I decided to state the bleeding obvious... .There were no Russian citizens in Ukraine in 2014 . Except for normal visitors in tourist accommodation , businessmen on secondment, and Russian military personnel in naval depot and barracks in Crimea, under lease agreements or fraternal arrangements with the Ukrainian State.
By parroting statements like" Russians" ,you are promoting the narrative that they were an indigenous population being trampled down against their will. You may have only intended it as a shorthand, but it has consequences. After 2014, Moscow started seeding that area with Russians for the purpose of creating dissention.
My post did not in any way give the impression " that they were an indigenous population being trampled down against their will." Except perhaps in your imagination. As I asked before, please stop distorting what I post by deliberately mispresenting it.
This whole reply from you is a distortion of reality in more than one way, particularly in implying a racial purity which the population of Ukraine do not have. Amongst others they are Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian and Russian, as the languages they speak show and as fits a "bitsa" country only recently assembled and barely over a century old.
They are all at least bilingual, but in some areas settle for one language. For example, in Kherson the only language used by all is Russian, yet that city is well to the west, a very long way from Russia's border. This invalidates your claim of recent infiltration into border regions being the only Russian element. They only speak Russian there since it was long a Russian shipbuilding centre on the Dnieper river with a predominantly Russian and Russian background population.
Like so many you have swallowed all the western propaganda instead of dismissing it like the Russian propaganda. As someone who was an adult when Khruschev switched administrative control of the region to Ukraine, I know how recently it was very Russian indeed, an important part of the USSR and with a large proportion living there having been born in Russia and therefore of Russian nationality.
Just as I know that the 2014 war was solely begun by Ukrainians who were of Russian background and sympathising separatists, Russia only then first supplying arms and much later fighting men.
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