They come here with their nonsnense equalizing a regular war to a genocide going on right now, the comic doesn’t even make sense in the situation of Ukraine, it’s about settler colonialism, something Russia doesn’t do
Edit: this is like coming under a post about the holocaust and talking about “this is just like the white genocide in south africa”
How on Earth is it not settler colonialism when Russia engages in a prolonged campaign of trying to russify the Ukranian language, heavily propogandizing those in border regions to either get them to apply for, or either grant them Russian passports/citizenship, then they claim the rightful borders have moved, then invade and capture those border areas (and others), and then emgage in ethnic cleansing within those border areas?
Please, explain to me how that isn’t settler colonialism, just with a few initial, semi-novel/semi-uncommon extra steps?
You don’t read books or theory about colonialism, you don’t look at the news or the current event, you give vibe based “analysis” of the situation, and you want me to explain the entirety of colonialism from beginning to end just because your lazy ass won’t read Frantz Fanon.
Yep, Russia stole third of Ukraine and tries to pretend it’s a part of their country not because they’re doing colonialism, but because… um… nothing I guess, it’s not happening actually. All the Ukranians just deciding to die of natural causes there.
It’s only Colonialism if it’s from Colonial region of the world, otherwise it’s sparkling war with the exploitative and/or genocidal purposes, and then it’s OK if it’s the country that I like. You wouldn’t understand, lib.
Hey, let’s compare definitions.
In my books, it’s when a big country tries to take some land, usually rich in resources, murder those parts of local population who disagrees with that, and make the rest into a workforce, taking all the resources into metropolis.
Now, given that, what parts of Russian relationships with Crimea, Donbass, and Lugansk regions don’t fit this definition? Well, apart from the fact that Russian military force is a military farce and they fail at all their plans except one when they murder local population.
Or do you think attempted colonialism doesn’t count? Because it’s not for the lack of trying, you know
What are you talking about the russians already lived in donbass which is why they voted to secede when the banderites started bombing them. Its not like settler colonialism at all.
But many do, and did historically, as it was part of Russia prior to the USSR.
But I have a genuine question: suppose that the majority of people living in Donbass genuinely wanted to break off and become part of Russia. Should they be allowed to, and if so, what steps should they have taken to make it happen, in the context that the government banned major opposition parties that were sympathetic towards Russia? What are you supposed to do, exactly, when the country is moving in a direction that you disagree with and shutting the opposition out of the political process, after seizing power through force?
It’s a complicated issue to solve, and I’m not the person to solve it but the Russian state’s approach has basically been in every single way wrong.
The Russian ethnic minority and it’s treatment is a domestic issue. It is not a suitable pretext for Russia to invade a country, bomb schools and hospitals, and force Ukrainians into either a smaller portion of their country or to live under an ethnostate that does not represent them. Putin has naked imperial ambitions not just in Ukraine but also in Georgia.
I’m now gonna block you, as I do everyone with pro-Russia views. Because anyone that can excuse Russia’s actions is not worthy of my attention.
The Russian minority wasn’t being genocided, and at most they could be ethnically cleansed considering Russia has it’s own nuclear-armed ethnostate that’s the largest in the world. Genocide is an international issue, what was not even an ethnic cleansing is a domestic issue.
Historically the acceptable answer if you want to live in a different country would be to, you know, move to that country, instead of trying to move that country to you through war.
Btw, the Donbas is not a historically majority Russian region. It was subject to russification starting under tsarist Russia and intensified under the Soviets. But it was majority Ukrainian, home to the Ukrainian cossacks and major settlements were also deeply intertwined with the Ukrainian economy.
This is completely false. It was seat of Crimean Khanate, vassal of Ottoman Empire, which was also hostile to Poland, Russia AND cossacks. And “deeply intertwined with the Ukrainian economy” was mostly looting, kidnapping, raping and murdering Ruthenian peasants (ancestors of both Ukrainians and local Russians) as part of one of biggest historical slave trades which Russia ended when it conquered that blight of humanity Khanate was.
Your post is deeply ahistorical, disgusting and borders on slavery apologia, and you should be ashamed.
That’s even further back. I’m talking about the period when the Russian empire controlled the territory. During that time (+100 years), there was far more economic integration with the Ruthenians than there was with Russia proper. It made more logistical sense, it’s the same reason for which Crimea was ceded to Ukraine by the Soviets, Kiev due to its positioning was better suited to administratively control it.
