I don’t care about their independence referendums. There’s even a secessionist movement in Bavaria, demanding independence from Germany. Doesn’t mean that any prick who thinks they deserve their own country should get one.

What even is the point you’re trying to make here? All independence movements are the same? That if there is a different independence movement that you don’t support in completely different circumstances then that means not supporting autonomy for people in the Donbass is reasonable because you are able to draw a thin veneer of logical consistency through completely superficial comparisons?

If your national government gets undemocratically overthrown in a coup and then starts implementing policies to strip away rights in your region of the country based on removing your ability to participate in public life and suppressing access to political representation and economic/social participation with tactics such as making it unnecessarily difficult to participate in society using your native language, then that seems like fantastic justification to want independence and autonomy. Why would you need to draw comparisons to other secessionist movements based on little more than the superficial similarity that it is also a secessionist movement?

How did the russians even end up there

Oh, it’s because your actual argument is that the people being affected are acceptable targets for racial/ethnic discrimination, and that they deserve to be relegated to their appropriate status as second class citizens without meaningful political representation, or better yet expelled from their homes so that the pure and righteous Ukrainian nationalists can reclaim their nation. But that’s a less palatable argument, so you had to preface it with some bullshit before you slid that in there.