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Notes -
This is not what being a client state means. The world is full of client states that are not absorbed into their patron, and it seems uncontroversial that Belarus (which still has its own flag) is a very pronounced example of a Russian client state, and even Ukraine under Yanukovich (2010-2014, before Maidan) was argued to be sort of one.
Who are "the Ukrainians" here? People with citizenship of Ukraine (the country) or people who speak Ukrainian (the language), which is roughly the set of people that one would refer to as ethnically Ukrainian? What you said is true for the latter, but not true for the former; that's why Yanukovich was elected to begin with, and the Euromaidan was not peaceful. To try to deny that a distinction exists between the two categories is a rhetorical tool that is useful for the Western-Ukrainian (ethnic, government) coalition in this war, but the resulting set of definitions does not carve reality at the joints.
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