Just so you know, I do have experiance with this sort of thing. My relatives were on the defeated side of the War Between the States. I serves no one to hold a grudge from the past. Ukrainians persecuting ethnic Russians wasn't right either.
Our United States, with NATO, successively encroaching toward Russia while telling Ukraine we would fight with them to destroy Russia was wrong.
This is only up to Russia and Ukraine to resolve.
Ukraine wasn’t persecuting ethnic Russians. It’s the other way round.
Before the Cold War era Stalin bussed thousands of settlers into Ukraine, viciously suppressed the Ukrainian languages, exterminated and starved millions, and forcibly relocated the Tatars... If Stalin hadn’t done that then the Bandera era of Nazi collaboration probably wouldn’t have happened. Ukraine was caught between two genocidal invaders and many thought that the Nazis were the lesser of two evils. Based on bitter experience.
But that was over 75 years ago. After Stalin died the Soviet Union started to be a lot less hostile to Ukraine, giving it administration of Crimea for example.
In the 80s, under Gorbachev, the Supreme Soviet granted even more to the Republics, so the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), the Belorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR were three separate and equal republics, albeit all subservient to the Supreme Soviet within the Union of SSRs.
By 1993 Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were three independent countries that had signed multiple friendship agreements between each other, and agreed to keep their borders the same as under the USSR.
Ukraine consistently voted to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity along the Belovezha Accords borders but ALSO consistently voted to maintain close ties with Russia.
Ukraine has signed five treaties with Russia on that front, consistently elected pro Russian deputies, prime ministers and presidents, and Zelenskyy was welcomed on Russian TV in his comedian career.
Ukraine ALSO kept signing deals with Russia and China, and kept kicking the cam down the road on NATO and EU membership, just to keep Russia happy.
But none of that deterred Putin and Medvedev. They didn’t just mourn the loss of the Soviet Union, they bemoaned the decisions made by Stalin’s successors right from the gifting of Crimea thru the Helsinki agreement of 1975, and the FIRST Minsk agreement (the Belovezha Accords).
Putin wants Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries and the old Warsaw Pact region back under the thumb of Moscow like in Stalin’s time.
That’s got bugger all to do with NATO expansion. He’s a history nut who thinks Peter the Great and Stalin had the right idea.
NATO expansion is only a whinge for Putin because NATO would get in the way of him putting tanks in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.
If Medvedev and Putin hadn’t attempted to assassinate Yuschenko, hadn’t blackmailed Azarov, hadn’t paid Yanukovych to sell his country out and hadn’t invaded the Donbas and Crimea, all in service of this Chauvinist fantasy, the 2014-2016 bloodshed would never have happened.
Russia was such a serially abusive partner that eventually the general population of Ukraine kicked off - that was what started Euromaidan. Putin then used Euromaidan as an excuse to invade Crimea and the Donbas.
Even after that, Russia still had support in the South and East of Ukraine. The rest of Ukraine wasn’t going to tolerate a Russian backed hijack, and viewed these collaborators as utter traitors, and that’s how Maidan turned into a civil war in the Donbas.
By the end of 2020 that civil war was over. A few hundred recalcitrant paramilitaries on the Ukrainian side kept taking potshots at Putin’s little green men and their Ukrainian enablers but the civilian population was largely untouched.
“Persecuting ethnic Russians” is a Russian trope, like their definition of Nazi which Putin and the Kremlin confirmed is actually
Any Russian speaker in any ex SSR who refuses to accept that their country needs to cease all delusions of independence and liberty, and embrace their forced conversion into a client state of Putin’s empire, is a Nazi according to Putin’s philosophy. That’s been confirmed by Dugin, by Putin, by the Kremlin, and by the author of the genocide manual “What to do with Ukraine”.
Russia is persecuting ethnic Russians, along with any other population in Europe that isn’t willing to collaborate against their own interests in the service of realising Putin’s conquest vision.