The tsar sought to increase his influence over the region and began the process of russification, to tie the valuable region to Russia proper. The Soviets accelerated this, as they did in most of the other Soviet states.
Also thanks to ml mods to shut down any discussion. Come on, you’re better than just censoring comments.
The soviets did not expand russification, it was the opposite. They preserved and made official tons of minority languages (yiddish comes to mind), even establishing publishing houses in these languages. In addition to the SSRs that preserved the national identities and cultures of the given republics, the soviets instituted protections for minorities within these ssrs.
Initially this is absolutely true! Under Lenin particularly this was very much promoted “indiginenisation” iirc it’s best translated as in English. But particularly under Khrushchev and later Breznhnev this very much changed, focusing on the single Soviet identity.
They didn’t really prosecute these minorities mind, just very much promoted the Soviet culture and Russian language in a large variety of ways.
Do you have any supporting evidence whatsoever for the claim that Russiafication was worse under the Soviets than under the tsar? Because if not, the mods are well within their rights to remove your unsupported claims as misinformation.
The Soviets pursued korenization initially, which actually revived efforts towards Ukrainization. But this was later stopped and reversed to pursue a single Soviet identity with the Russian language. Ukrainian culture was suppressed and even Ukrainian membership of the communist party declined sharply. Russification intensified under Khrushchev and later Brezhnev.
The Ruthenians had been a people for centuries at that point, culturally similar but distinct from the Russians. History did not begin with the Soviet Union, nor are people defined by their borders, especially not in an age of empires and often shifting borders.
The claim you made was “Russiafication of the Donbass increased under the Soviets.” The same Soviets who granted the Donbass to Ukraine. Nothing in your comment seems at all relevant to that.
All that says, is that you are this close to admitting that Ukraine has been an occupied territory for centuries. Except you are using that fact as a justification for continued occupation, and not a reason for Russia to stop their colonial objectives.
That’s not what it says. Your refusal to engage with evidence has you pretending you found a gotcha because you assume anything that disagrees with you has to be based on a flawed premise.
You’re literally ignoring the facts he presented (maidan was a coup, Donbas collectively decided to secede in a referendum). The people of the Donbas were resisting an attempted genocide as much as Gazans, you can listen to Poroshenko’s statements about bombing their hospitals, having their women and children hiding in basements, you can see the indiscriminate shelling of civilian centers. Both of them were propped up by your government (the lapdog of the only empire on earth rn), and by you personally, from your stupid refusal to acknowledge actual imperialism and pretending the enemies of the State Department must be the enemies of all of us everywhere.
What I did was state a couple objective historical facts and then ask a question, one that none of the downvoters and none of the people who have replied to me (including you) have anything resembling an answer to.
All y’all do when you get confronted by something you can’t answer is downvote, fall back on lazy talking points, block, and ignore it. This makes your criticism very hard to take seriously, you just parrot the news, with no investigation or critical thought.
Not all of modern Ukraine was part of Russia before the USSR, btw. When I said “it” I was referring specifically to the Donbass. Donbass was given to Ukraine, perhaps in the hope that the Russian population would influence the politics of the Ukrainian SSR in a way that was more cooperative with the rest of the Union. This is simply a fact, and astute readers will note that it’s mostly tangential to my actual question, except in that establishes that many Russians have lived there historically.
It’s Russians that live in the Donbass, not Poles.
There are a few Taiwanese in Taiwan apart from Chinese,
a few Australians in Australia apart from Anglos,
and a few Americans in the US apart from Anglos,
but there are no Ukrainians in the Ukraine.
No, they are fascist Russians who speak a different language because they hated communism and decided to turn their Russian dialect into a full-blown language.
The Soviets decided to respect the language and cultural differences as long as they denounced their fascism.
Plus “The West” is too vague a term to take seriously.
If you’re from the US, you’re soon going to be familiar with such ‘fascist split-off “nation”’ like the ROC and Ukraine have been.
There won’t be no lie low enough not to continue for them. US fascists will claim that they’re the true USA and later claim that they’ve never been part of the USA in history. Their lies go on and on until kingdom come.
Calling another language a “dialect” is really lame if I’m being honest. The Ukrainian and Belarusian languages descended from Rutherian, which split from Russian hundreds of years ago. After centuries of Ukraine being occupied by one foreign power after another the history is all over the place but long story short Ukrainian is as much a dialect of Russian as English is a dialect of Latin.
