Interesting. Why do you think Ukraine been in a state of war with breakaway Republics for the last 8 years?
Btw jdege, prior to 2014 the breakaway parties that started the insurrections in Donetsk and luhansk had a negligible following in the polls. They only achieved traction because Putin poured in arms, mercenaries and false-flag military units to back them.
Before the violence, opinion polls suggested that around 25% of the population supported some kind of a split. Compared to, say, the numbers of Scots that want to split from England, or the number of Catalans that want to separate from Spain, this number is very low.
And that was asked in the context of a constitutional separation, so we can assume that an even smaller percentage support the violent insurrection.
Putin engineered the breakaway and sent in Russian special forces.