@A Person
This is the sentiment behind the language law. They simply don't consider Russian-speakers Ukrainians. Been the case since before 2014, and they are the ones in power now.
They hate Russian speakers so much, they elected one to be their president! Come on, now. Try to have arguments that are actually based on demonstrable facts.
Er... Creating hate for the enemy you are at war with via propaganda is... normal.
What a dramatic U-turn!
You missed the part in recent history when the UAF started using artillery on the citizens of Donbas.
You missed the part in slightly older history when the supposed "separatists" that were mostly Russian soldiers with their insignia removed from their uniforms started using artillery on the citizens of Ukraine-controlled Donbass. No matter how you twist that, Russia started the war and the violence. Now of course when you attack from a city, counter-battery fire will hit the city. Then Russian propaganda will claim that civilians were deliberately targeted (as if Ukraine has ammo to waste on non-military targets).
But it's Russia which is deliberately targeting civilians, including in cities far from the frontline where there isn't any military target.
The issue with Ukraine is it's a country of two people. The Ukrainian side and the Russian side are divided by the river, more or less. Businesses on the Russian side would have suffered had the EU deal gone through. Basically, the Russians in Ukraine were asked to choose between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukrainian independence referendum, 1991:
Ukrainians were pretty united in wanting to be independent. This, regardless of language.
On economic issues, the questions is moot now: the economy of the regions that traded mostly with Russia has been entirely destroyed,
physically destroyed, by Russian fire. But even before Putin decided he needed to have one more bloody war on his hands before his death, that economy was declining. Soviet-era mines and industrial plants that were increasingly uncompetitive in the modern world.
And a look at the economic situation in Crimea shows that Russia doesn't really have anything to bring.
The Strategy for socio-economic development of Crimea to 2030[1] has formed the basis for the vision of the newly annexed region. The adopted document aims to form the modern engineering, transport, and social infrastructure, and to ensure “all-inclusive” sustainable development. Since Crimean...
www.ankasam.org
You can look at economic or cultural ties, but the fact remains that Ukrainians are Ukrainians and don't want to be Russians. Even when they do speak Russian. The child-drowning bit from the Russian TV show, if you paid attention, was said in response to the show's guest talking about Russian-speaking Ukrainian children, with Russian family names (i.e., ethnic Russians) being angry at the "moskals" (slur for Russian nationals) for having ruined their country.
Ukraine has quite a different culture from Russia, notably a very different political culture. Where Russia is all about power verticality, in Ukraine there's a lot more horizontality. The way Russia has attempted to maintain control over Ukraine after its independence was through corruption. But, contrarily to the Russian population who accept everything without ever protesting out of fatalistic resignation, the Ukrainian population thinks that corruption is bad. I know, I know, this justifies genocide at least in the eyes of Putin. This opposition to corruption will lead to several uprisings. The first is the Orange Revolution of 2004, which Russia punished by attempting to assassinate President Yushchenko through tetrachlorodibenzodioxin.
Then from 2005 to 2009, Russia tried to exert pressure with gas blackmail. However, Russia could not fully cut off the Ukrainians from gas without also cutting off the EU from gas, and Russia needed the money. That's why Nord Stream was launched. NS1 was built from 2005 to 2011. But Russia also prepared a contingency for the next crisis by funding various extremist gangs of Neo-Nazis with a pro-Russian, Panslavic nationalist project. Russia took advantage of the confusion of the Euromaidan crisis to seize power in Crimea and in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts thanks to Russian troops and their far-right fifth columns. Their attempts were, however, thwarted in Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odessa.
