountered practically zero armed resistance.

They seized the weapons lockers, pulled stacks of worn car tires into the streets, hauled sandbags onto the asphalt, hoisted the Russian tricolor and the black-blue-red banner of the Donetsk People's Republic, and declared to the global media that a popular proletarian revolution had commenced.

The audacity of that bluff is the single most important operational fact about the outbreak of the Donbas War, and it is routinely buried beneath a mountain of subsequent propaganda.

It worked for one reason and one reason only.

And the war he started was run in the next town over by a man who used it as his call sign.

On the 17th of April, a pro-Russian mob gathered in front of the Horlivka city council building.

They climbed the facade, ripped down the blue and yellow national flag of Ukraine, and hoisted the, well, very much, uh, Confederate-like flag of the Donetsk People's Republic.

Volodymyr Rybak did not leave town.

he's obviously not really in a position to say much else he has to and in fact he does sound pretty confident and unbending but he's also being faced with with the fact that this is having serious costs for russia and therefore he's having to try and formulate what the future could be And he says, and this is the last chunk of Putin, well, at least his speech.

In the Donetsk People's Republic, approximately 11% remains under Ukrainian control.

And what I'll say next is important.

At the Ukrainian high level, they're saying they'll hold on to the remaining 11% of DNR territory for a year and a half.

[dramatic music] Welcome back to Ether Hour, everybody.

I'm your host, Conrad Franz, joined as always by Dmitry Kalugin, with a huge returning guest, Andrei Afanasyev joins us once again from the Donetsk People's Republic, from the war zone in Russia and Ukraine, of course, where I have been with him on a World War Now, you know, correspondent mission.

He's going to be bringing us the latest from the war in Europe.

Of course, we've had some major rhetorical escalations from NATO and the Europeans, who seem to be wanting to get into a fight with the Russians sooner rather than later.

And at the same time, of course, Russian soldiers are advancing towards Slavyansk.

We have reports of Russian soldiers initially in the city of Sviatohorsk or the town of Sviatohorsk.

So as far as the actual Donetsk People's Republic front and the other areas in the northern area of the war, how, how are things faring? What is the, what is the situation? And, you know, how does, how is it looking as far as the monastery itself goes? Because clearly the monks there are being, you know, regularly persecuted and literally murdered.

So is the, is, is there hopes that the Russians will be liberating Sviatohorsk Lavra soon? I'm curious your perspective on, on the crimes there and just the frontline situation.

But despite the threat posed by Ukraine, people are saying that they are determined to make their voices heard.

Even the head of the Donetsk People's Republic has cast his vote at a local polling station, also saying that he met quite a few people who actually wanted to vote in the first state Duma election.

RT's Murad Ghazdiyev reports on how the vote is being held under wartime conditions.

Across two continents and 11 time zones, under ceaseless threat of attack, Russians vote for their new parliament.

Of course, that was boosted by high and conveniently unobservable early voting polls in the occupied territories of Ukraine, which included elections.

80.9% in the Donetsk People's Republic region.

I mean, that's even rivaling Chechnya, which again, as of Saturday night, had a surprisingly, suspiciously high, but also, to be perfectly honest, characteristically high, 85.2% turnout.

So it looks like they might be going for a record.

TASS, and again, this is from TASS, so take it with a grain of salt, the West benefits, same, same kind of principle, the West benefits from continued conflict between Russia and Ukraine because EU countries capitalize on weapons supplies to the Kiev regime.

Really? Is that it? I don't think so," says Denis Pushilin, the head of the Donetsk People's Republic in an RT interview.

So here, this is in TASS again, but it's just saying the European Union has lost 90 billion in euro due to the conflict around Iran and the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.

So add insult to injury with that.