And as for the Ukrainian identity not being real … if it wasn’t real then Russia wouldn’t be trying to erase it. Ukraine has only been part of Russia for 80 out of the last 800 years. I should not bother arguing with you, I don’t know why I even bother. I’m gonna block you like I do every tankie.
Lol, the differences between Ukrainian and Russian began in the 13th century, when old Ukrainian shifted /g/ to /ɣ/ and then to modern day /ɦ/.
By that logic, Germany should swallow the Netherlands because clearly Dutch and German have the same origins and are just dialects. Hell, if you go back to the 11th century, i.e. the Kievan Rus, a bunch of now distinct languages were much closer to each other.
Ukrainian has a lot more German, Polish and Tartar loanwords than Russian. Southwestern Dialects of Ukrainian are closer to Polish than to Russian. Ukrainian has an 38% difference in Vocabulary to Russian, which is roughly the difference between Italian and Spanish.
Ukrainian also preserved it’s vocative case, which has disappeared from Russian. It possesses 3 different future tenses, opposed to 2 in Russian. These are two different languages
Soviet promotion of the Ukrainian language was not an “appeasement of fascist russians”, it was a reversal of Tsarist oppression. Just up until the 1930s, when the USSR again made a 180 turn on their language policies throughout its territory.
In Ukraine in general, ~68% speak Ukranian natively, ~17% are native Ukranian/Russian bilingual, ~14% are native Russian speakers.
In the Donbas, ~27% Ukrainian native speakers, ~29% bilinguals, ~42% Russian native speakers.
Going by nationality:
~73% of Ukranian nationals natively speak Ukranian.
~18% of Ukranian nationals are bilingual natives.
~9% of Ukranian nationals natively speak Russian.
~4% of Russian nationals natively speak Ukranian.
~14% of Russian nationals are bilingual.
~81% of Russian nationals natively speak Russian.
All these numbers are from 2017.
…
I think it is safe to say that there are in fact many Ukranians in Ukraine, even many Ukranians in Donbas, at least prior to 2022… due to, you know, the ethnic cleansing undertaken by an occupying foreign national army.
My napkin math on those numbers works out to 53% Russian nationals vs 46% Ukranian nationals in Donbas in 2017.
Using a 53% Russian vs 46% Ukranian proportion to justify mass military force against the Ukranian population in Donbas is roughly the same logic that would conclude it is morally correct to invade Los Angeles and deport everyone who isn’t fluent in English, which has similar proportions between English and Spanish.
That doesn’t explain why Russians have been occupying land in Ukraine for all that time. When an imperialist state conquers territory, it occupies the land in order to legitimize its claim it.
They are there, because Ukraine has been a vassal state to Russia, with its people treated as second-class citizens, for centuries. During that time, they have oscillated back and forth in status from rebellion to re-conquered, many times. This is just the latest wave of Russian oppression intended to crush dissent and re-establish Russian dominance over Ukraine through the russification of Ukrainian culture, language and identity. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Huh, I wasn’t expecting a comic critical of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in this comm.
Fascists are murdering both ukrainians and palestinians. Grow up, lib.
Exactly, the Nazis in the Ukrainian government are sending Ukranians into meat grinders for the profits of the U.S. empire
Aaaaand there it is.
They come here with their nonsnense equalizing a regular war to a genocide going on right now, the comic doesn’t even make sense in the situation of Ukraine, it’s about settler colonialism, something Russia doesn’t do
Edit: this is like coming under a post about the holocaust and talking about “this is just like the white genocide in south africa”
How on Earth is it not settler colonialism when Russia engages in a prolonged campaign of trying to russify the Ukranian language, heavily propogandizing those in border regions to either get them to apply for, or either grant them Russian passports/citizenship, then they claim the rightful borders have moved, then invade and capture those border areas (and others), and then emgage in ethnic cleansing within those border areas?
Please, explain to me how that isn’t settler colonialism, just with a few initial, semi-novel/semi-uncommon extra steps?
you don’t know what is settler colonialism and you don’t know what is reality, gtfo don’t compare Palestine to Ukraine
Would you care to explain anything, or do you just want to have a hissy fit?
