Ag with kids said:
agent-maroon said:
Quote:
Such borders would likely lead to a longer term peace/successful outcome for the peoples involved.
As long as the "peoples" are russian, because it would completely suck for everybody else
They would be Russians whether they like it or not...
The "Russian oriented" or "Russian speaking people" trope is repeated without question by western news media who have no interest in understanding the history of Russian efforts from the 18th century and even earlier to quash Ukrainian national identity.
Within the past 100 years, Stalin. tried to exterminate Ukraine through famine but only succeeded in killing 3.5 million. The holodomor was after the prosecution and execution or exile of "kulaks" which numbered into the millions across the USSR with almost half being Ukrainian. By 1930, the meaning of Kulak had expended to include anyone who had ever hired another person and paid them, ever for seasonal help with the harvest (from the Gulag Archipeligo).
On the eve of Nazi invasion Stalin had almost 130,000 Ukrainians imprisoned within Ukraine being tortured over months to years to elicit a signed confession of Anti Soviet Agitation under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. When Hitler did invade, Stalin had the NKVD execute 41,000 Ukrainian political prisoners in their cells and another 80,000 were exiled to the Stans and never returned.
Even after Stalin and through Kruschev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov, all schools in eastern Ukraine were taught exclusively in the Russian language despite Ukrainian being spoken at home. After 50 years of Soviet Russian rule, a partially successful genocide, and exiting millions that were suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies, virtually nobody was left in eastern Ukraine that still spoke Ukrainian even at home.
I have a friend from Kharkiv in his mid 50s who understands Ukrainian but only speaks Russian because that was all he was allowed to speak in public growing up. He doesn't consider himself to be Russian or have any cultural connection to Russia. Russian is just the language of the conqueror and occupier.
When Ukrainians voted for independence from Russia in 1994, the vote for independence was over 90% in aggregate but still over 70% in the Donbas and over 55% in Crimea. Any claimed "Russophile majority" in those regions only exists to the extent that a knife is at their throats.
