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I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?
What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.
It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc, and Russia will not allow them to do so. Russia persecutes the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives, etc.
To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference. But it's also hard for slavs to tell the difference between the blue and red tribes; why there's so much fighting about the narrative in public schools is likely tricky political analysis for the FSB. It's also vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will see replacement migration, even Ukrainians don't want to live there, much less non-Ukrainians.
TIL that Galicians have trouble with gaining independence from their cultural overlords from Iberia to Eastern Europe.
Galicia is Latin for "land of the Celts" and was used as a term for difficult to control borderlands inhabited by ethnically distinct peoples in European state formation; at least for some of them, old habits die hard.
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As far as I can see, it’s not Galician nationalists wanting their own Central European country that Putin objects to. It’s rather them wanting to control the entire territory of the former Soviet Ukraine, including the Crimea.
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The best explanation I've seen is that Putin wants Ukraine to be like Bavaria. They are free to yodel and walk around in leather pants and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves, but they are still an integral part of the German nation and the German state. While Ukrainians want to be like the Netherlands. Who mention the German blood of their ruler in the anthem, used to be in the HRE, but are free to polder and walk around in wooden clogs and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves in their own country.
Austria might even be closer to Germany than the Netherlands.
I am the first to admit that borders are accidents of history. There is no good principled reason why Austria should be its own thing but Bavaria should be part of Germany. The status quo is sacred merely as a Schelling point. If people want to move borders through democratic means, such as the Scottish movement to leave the UK, that is fine. But after two big industrialized wars, the world has largely realized that moving borders through military action is not worth the effort any more. Eventually, such actions became seen as defection from the club of civilized countries.
For Europe, "stick to the borders however stupid and unfair they are" has been a marked improvement over the ancient, previous method of resolving land disputes, "bash your neighbors heads in every 50 years to see who gets to own the disputed territories".
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Unlike the western globalists who would never ever do something to dismantle a country's ethnic and cultural heritage...
If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture Macron and Keir Starmer are their worst nightmare.
Wrong. If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture, Russia is their worst nightmare. On account of actually having an explicit policy to destroy them as an ethnicity and fold them into Russia, as opposed to whatever it is you're insinuating Macron and Keir Starmer are doing.
Not even close.
While London is 50+% non British? Ukrainian culture will be as deconstructed as western culture and replaced by bland American consumerism while their population will be replaced by Bangladeshis extracting resources owned by western financial institutes. Ukraine's demographics rival South Korea's as the most catastrophic on Earth while they are allying with people who want mass migration with incredible fervor.
Don't think the Black rock owned plantation is going to have an HR department that cares about traditional Ukrainian culture or that the Nigerians working there have any interest in it.
Why would any Ukrainian who cares about his ethnicity care about that, when Russia promises to actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers as soon as it's done?
It's clearly been too long since you've had an actual existential war if your concept of being replaced is limited to "London is less than 50% British". Try zero percent. Ethnicity null can't take up any percentage of the former country, after all.
I think this almost never works, it just induces resentment. Spanish culture stayed strong despite centuries of Islamic occupation (the staying-power of bullfighting has a lot to do with the Muslims repeatedly trying to ban it), the Irish are still Irish, and Ukraine went straight back to being Ukraine once the USSR was over. If anything foreign occupation seems to solidify native culture, below a certain level. (That is not to say that being occupied is fun or easy, especially by Russians).
What does seem to cause long-term culture change is demographic change. On an obvious level, America and South America changed almost completely once the Europeans moved in, as did the English when the Normans moved in. I don't really have great examples because mass migration is still quite new, but it seems relevant to me that the statues of Robert E. Lee in the South didn't disappear after Civil Rights but only disappeared when the locals became outnumbered by incomers with no connection to the history. There's just something about 50%+ of your capital city and even increasingly your politicians having no connection with your history at all (or negative ones) that's hard to describe. I look out of the window and nobody looks like me. I can't understand what they're saying. If the Nazis had succeeded and tried to wipe out our culture I think we'd still consider ourselves English, but this is different.
