[jb: An informative (thought-provoking?) point of view re Ukraine -- Russia]. From Quora

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lives in Lviv, Ukraine Updated Dec 22
Are Ethnic Russians indigenous to the Eastern Ukraine?

No. Same as to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The ethnic Russian majority in the East of Ukraine (correction: ethnic Russians have a majority only and specifically in several big industrial cities of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, not overall) is a direct result of the Russian Imperial and, to a larger degree, Soviet colonization policies, mainly:

  • Holodomor, which effectively worked as an ethnic cleansing there. Once a large part of the indigenous Ukrainian population was starved to death, outright killed or deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms, they were replaced by ethnic Russians from the poorest areas of Russia.
  • Russification. Not only ethnic Ukrainians were coerced or stimulated to speak Russian, but ethnic Russians were summoned to work as teachers, middle management, military, police and other important positions to enforce the policy, and to indoctrinate Ukrainian children into the Russian supremacy. Descendants of these ideological workers form the base of the political Russians.
  • Industrialization of Donbas. Donbas was an agricultural region, before the coal mining industry was founded in the late 19th century, and the name was coined. During the Soviet period, workers from all over Russia were attracted to the region through high salary incentives (remember, in the USSR, your salary was defined by political officers, rather than by the added value you generated). Many of those newcomers were former prisoners - the criminal subculture, totally alien for the majority of Ukrainians, was blooming in Donbas.

So good, that the previous owners were executed! (From Russian media*)

For most ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, who can trace their lineage, they lived in Ukraine for 2–3 generations at most (1–2 in the Western part of the country, which was only occupied in WW2).

Those speaking Russian only, however, should be considered political Russians, as the affinity is by choice. Anyone living in Ukraine can learn the language within a year, and master it within 2–3 years. So the Pushkin-loving, monolinguistic crowd usually know how to speak Ukrainian, just prefer not to. [...]


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