Stalin was a Georgian, not Russian. Most of his and Lenin's murderous henchmen were atheists of Jewish descent from the Pale of Settlement, which encompassed Ukraine and Belorussia, but not much of Russia proper.
That's why when the Nazi's came along and conquered Ukraine from the Communists, the Ukranians immediately turned on any Jew they could find and killed them, blaming them for 20 years of Communist opression. But they didn't turn on any Russia they could find and kill them.
The Ukranian identity as a distinct ethnicity is a construct of the Poles and Jesuits in order to discourage any feelings of loyalty among the "Ukranians" towards Russia through the several hundred years of Polish occupation, and is centered in the mainly Catholic area of L'viv and stretches east to K'yiv, which was the extent of the Orthodox Dioceses that had reunited with Rome in 1596. The Germans partially awakened these old feelings for purposes of separtism in 1917 by creating an independent Ukraine under German protection in the 1917 armistice with Russia (the Germans also created the modern states of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Georgia at the same time with the same treaty for the same purposes). Most other "Ukranians" think of themselves as just a different kind of Russian (i.e. Great Russians=Russia Proper, Little Russians=Ukraine, and White Russians=Belarus). The language difference is a matter of dialects more than anything else. Basically, Ukranian is Russian with a bit of Polish influence. The people look indistinguishable.
The Nazi's, for example, recognizing this, only admitted as Ukranian those who were from western Ukraine and were Catholic. Only Ukranians from the west were allowed into the Ukranian SS battalion. Other Ukranians were considered as Russians, and if they wished to fight with the Germans against the Communists, had to join with Gen. Vlasov's army or work as Hilfi's (grunt labor) in the Wehrmacht.
At the same time famine was being spread across the Ukraine by Stalin, he was also spreading famine across the Cossack Steppe to the east and in the large German settlement in Sartov and continuing to kill off the peasant-owner farmers known as Kulacks. The Ukraine drew the bulk of attention because it had the bulk of Russia's people at that time, and also the bulk of the independent farmers Stalin wished liquidated.
And Nikita Kruschev was Ukrainian but that didn't stop him from continuing with the murder of Ukrainians.
Maybe Ukraine should be thinking more in terms of independence from both Moscow and the EU.
That would have come as a great surprise to my Ukrainian Orthodox grandfather.
The existence of the Ukrainian language dates at least to 1200 A.D.
There is a considerable Ukrainian literature.
The Ukrainian novelist and playright
Nicolas Gogol
wrote his earliest stories in Ukrainian
before shifting to Russian in order to gain wider recognition.