Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I'm always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.

Minsk II was the one I was referring to, but it's a fair point.

If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like "Come across the border and we'll set you up with a Russian passport".

Ok, let me rephrase that then. Do you believe that the people have Donbas have a right to self-determination and representation in government, and that that right would include having some possible roadmap to joining Russia, or should they be forced to either go along with whatever the new government wanted or abandon their homes and flee the country? Because I think that a lot of this mess could've be avoided if Ukraine had simply given them a referendum, but instead they banned opposition parties, which says to me that they knew how the people there would vote.

They did do that. My coworkers aunt was finally granted Russian citizenship and was ecstatic. They granted citizenship to a number of refugees in the war.

Hoo boy wait til you see what Zelenskyy was up to.

I'm not sure what that has to do with shelling cities, are you suggesting he was hiding in one of the buildings or what?

Yes, but the liberal pro-EU protestors got sidelined by literal neo-Nazis. The following President was basically handpicked by the US Ambassador. There's plenty of western media from 2015-2021 about the integration of Azov into the Ukrainian military structure, the rehabilitation of World War II collaborators, and the suppression of the Russian language. The people of the East are, in principle, just as entitled to wish to join Russia as western Ukraine is to join the EU.