How separatist are they? Is it small group that group that gained control, or does the population largely support Russia? Did they just take Russian backing to remove themselves from the Ukrainian government?
The long version is … long, but the short version is that Russia took advantage of pre existing sympathies to move Russian settlers and collaborators into the region in order to solidify those sympathies. It’s a partially manufactured rebellion, in other words.
There were definitely genuine Russian sympathizers in those regions before all the drama wrt to Crimea etc. The exact percentages versus imports from Russia is hard to say. During the long period of the Russian Empire and then Soviet Union, ethnic Russians moved all throughout the possessions of the Empire/USSR and settled, in differing amounts. Ukraine was controlled by the Russian Empire for quite a long time and had a lot of Russian migrants move into it. Many of them retained a loyalty to Russia over Ukraine when the USSR collapsed.
Also, Ukraine as a whole was much more pro-Russian before the Maidan and Crimea situations than it is now. There were polls conducted in the early 2010s that showed while it was a divisive topic, more Ukrainians actually wanted closer relations with Russia than NATO, and with Russia’s Eurasian-Economic Union than the EU. The history of Russia-Ukraine relations is fairly complicated. Many ethnic Ukrainians for example grew up speaking Russian as their first language (the current President of Ukraine, for example.)
Many adult Ukrainians also grew up in the USSR, at least for part of their lives. While we all know Russia was not well ran after the USSR collapse, Ukraine was much worse, and further while Russia started to see some level of economic turn-around in the 2000s, Ukraine’s troubles continued well past then. This created a situation where, while many Ukrainians were happy with independence, they also “remembered the better times” in the USSR, when they may have lacked independence but had a more stable economy and job market, and where leadership was not as brazenly plutocratic and corrupt as it was in post-Soviet Ukraine for many years.
The Maidan Revolution somewhat changed things because it pushed out a Russian plutocrat ruler, and saw a genuine growth in Ukraine of a grassroots desire to try and improve the country’s government. Putin, in my opinion stupidly, then attacked Crimea, which poisoned much of Ukraine against him. I actually think if he had continued with his typical “influence” operations, he had a much better chance of manipulating Ukrainian politics at some point in the future and achieving most of his goals. I think he basically overreacted and not in a way that is to Russia’s long term benefit. It has also created a much stronger sense of Ukrainian nationalism once it nakedly revealed how at true risk Ukraine is from Russian aggression (which obviously has gone into hyperdrive since this year’s full scale invasion.)
As an example look to Hungary–a country that is basically a Russian puppet now, and was done without a single bullet being fired. While Maidan was a set back, due to structural issues Ukraine was likely not joining either EU or NATO, for many many years, if ever (the Crimea invasion likely caused the EU to more seriously work on bringing Ukraine in), which would have given Putin considerable leeway to continue manipulating things.
It should also be noted that the primary reason that there are “pre-existing sympathies” is because ethnic Russians were relocated both before WWII (during the planned famines that resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians) and after WWII (to repopulate areas devastated by the war) into Ukrainian lands and were given farmland and industries to operate. Ethnic Ukrainians have a long cultural memory of the horrors done to them by Soviet (and before that Tsarist) Russian-dominated regimes and have no interest in being a ‘protectorate’ of a Putin-led Russian autocracy.
Stranger