The context for the Donbas existed long before Putin ever mentioned it. If anything, Putin did more deflection after they got Crimea and said that the Donbas regions didn’t want to defect despite the fact that the Donbas regions were very very interested in going the way of Crimea.

The lie is more that Putin wanted to go to war and is very interested in a conflict with the West. This is clearly not the case, if Putin had wanted war with Ukraine he would have pushed for it immediately after Crimea and taken the Donbas regions while the Ukrianian government was in the middle of a coup and disorganized. The fact is that Ukrianian Nazis and Nazism had been developing under Putin’s nose the entire time and he did nothing, it was only when the Russian military convinced him that not only was an attack on the Donbas imminent, that it could continue to roll into Russian territory if it succeeded, and that they could counter it with minimal force and expense that Putin ok’d the war, which is how this whole mess is now bogged down.

But idk what you would expect from a nation who literally threw away their reason for existing, sold themselves to the highest bidder, and when that didn’t get them universal acceptance into the international capitalist cult, which is something that any amateur Marxist scholar could have told them would happen, try to make up another reason for having rejected the ideology that made their nation relevant on the international stage. At this point my only prognosis is that Russia is a cursed land and Russians a cursed people, to emulate Western lies and practices but not understand that you have to actually be stupid enough to believe the lie you are telling for it to work effectively.