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Notes -
Ukraine has a deep ethnic split between Ukrainians and Russians that goes back to the border between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Polish-Lithuanian_Commonwealth_at_its_maximum_extent.svg
You can see it was still reflected in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_election#/media/File:%D0%94%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80_2010_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%85-en.png
And Putin is still following the pattern:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0003/production/_127630000_ukraine_invasion_south_map_x2_nc.png.webp
Putin's ideal outcome is to take the entirety of the provinces Russia currently controls most of, then add on Odessa. He'd also have a land bridge to Transnistria. Basically make Ukraine a land locked country.
A lot of the ethnic Russians left after the domestic conflict broke out in 2014. Between Russian speakers returning and Ukrainian speakers leaving, he probably wouldn't have much trouble integrating that strip.
Integrating the rest of Ukraine is clearly impossible. He'd probably like to leave the rest of the country independent and de-militarized. It's just not part of his vision of historic Russia.
Relatedly, the internal boarders of the commonwealth between Poland and Lithuania from the Union of Lublin in 1579 are the current border between Belarus and Ukraine.
This dichotomy lost its importance by 2016. Having lived in Eastern Ukraine, everyone lost any faith in Russia seeing the Donbas turn into a looted mafia run hellhole, with militias forcing people to sign their assets away etc. Culture, language etc. are meaningless compared to not wanting to be impoverished worse than the 90s. The Ukrainian army is very happy to use Russian, Azov's main language was Russian and had many Russians from Russia in its ranks. Many are now switching languages, building negative associations with Russian, due to the war.
One confounder is Zelensky himself, commonly found on Russian TV, who ran on a campaign to ease tensions and move on from the Donbas conflict. In spite of this, he surprising ended up not vetoing (middling) anti-Russian language laws. I haven't been able to determine why he switched then - but it does echo popular opinion in the East too. Here Zelensky sings on a Russian New Year's special: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lkdDQX06ISI The channel currently does nothing but war propaganda, featuring some audience members.
I've written about identity in Ukraine in other posts: https://www.themotte.org/post/269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/50553?context=8#context
These claims are very odd. To point out a couple
do you have some sort of empirical evidence of this other than your anecdote. I have seen many videos that would show contrary. For an empirical example this poll by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in (sep2022) states that "The poll showed that 57% of Ukraine's ethnic Russians" do not support making territorial concessions to Russia while almost 90% of Ukrainians do not as a whole. That is as significant difference in opinion to me. This poll did not include all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Crimea oblasts either.
Again the poll by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology "At the same time, it is mostly supported by residents of the West and the Center (respectively, 79.4% and 66.2%), the least - residents of the East (38.8%, while 55.8% do not support)."
I don't find this surprising in the least bit
Consider half the country uses Russian as their main day to day language, but not even a fifth claim it as their native language (which also means something different than in English), and 57% of that less than a fifth of "Russians" have an opinion on a poll? That's less than 10%. Of the "Ukrainians", you'd be hard pressed to find any (besides in the far West) who don't have a Russian grandparent (or 3). Along the same lines, even in Siberia or Vladivostok, half the people you find will have a Ukrainian or Polish grandparent. This does not impact what ethnic identity they write in surveys.
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