Exactly....Porshenko was a master at it. No one was to speak Russian. It was not to be taught in school. And the Chocolate King owned ALL the media in Ukraine.
“Porshenko was a master at it. No one was to speak Russian.”
Three things:
1. Zelensky (elected in 2019, not an establishment politican, has Russian as first language) is not the same person as Poroshenko (establishment Ukrainian nationalist, voted out in 2019). Please, don’t make the mistake of thinking Z is continuity P - their politics were quite different, at least until Putin sent the tanks in and by doing so threw a massive wrecking ball into the positive effect of armistices and demobbing that Z had been fighting very hard to maintain.
2. Said it before and I’ll say it again: ask the refugees from the Donbas, Luhansk and Kherson regions, who are themselves ethnic Russian, why more of then fled west into Europe than fled east into Russian separatist areas or Russia proper... And, why so many of them waited until Russia invaded before they did it. The inconvenient fact that Russia doesn’t like people pointing out is, the worst civil war fighting was 204-2017 and people who didn’t flee the conflict zone then fled thru Poland or Germany when the Special Military Operation kicked off. If that doesn’t give you a very idiot-proof signal of just how little love and trust these Russians in Ukraine felt for their “bigger brother”, nothing will.
3. Any argument that a shared history justifies a forced reunification of an artificial country with a bigger neighbor is just indefensible, period. If that made an atom of sense there’d be a big lobby pointing out that because the Republic of Ireland spent a couple of centuries under UK rule, the UK would be entitled (and morally justified) should it impose a forced reunification. Nobody seriously makes that case. Not even the most rabid nutjobs in the “Progressive Unionist Party” would go there.
4. If you think the common language issue / erasure of Russian provides a justification - again, the example of Ireland debunks it. Just because they speak English as a first language, doesn’t mean they ARE English.
A better model for Ukraine would be Wales. Most of the Welsh population speaks English, and English remains the lingua franca in most parts. The Welsh Assembly promotes the Welsh language though. In the rural areas, an English newcomer can massively improve their relationship with the Welsh locals simply by making an attempt to learn a bit of the Welsh language. Hostility to the English tends to come when people who speak only English start acting like they own the place when in a Welsh speaking area.
Quite a lot of Ukrainians can relate to that.