You don’t read books or theory about colonialism, you don’t look at the news or the current event, you give vibe based “analysis” of the situation, and you want me to explain the entirety of colonialism from beginning to end just because your lazy ass won’t read Frantz Fanon.
Yep, Russia stole third of Ukraine and tries to pretend it’s a part of their country not because they’re doing colonialism, but because… um… nothing I guess, it’s not happening actually. All the Ukranians just deciding to die of natural causes there.
you genuinely don’t know what colonialism is
Colonialism is when a country I don’t like does a thing I don’t like somewhere else. Imperialism is when any country attacks any other.
There, who needs books when it’s that simple, tankies?
Colonialism is when two countries have a war
It’s only Colonialism if it’s from Colonial region of the world, otherwise it’s sparkling war with the exploitative and/or genocidal purposes, and then it’s OK if it’s the country that I like. You wouldn’t understand, lib.
Hey, let’s compare definitions.
In my books, it’s when a big country tries to take some land, usually rich in resources, murder those parts of local population who disagrees with that, and make the rest into a workforce, taking all the resources into metropolis.
Now, given that, what parts of Russian relationships with Crimea, Donbass, and Lugansk regions don’t fit this definition? Well, apart from the fact that Russian military force is a military farce and they fail at all their plans except one when they murder local population.
Or do you think attempted colonialism doesn’t count? Because it’s not for the lack of trying, you know
I love how all the chuds from nazi adjacent instances come out of the woodwork to downvote anybody pointing out the basic facts of the situation.
What are you talking about the russians already lived in donbass which is why they voted to secede when the banderites started bombing them. Its not like settler colonialism at all.
It wasn’t just Russians that lived in Donbass.
But many do, and did historically, as it was part of Russia prior to the USSR.
But I have a genuine question: suppose that the majority of people living in Donbass genuinely wanted to break off and become part of Russia. Should they be allowed to, and if so, what steps should they have taken to make it happen, in the context that the government banned major opposition parties that were sympathetic towards Russia? What are you supposed to do, exactly, when the country is moving in a direction that you disagree with and shutting the opposition out of the political process, after seizing power through force?
A downvote is not an answer, btw.
It’s a complicated issue to solve, and I’m not the person to solve it but the Russian state’s approach has basically been in every single way wrong.
The Russian ethnic minority and it’s treatment is a domestic issue. It is not a suitable pretext for Russia to invade a country, bomb schools and hospitals, and force Ukrainians into either a smaller portion of their country or to live under an ethnostate that does not represent them. Putin has naked imperial ambitions not just in Ukraine but also in Georgia.
I’m now gonna block you, as I do everyone with pro-Russia views. Because anyone that can excuse Russia’s actions is not worthy of my attention.
Hey that’s exactly what Candice Owens said about how Hitler treated the jews
The Russian minority wasn’t being genocided, and at most they could be ethnically cleansed considering Russia has it’s own nuclear-armed ethnostate that’s the largest in the world. Genocide is an international issue, what was not even an ethnic cleansing is a domestic issue.
God you’re fucking shameless. Piece of shit.
Russia is the world’s largest ethnostate because you decided the word sounds bad and if it’s bad people you can just vamp?
But ‘meh’ ethnic cleansing? Leave it to the people doing it?
Eat a fucking knife, nazi.
You absolute baby
Historically the acceptable answer if you want to live in a different country would be to, you know, move to that country, instead of trying to move that country to you through war.
Btw, the Donbas is not a historically majority Russian region. It was subject to russification starting under tsarist Russia and intensified under the Soviets. But it was majority Ukrainian, home to the Ukrainian cossacks and major settlements were also deeply intertwined with the Ukrainian economy.
This is completely false. It was seat of Crimean Khanate, vassal of Ottoman Empire, which was also hostile to Poland, Russia AND cossacks. And “deeply intertwined with the Ukrainian economy” was mostly looting, kidnapping, raping and murdering Ruthenian peasants (ancestors of both Ukrainians and local Russians) as part of one of biggest historical slave trades which Russia ended when it conquered that blight of humanity Khanate was.
Your post is deeply ahistorical, disgusting and borders on slavery apologia, and you should be ashamed.
That’s even further back. I’m talking about the period when the Russian empire controlled the territory. During that time (+100 years), there was far more economic integration with the Ruthenians than there was with Russia proper. It made more logistical sense, it’s the same reason for which Crimea was ceded to Ukraine by the Soviets, Kiev due to its positioning was better suited to administratively control it.
