as eager to join Russia was called "wishful thinking" by Katya Soldak of Forbes, who said that events in the city and the results of a survey which was conducted by Alexei Navalny did not support the portrayal. The University of Helsinki's Michael Gentile and Lucian Kim of Reuters were critical of the focus on ethnicity and language as an explanation for the conflict in Donbas. Gentile stated that "rather than being divided between Ukrainians and Russians, the Donbas is divided between people who believe in the concept of Ukrainian sovereign statehood and those who are nostalgic of the Soviet past." Kim wrote, "As strenuously as the Kremlin propaganda machine raises the hobgoblin of Ukrainian nationalism, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia isn't about ethnicity or language — it's about the kind of country that people want to live in." Pierre Vaux, writing in Left Foot Forward, criticized "the efforts of Kremlin propagandists to portray the Ukrainian government as waging a war on Russian speakers", stating that "large swathes of the government are Russian speakers. So are many of the military leaders in the east, including commanders of volunteer formations, such as Semyon Semyonchenko". In addition to Russophones from Ukraine, about a hundred Russian citizens joined pro-Ukrainian forces, "[discrediting] incessant Kremlin propaganda that Russian speakers are being persecuted in Ukraine", according to the Kyiv Post. NATO Assertions that the West had broken an agreement against NATO enlargement were criticized by some commentators. Pavel Stroilov, who copied Kremlin documents, said that "if the idea of a broken promise is being used as casus belli in Ukraine, it is being used fraudulently." Citing a 1995 article from The New York Times, Anne Applebaum said the suggestion that the EU and NATO had provoked Russia was "based on revisionist history promoted by the current Russian regime—and it is wrong. For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken." In 2014 interviews with Russia Beyond the Headlines and Germany's ZDF, Mikhail Gorbachev also dismissed claims of a non-expansion pledge and said the idea that the West had deceived him was "a myth. The press had a hand in it." Gorbachev however was still critical of NATO expansion saying, "The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very