Not ethnic cleansing; Ukrainians are East Slavs like Russians. The Crimean Tatar population has already been largely displaced, mostly to Uzbekistan, in the Soviet Era (literally as many were fighting back the Germans). Using non-combatants as human shields, however, was a noted tactic during the Chechen Wars on both sides, and the Russians have often accused opponents of using non-combatants even while they do it themselves. I suspect they are going to try to round up civilians and put them in ‘detention’ camps, using them, both as hostages and to limit the number of refugees. Next, you’ll hear that it is only a small number of “Nazis’ who are engaged in the fighting. The Russian attempt at a media war isn’t so much disinformation as it is just lying so much that you give up trying to get them to admit the truth.
One of the multitude of rationalizations Putin has…’expressed’…for the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is to ‘de-Nazify’ it under the presumption that it is being run by Nazis (of course lead by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish), so at least to Russian state media Putin will want to claim that it is all Jews to appeal to the pretty strong anti-Semitic sentiment among many Russians.
Sure, but Ukrainians and Russians are both East Slavic peoples, and in fact during the Soviet Era there was such intermixing that there are many people of Russian descent living in modern day Ukraine. In the Russian Empire and Soviet Union eras there was plenty of ethnic persecution against Crimean Tatars, Zaporozhian Cossacks, and the smattering of Poles, Magyars, and Bulgars, but these are only tiny fractions of the population today and are not the rationale for invading Ukraine. The Russian Army is committing war crimes and is deliberately targeting non-combatants in a terror campaign, but it isn’t ethnic cleansing or genocide by any accepted definition.
That’s very much a “tomatoes are actually fruit!” scientific analysis - technically accurate, but irrelevant in this context. In practice, ethnic groups, races and nations are whatever the people involved define them to be. That means that if someone is being killed because they belong to a certain group, that group becomes a nation.
If the people of New York State decided to kill all of the residents of New Jersey, for instance, that would be genocide, despite the fact that their are no real genetic or historical differences between the group. The very fact that the New Yorkers want to kill New Jersians for being New Jersians would be what makes the New Jersians an ethnic group.