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Notes -
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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.
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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