[goldstategop]

There is a large Ukrainian diaspora in Russia and the two peoples often intermarry. And millions of ethnic Ukrainians do speak Russian.

Those deep and close ties in the Slavic family will not be dissolved by the current protests.

[Honorary Serb]

Some of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians are in my own U.S. Orthodox parish!

[wildandcrazyrussian]

Not to mention that there are millions of people inside Ukraine who strongly deny that they ARE "Ukrainians" as a separate group from "Russians". Especially the Crimea (originally in Russia, handed over to Ukraine in 1954 by the Ukrainian Khrushchev); the eastern half of Ukraine, which had been in the Russian Empire and where they have always thought of themselves as Russian; the Black Sea coast including Odessa; and the Carpathian region, stolen by Stalin in 1945 from Czechoslovakia.

This last region (Carpatho-Russia) is a land of about a million people who have resisted the separatist movement of political Ukrainianism since it started in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutionary times. Even now, bordering Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, they would prefer to be part of Russia proper, even if it were an outpost like Kaliningrad. They have been loyal to a sense of Russianness and Orthodoxy for centuries under foreign domination.

The current events are of one faction of many in the country, and are seemingly not aware that they are being used by Germany and other Western powers.