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Ukraine was Russia for centuries, it was still Ukrainian. Ukraine now has collapsing demographics and will end up being completely replaced.Their culture will be some washed out American culture and their population will be Pakistani workers extracting resources for black rock. There is no force that is more culturally corrosive than western liberalism.
Ukraine wasn't even a part of Russia. There are parts of Russia with strong cultures. Ukraine would easily have remained Ukrainian.
The parts of Russia with strong cultures have not been painted as literal inheritors of the German Nazi cause who must be annihilated as a state and entity. Also, the parts of Russia with the strongest non-Russian cultures are, you have guessed it, Muslim. Not "Slav convert" Muslim, but Central Asian Muslim.
I am telling you once again since you do not even address it - Russia is not some sort of based trad anti-White Replacement haven. All the trends that make people crow about "replacement" are there at only slightly weaker, combined with the kind of government ideology that is really not promising for newly-subjugated Enemies of the Glorious Fatherland.
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This is of course also true of Russia, the two nations have similar TFRs.
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It was a part of a premodern Russian empire withotu anywhere close to the amount of state capacity (or general ideological development related to modernity) to attempt assimilation, or basically any form of governance beyond letting local atamans and village chiefs continue to do as they've always done. Things are obviously quite different on that front now.
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Weren't many of these areas historically, uh -- Poland?
Give those parts back to the Poles, Crimea + Donbas etc. back to the Russians, and what's really left?
There's no such thing as "historically Poland" and these areas had been everything. These lands were conquered and re-conquered by a variety of states, which bore variety of names, many of them sounding like modern states (e.g. Grand Duchy of Lithuania) but being very different from them. Taking a random moment out of 1000 years of chaotic warfare and conquest, fixating on it as "historical" and claiming that's the "true" state of things is just nonsense. Russian official propaganda does it all the time - if any particular piece of land had been conquered by Russians even for a day over the centuries, it's "historically Russian land", from the time of Creation till the end of the Universe. Of course, if you believe silly stuff like that you may as well start doing land acknowledgments and move back to Africa since that's where "historically" humans lived.
That's kind of the point though -- I know people who's family came from those areas pre-WWI; I think it was an Austrian possession at the time, but they were Polish people who called themselves as such. Later it was Poland again, then USSR, now Ukraine. But the people there were still Poles or Ukrainian as the case may be; it's not as though they were confused as to which depending on which army had conquered the place recently. (we had plenty of Ukrainian emigrees as well; they called themselves according to their history, not what part of the area they had been living in)
So if (some of) the people of Galicia consider themselves still Polish, they are probably right.
Due to all that long and messy history, no border is ever able to express the complexity - you'll always have people that think they are Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Hutsul, Romanian, Ruthenian, Czech, and a dozen of other options leaving next to each other. Sure, in some place people would say "we are Polish and we're living here since year X" and over the hill over there people would say "we are Ukrainian and we're living here since year Y". It's always easy to find some substantiation of some politician's grand "historic" claims - but it's also as easy to find a diametrically opposed evidence which the politician conveniently ignored.
All true -- thus "might makes right" is usually how these disputes are eventually resolved. If Poland wants Galicia back, they would have to come and take it. If Russia doesn't get there first, I suppose.
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My grandmother was born in Przemiwółki, a small village near the Polish city of Lwów, which you probably know as Lviv. My grandfather was born a bit more to the west, in Żółkiew (Zhovkva). There's a family story about how his father and father's brother became estranged for life after the modern nationalities started to crystalize and one chose to be Polish, and the other an Ukrainian - Tolkien's story of Elrond and Elros comes to mind.
Anyways, the known Poles living in those regions faced a simple choice as WWII was drawing to a close - flee, or die at the hands of UPA. There might be some octo- and nonagenarians left who consider themselves Polish deep in their hearts because of the stories one of their parents told them, but that's basically the end of it.
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