It was a low-key civil war, make no mistake about it.

Your government doesn't just allow armed, organised (largely ultranationalist) paramilitary groups to conduct ethnically-motivated attacks on its own soil without their tacit approval, especially not when those same paramilitary groups tended to get absorbed into the state military forces later on.

This isn't the wild west were talking here.

Fuck, if a protest action in your own country can deploy the pointy end of the state against you immediately then the civil war against the easternmost part of Ukraine could have had a police/military response within days rather than leaving it to play out over literal years.