“...everyone born in Ukraine prior to Independence has “Russian” on their birth certificate...”
This statement is absolutely wrong. My wife is from the eastern Ukraine (Alchevsk) but her nationality was listed as Georgian because that was the nationality of her father. Others in her extended family were listed as Ukrainian during the Soviet era.
I have friends here who have shown me copies of theirs when they were telling me about this. They were born just south of Kiev in the 1950s and 1960s and both parents were born near Odessa in one case and “in the middle of the country” in one case. I think I could recognize the names of the cities if I saw them on a map but probably only if there aren't similar ones in the map in the area they said they were from.
I've seen these and held them in my hands along with their English language equivalent they had made when they moved to the States.
Using his logic, Stalin was a Russian. And, of course, Stalins mass murder of Ukrainians to break their nationalist sentiments makes no sense since Stalin apparently didn’t understand that the Ukrainians were Russian. After all, it said so on their birth certificates.