this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
34 points (100.0% liked)
World News
1949 readers
869 users here now
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
Rules
Be excellent to each other
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Dude, 40 % of Ukrainians spoke Russian as their main everyday language in early 2022. In the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, that was 70 %. More than two thirds of the people in Kyiv did all of their everyday things almost exclusively in Russian. When they paid the bus driver, they talked in Russian. When they bought milk in those over-the-counter shops that are still prevalent in Ukraine, they asked for it in Russian. And the bus driver and the shopkeep answered them in Russian. And when I lived in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016, practically all of my friends spoke Russian as their main everyday language. That had to do with me knowing Russian reasonably well back then and only knowing the basics of Ukrainian.
Any Russian-speaking Ukrainians I explicitly asked about their mother tongue always gave the same answer to me: "Ukrainian and Russian". I almost never heard them utter anything at all in Ukrainian – they lived their life completely in Russian. But still, they would answer "Ukrainian" in a poll. And not even one of them identified as Russian. They identified as Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Or, more specifically (and a bit funnily, to my eye), as "Ukrainian-and-Russian-speaking Ukrainians".
I am also married to a woman born in the city of Donetsk. Who used to speak exclusively in Russian until September of 2022. And even though she is from the most Russian-speaking city in all of Ukraine, and therefore along the most unambigously Russian-speaking Ukrainians, she has never seen herself as Russian. So, no. Eastern half of Ukraine was not Russian. It was Russian-speaking. And the capital was overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. And still not Ukrainian.
Also, most of the people in the Maidan demonstrations spoke Russian as their main everyday language and spoke Russian with their parents and children and spouses at home. Your claim that it was a demonstration against Russian-speakers in Ukraine is based on a forgetting or ignoring of this narative.
Also...
This sounded very sarcastic. Keep in mind that I started expressing my opinion because of you saying the following:
If you think I am unimportant and my opinion is not of any interest to you, please refrain from saying "I am eager to hear your opinion"
speaking a language and being of certain decent are two different things. i also know many ukrainians, many russians and many deutschrussen. imagine it as a switzerland if you could. or maybe belgium. one country, similar but still different people. rlthere are probably swedish enclaves in Finnland? are they finnish with swedish decent?
They do not see themselves as Swedes. Beside that, I do not understand what you are trying to say with your comment, and cannot react to it in a very meaningful manner.
You referred to a statistic where people's everyday language is incorrectly conflated with their nationality and then used that statistic to claim that the eastern half of Ukraine was identifying as Russians. That statistic was erroneous precisely for the reason you are bringing up: Being of a certain descent and speaking a language are not always connected. And also, being of a certain descent does not mean that you identify as being a part of the culture you are descent of.