“You could put England, Scandinavia and Germany together as “Langues et peuples Germaniques” as well. Meaningless.”
I’m trying to convey that there is a historical basis [Ruthenian] for a Ukrainian identity.
Note also on the map “MUSCOVITES” & “Origine Turco-Finnoise”, which I will admit doesn’t tell the whole story, but the map indicates why Putin and the Ukrainians don’t have as much in common as Putin would like to think.
There is still a recognized Ruthenian population in far west-southwest Ukraine: many of then were expelled from far south-eastern Poland after WWII at the same time as most Poles were expelled from Belarus and what is now Ukraine.
Several yyears ago I was in Lviv/Lwow and my impression was that there were still some Poles living there, although not long ago there was a linguistic continuum moving east as Polish dialects slowly diverged into Ukrainian: the big differentiator was religion, with almost all Poles being Roman Catholic and Ukrainians being either Uniate or Orthodox.