The tsar sought to increase his influence over the region and began the process of russification, to tie the valuable region to Russia proper. The Soviets accelerated this, as they did in most of the other Soviet states.
Also thanks to ml mods to shut down any discussion. Come on, you’re better than just censoring comments.
The soviets did not expand russification, it was the opposite. They preserved and made official tons of minority languages (yiddish comes to mind), even establishing publishing houses in these languages. In addition to the SSRs that preserved the national identities and cultures of the given republics, the soviets instituted protections for minorities within these ssrs.
Initially this is absolutely true! Under Lenin particularly this was very much promoted “indiginenisation” iirc it’s best translated as in English. But particularly under Khrushchev and later Breznhnev this very much changed, focusing on the single Soviet identity.
They didn’t really prosecute these minorities mind, just very much promoted the Soviet culture and Russian language in a large variety of ways.
Do you have any supporting evidence whatsoever for the claim that Russiafication was worse under the Soviets than under the tsar? Because if not, the mods are well within their rights to remove your unsupported claims as misinformation.
Sure, here’s a source: https://archive.org/details/acrossmoscowrive00brai
The Soviets pursued korenization initially, which actually revived efforts towards Ukrainization. But this was later stopped and reversed to pursue a single Soviet identity with the Russian language. Ukrainian culture was suppressed and even Ukrainian membership of the communist party declined sharply. Russification intensified under Khrushchev and later Brezhnev.
You dont get to post vibes base ahistoric nonsense (like you again did) then cry about mods “censoring” you.
Interesting how “russiafication intensified under the Soviets” when the Soviets are the ones who gave the territory to Ukraine 🤔
The Ruthenians had been a people for centuries at that point, culturally similar but distinct from the Russians. History did not begin with the Soviet Union, nor are people defined by their borders, especially not in an age of empires and often shifting borders.
Non sequitor?
The claim you made was “Russiafication of the Donbass increased under the Soviets.” The same Soviets who granted the Donbass to Ukraine. Nothing in your comment seems at all relevant to that.
All that says, is that you are this close to admitting that Ukraine has been an occupied territory for centuries. Except you are using that fact as a justification for continued occupation, and not a reason for Russia to stop their colonial objectives.
That’s not what it says. Your refusal to engage with evidence has you pretending you found a gotcha because you assume anything that disagrees with you has to be based on a flawed premise.
You’re literally ignoring the facts he presented (maidan was a coup, Donbas collectively decided to secede in a referendum). The people of the Donbas were resisting an attempted genocide as much as Gazans, you can listen to Poroshenko’s statements about bombing their hospitals, having their women and children hiding in basements, you can see the indiscriminate shelling of civilian centers. Both of them were propped up by your government (the lapdog of the only empire on earth rn), and by you personally, from your stupid refusal to acknowledge actual imperialism and pretending the enemies of the State Department must be the enemies of all of us everywhere.
I didn’t say any of that shit.
What I did was state a couple objective historical facts and then ask a question, one that none of the downvoters and none of the people who have replied to me (including you) have anything resembling an answer to.
All y’all do when you get confronted by something you can’t answer is downvote, fall back on lazy talking points, block, and ignore it. This makes your criticism very hard to take seriously, you just parrot the news, with no investigation or critical thought.
Not all of modern Ukraine was part of Russia before the USSR, btw. When I said “it” I was referring specifically to the Donbass. Donbass was given to Ukraine, perhaps in the hope that the Russian population would influence the politics of the Ukrainian SSR in a way that was more cooperative with the rest of the Union. This is simply a fact, and astute readers will note that it’s mostly tangential to my actual question, except in that establishes that many Russians have lived there historically.
It’s Russians that live in the Donbass, not Poles.
There are a few Taiwanese in Taiwan apart from Chinese,
a few Australians in Australia apart from Anglos,
and a few Americans in the US apart from Anglos,
but there are no Ukrainians in the Ukraine.
Ah yes, they are just “confused Russians” who speak a different language because of the ebul West.
No, they are fascist Russians who speak a different language because they hated communism and decided to turn their Russian dialect into a full-blown language.
The Soviets decided to respect the language and cultural differences as long as they denounced their fascism.
Plus “The West” is too vague a term to take seriously.
If you’re from the US, you’re soon going to be familiar with such ‘fascist split-off “nation”’ like the ROC and Ukraine have been.
