The Swiss speak French, German, Italian and Romansh. Doesn’t make them not Swiss.
Unified national languages are creations of states. Otherwise, you have collections of dialects. (Newspapers, etc, can also linguistically standardise.) Ukrainian as a language is no more artificial than Portuguese. And, clearly, the Russian Army wasn’t greeted as liberators.
What we are watching is the pressure of the Russian state generating ethnogenesis. Just as there was no Palestinian people in 1920 but there sure is now. Sure, there is a division between the quite Nordic West Ukrainians (who are absolutely not Russian) and the much more Slavic East Ukrainians, but national identities have been created out of less promising material.
The Swiss speak French, German, Italian and Romansh. Doesn’t make them not Swiss.
Unified national languages are creations of states. Otherwise, you have collections of dialects. (Newspapers, etc, can also linguistically standardise.) Ukrainian as a language is no more artificial than Portuguese. And, clearly, the Russian Army wasn’t greeted as liberators.
What we are watching is the pressure of the Russian state generating ethnogenesis. Just as there was no Palestinian people in 1920 but there sure is now. Sure, there is a division between the quite Nordic West Ukrainians (who are absolutely not Russian) and the much more Slavic East Ukrainians, but national identities have been created out of less promising material.