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Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their
peasant dialectregional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.Note that the “destiny” of a people who declare sovereignty has never been important for Ukraine or her oligarchs, as they waged war against the ethnically and linguistically Russian inhabitants of eastern Ukrainian when they declared themselves sovereign (after a Western-influenced unconstitutional coup). This despite it having widespread support from the people, as shown by third party polling. Before and after Ukraine literally shelled a region with cluster munitions for declaring sovereignty, they waged cultural genocide against indigenous Russian speakers by making it illegal for shopkeepers to speak Russian or for newspapers to be published in Russian without publishing in Ukrainian first.
Some time ago I read a book about the early days of 2014 war by a Russian militant which made it quite clear, to me, that this narrative (or that Ukraine literally shelled a region with cluster munitions for declaring sovereignty") is bunkum.
What happened was that, in the post-Crimea high, a small group of Russian radical imperialist nationalists conducted a filibuster operation that, due to the general weakness of the post-Kuchma/Yanukovich Ukrainian state and army, managed to turn a heretofore-fairly-weak anti-Maidan operation that had aimed for federalization into a secessionist enterprise, this reaction then being furthered by the ongoing warfare. What is unclear is how much support from official Russia they had, but at least some sectors of the regime seem to have offered them backing.
While there probably was real support for secession in Crimea, I don't think that applies to Donetsk. Of course situation might have been different in the pre-2022 years in the then-Russian-controlled area due to people moving to/from the area for ideological reasons, but I'm not aware of any polls in the Donetsk/Luhansk areas giving any credence to widespread separatist support, apart from the obviously farcical status referendums of 2014 and 2022.
Considering how widely Russian is still spoken in Ukraine, and particularly before 2022, this is not a particularly efficient genocide. Ukraine does privilege Ukrainian to Russian, currently, but that's not genocide, cultural or otherwise.
(Also, below, you state "Ukrainian culture does not exist as separate from the history of Russians, though. That’s why it is nearly identical to Russian culture, religion, and language" - well, if that would be the case, why would Russians consider it such an onerous requirement to speak Ukrainian, identify with Ukrainian culture, join the OCU instead of UOC (MP) etc?)
Which do you think would be easier, incidentally - being an Ukrainian-only speaking in the areas of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia, or being a Russian-only speaker in Ukraine?
What? That's like being libertarian socialists.
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The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology polled Donbas residents in 2014. The findings are tilted pro-Kyiv in two ways: it’s literally the results from an institution in Kyiv shortly after a coup, but more importantly Kyiv was mentioned whenever the polling was done — those who are wary of Kyiv or anti-Kyiv are obviously going to be less likely to answer an institute from Kyiv. If you look at page 35 Figure 1, 31% want either succession or joining with Russia, an additional 23% wanted to be made an autonomous republic within Ukraine, and 35% want to remain in Ukraine without autonomy. Of that last 35%, only 9% wanted the status quo, whereas 26% wanted expanded powers.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2454203
If the results are this pro-autonomy despite the bias in favor of Kyiv, it’s reasonable to assume that the actual figures are more pro-autonomy. Sadly, there’s no way to get that figure.
NYT say they have, as do HRW. You think it’s bunk because of an obscure book written by an obscure Russian, probably from an obscure passage you haven’t linked.
Yes, that poll shows a clear majority for staying within Ukraine (with autonomy or expanded powers, or without), which is completely different from separation and/or joining Russia.
To make it clear, I wasn't talking about cluster munitions, but about the idea that Ukraine just attacked innocent Donbass people for "wanting sovereignty", a term that means very little in itself. Ukraine defended itself by force of arms against armed filibusterers and (later) local separatists who wanted to violently enact separation and annexation to Russia (declared to be the aim by DPR/LPR from the start), ie. something that had just repeated in Crimea previously. Any other country would have done the same, according to capabilities.
If you want to read the book ("obscure", sure, but would one expect a pro-separatist Russian manifesto to be a NYT bestseller in any case?), it's here.
The poll is an extreme upper ceiling on support for remaining in Ukraine, which is sufficient to prove to even the most skeptical of skeptics that there is huge public support for independence / annexation among Donbas residents. Reminder by the way that Euromaidan was an armed, illegal ousting of a constitutionally-elected president.
That argument is, to put it mildly, a huge reach. Unless there's clear evidence to assume otherwise, one can't just take a poll and then assume that it must represent the "extreme upper ceiling".
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