There won’t be no lie low enough not to continue for them. US fascists will claim that they’re the true USA and later claim that they’ve never been part of the USA in history. Their lies go on and on until kingdom come.
Yeah, the famous communist hating “Russians” deciding to write in Ukrainian in the 1840s.
Alexander II. banned any publications in Ukrainian. But yeah, totally just fascist Russians lol.
God I’m so fucking tired of idiot liberals who refuse to read history and think their ignorant fucking smarm is the same as knowledge
You are now a liberal if you don’t think every Ukrainian is a fascist.
Dialects have names. Go back further and you’ll notice the language starts out in Kiev, same as Russian, in the same era as the same language.
Again, if you live in the US, you’ll have this historical revisionism fun of fascism too soon.
Calling another language a “dialect” is really lame if I’m being honest. The Ukrainian and Belarusian languages descended from Rutherian, which split from Russian hundreds of years ago. After centuries of Ukraine being occupied by one foreign power after another the history is all over the place but long story short Ukrainian is as much a dialect of Russian as English is a dialect of Latin.
And as for the Ukrainian identity not being real … if it wasn’t real then Russia wouldn’t be trying to erase it. Ukraine has only been part of Russia for 80 out of the last 800 years. I should not bother arguing with you, I don’t know why I even bother. I’m gonna block you like I do every tankie.
Lol, the differences between Ukrainian and Russian began in the 13th century, when old Ukrainian shifted /g/ to /ɣ/ and then to modern day /ɦ/. By that logic, Germany should swallow the Netherlands because clearly Dutch and German have the same origins and are just dialects. Hell, if you go back to the 11th century, i.e. the Kievan Rus, a bunch of now distinct languages were much closer to each other.
Ukrainian has a lot more German, Polish and Tartar loanwords than Russian. Southwestern Dialects of Ukrainian are closer to Polish than to Russian. Ukrainian has an 38% difference in Vocabulary to Russian, which is roughly the difference between Italian and Spanish. Ukrainian also preserved it’s vocative case, which has disappeared from Russian. It possesses 3 different future tenses, opposed to 2 in Russian. These are two different languages
Soviet promotion of the Ukrainian language was not an “appeasement of fascist russians”, it was a reversal of Tsarist oppression. Just up until the 1930s, when the USSR again made a 180 turn on their language policies throughout its territory.
The only historical revisionist here is you.
In the Donbas? Half of them speak Russian natively, you dunce. About another fifth are natively bilingual.
Since you started it: are you blind?
“There are Ukrainians in Ukraine”
They weren’t talking about the Donbas specifically, they were talking about the entire Ukraine.
In Ukraine in general, ~68% speak Ukranian natively, ~17% are native Ukranian/Russian bilingual, ~14% are native Russian speakers.
In the Donbas, ~27% Ukrainian native speakers, ~29% bilinguals, ~42% Russian native speakers.
Going by nationality:
~73% of Ukranian nationals natively speak Ukranian.
~18% of Ukranian nationals are bilingual natives.
~9% of Ukranian nationals natively speak Russian.
~4% of Russian nationals natively speak Ukranian.
~14% of Russian nationals are bilingual.
~81% of Russian nationals natively speak Russian.
All these numbers are from 2017.
…
I think it is safe to say that there are in fact many Ukranians in Ukraine, even many Ukranians in Donbas, at least prior to 2022… due to, you know, the ethnic cleansing undertaken by an occupying foreign national army.
My napkin math on those numbers works out to 53% Russian nationals vs 46% Ukranian nationals in Donbas in 2017.
Using a 53% Russian vs 46% Ukranian proportion to justify mass military force against the Ukranian population in Donbas is roughly the same logic that would conclude it is morally correct to invade Los Angeles and deport everyone who isn’t fluent in English, which has similar proportions between English and Spanish.
That doesn’t explain why Russians have been occupying land in Ukraine for all that time. When an imperialist state conquers territory, it occupies the land in order to legitimize its claim it.
They are there, because Ukraine has been a vassal state to Russia, with its people treated as second-class citizens, for centuries. During that time, they have oscillated back and forth in status from rebellion to re-conquered, many times. This is just the latest wave of Russian oppression intended to crush dissent and re-establish Russian dominance over Ukraine through the russification of Ukrainian culture, language and identity. Wash, rinse, repeat.