It's the same as the US.

Hong Kong: All they want is democracy.
Donbas: It's a Russian invasion!

You know these people in Luhansk and Donetsk Republic are willing to die to get out of Ukraine.

It's the reason why Russia doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO. Half the country potentially wants to join Russia.
Are we going to fight a world war over a majority of people in a region wanting to leave the nation, even more than the Hong Kong population did.

With the Hong Kong situation, it's yet again, 'Britain gave them democracy. Chinese promised to retain the democracy. They lied.'. That's a three times no there.
Hong Kong was vassal state without any form of democracy, so it was a dictatorship through and through under a democracy.
How does that happen eh?
Furthermore, mainland China promised to improve it's democracy, which they did, with the promise from the British side that China had sovereignty over Hong Kong national security and defense issues.

People are constantly now making stuff up what the US is doing and what Russia and China are doing in order to excuse their anti free trade, and anti-democratic and anti-freedom actions.

If it's a Russian invasion, then of course you can oppress and genocide the people in the Donbass region.
If Hong Kong demonstrators "just want freedom", then of course a little bit of terrorism is allowed.

Going back to the Hong Kong situation.
Like Donetsk and Luhansk, a majority of people wanted to at least remove their oligarchically elected leader from office.
And yes, I get it, such elections aren't very democratic.
But during the entire protest, calls for democracy was put on the backburner.

What they really wanted and what the whole was about, was to build a wall between them and Shenzhen, with Shenzhen quickly becoming the richer city.
It's kind of like East and West- Berlin, except that it's West Berlin that would be the poor one in the middle of the country and they didn't build the wall to keep their citizens from fleeing, but to keep the East Berliners out from treating the West-Berliners like equals and not like gods to the dirt poor peasants they were.

If they had gotten independence, the situation would immediately turn into a civil war again as just like Ukraine, a significant part of the city rather wants to be part of China, seeing how Shenzhen is richer and they have to deal with that daily as they live at the mainland border, rather than the metropolic island.

That's why the demonstrators felt the need to lie and support the prevention of extradition of an axe murderer murdering a young woman in cold blood for cheating on him, in order to demonstrate for what they really wanted, retain the illusion of their status as the richest, most powerful city in China, to which they've frankly lost by 2020 to Shenzhen in PPP per capita.

So despite a majority being in favor of the protests in Hong Kong, I disagree with all of them for having a pipe dream that can only be upheld by being more and more violence as they keep losing power, thus throwing into an economic abyss.
The mainland rightfully believes that this is not a smart decision and considers the protesters to be like children led to the chompers.
The organiszers already felt the need to lie in order to hold the demonstrations and while the city used to be a safe haven for people fleeing from mainland China, mainland Chinese between 2014 and 2019 entered Hong Kong as "just another rich Chinese city" (since 2020 it's spoiled brat city) and looking at the attitudes during those demonstrations, where pro-US Hong Kongers were constantly beating up every pro-China person they saw, it got pretty clear on who is oppressing whom and why.

Back to the Donbas situation, it is straight forward.
Russia is richer, the protesters are sons and daughters of Russians who moved into Ukraine during the Soviet period.
Ukraine, already poor is further going backwards economically.
They border Russia. They want out and they'll get richer if they do.

This will keep happening and so it's no wonder that a "if we think you attack one of our members, you attack all of us" NATO isn't very welcome to Russia and pro-Russians wanting to separate themselves from near-NATO nations, in which any secession, of which some of the the Hong Kong 2019 demonstrators were opting for, is always seen as a direct Russian invasion.

P.S. Dutch state media made extremely suggestive language that Russia blocked gas going to Germany (via Nordstream 2) and that this is evil, while just a few weeks ago they agreed with the US to shut down Nordstream 2.

What planet am I living on?