Thank you for response. I went to your links and I had actually clapped for a few of them previously.
My insights came from the early days of Ukrainian independence. I was reading The Economist, which was often reporting on the Russian dissatisfaction within Ukraine. The ethnic Russians were advocating for a return to Russia. Whether this was a minority or majority of ethnic Russians, I could not discern. But a small group sometimes makes itself much bigger than it really is.
When I visited my grandparents' village in 2006 in Bukovina, my family was telling me about the turmoil in Chernivitsi with ethnics Russians wanting more rights in that city. I was wasn't in a position to verify their perspective; but I could see there was some prejudice in their comments.
There was a crisis in the village Oshliev. The local church was from the Russian Orthodox Faith. The church was too small, so a second church was being built. But the money was coming from Russian Orthodox Church, so services were going to be in Russian in this second church as well. My mother's cousin was not happy with this.
I met a Russian lady from Dnipripetrovosk. She was not happy with the Ukrainian language becoming the dominants language of this city.
My understanding was the election of pro-Russian Yanukovych was because many Ukrainians stayed away from the polls, because of corruption of the previous pro-Ukrainian politicians. The Russian agitators voted and got the pro-Russian candidate into office.
After that debacle, I wasn't following Ukrainian politics that much. So when the invasion occurred, I was a little surprised that there wasn't much pro-Russian resistance within Ukraine. It seems to me that much of the pro-Russia sentiments had dissipated in the previous decade. Today, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are clearly moving away from Moscow, albeit the mood in Crimea is unknown.
And as your articles suggests, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are taking their dissatisfaction to the next level by adopting the Ukrainian language.
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On my paternal side, my heritage is Slovak. My father's cousin traced our family history to a Czech migration to the Trnava region about 1750. There are a few Czechisms in the Trnava dialect of Slovak. But nobody from this heritage identifies with being Czech. At some point, people let their heritage go or make it less important.
There won't be much Russian in Ukraine when this war is settled.
