all empirical evidence indicates that the people in the regions occupied overwhelmingly support reunification with russia.
the premise that ukraine is fighting for democracy is an absurd, malicious lie. ukraine itself is a kleptocracy, and not a democracy in any meaningful sense. the political system in ukraine is the same as the political system in russia. the democratic will of the people is to join russia - and it's been expressed repeatedly. the occupier is ukraine, not russia.
canadians should understand this. imagine if quebec declared independence from canada (which is similar to ukraine declaring independence from russia, except that ukraine and russia have almost identical languages and share a similar cultural background, which is less true about quebec and canada). if you lived in montreal or gatineau, you would oppose that - you would vote to go back to canada. that is the situation that crimeans and residents of what the russians call the donbas regions found themselves in after ukraine declared independence - they were a part of a country that existed geographically, but not culturally, and they resented it and wanted to return to the country they wanted to live in. they didn't vote for independence, it just happened.
the event in 1991 was not a democratic process. a handful of people made a decision in moscow to dissolve a confederation, and the borders of ukraine (expanded by khrushev to include historical parts of russia) poofed into existence out of no historical process, and with zero democratic legitimacy.
i can imagine being a montrealer waking up in the country of quebec on november 1, 1995 - which, unlike ukrainian independence, would have at least been a democratic process. i can imagine welcoming a canadian invasion to reclaim gatineau and montreal as being liberating forces, to overthrow the new found occupation of montreal by quebec. i can imagine the new country of quebec kicking and screaming and throwing a fit and demanding it's territorial integrity be respected, and it would be wrong to do that. the canadian government would be doing the right thing in sending the military in to take back strategic regions by force.
this government's cluelessness of the precedent it is setting - which is that quebec is indivisible, and trying to reclaim canadian-identifying regions that overwhelmingly want to stay in canada would be some kind of war crime - is baffling, and irresponsible. canada should be in 100% support of the right of russian speaking regions of geographical ukraine to self-determination, if for no other reason than to prevent itself from an inevitable collapse into a failed state, on the eventuality of quebec independence.
but this is the fucking dumbest country in the world.