Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again reiterated his favourite sentiment: “It was only after the October Revolution that various quasi-states appeared and the Soviet government created Soviet Ukraine. It is a well-known fact.” To historian Alexander Orlov such statements are not only incorrect, but they show the Russian government’s “passeism”, the hostility towards the present and future.
if we’re using historical population to litigate arguments like this, then one might be obliged to ask why Russia would have any claim on Crimea either. it was the homeland of the Turkic Crimean Tatars long before Russians came there in large numbers, and only ceased to be majority-Tatar through a long-term project of settler-colonialism there which ultimately culminated in the mass deportation of Tatars and the Russification of the region. surely this history of habitation counts far more than Russians settling there in a process analogous than to the colonization of the New World, no?
No matter if we regard historical inhabitants or current ones as the rightful owners of the land, Ukrainians are neither in the first nor the second category, so my point stands.