Comradeship // Freechat

then there is a east-west regional divide

It's more like a three-way divide: West vs Centre&North vs East&South. Western Ukraine is firmly Banderist. East and South are firmly pro-Russian. The rest is somewhere in the middle, though they have been getting forcibly dragged into the Banderite camp through an enormous amount of indoctrination and propaganda over the past decades, much of it funded by the West and by corrupt oligarchs who stood to gain from this.

This is also reflected in the language. The reality is that there isn't just Ukrainian on the one side vs Russian on the other. For most of Ukraine's history much of "middle" Ukraine (Malorossiya) spoke a mixed dialect, closer to Russian than to the Ukrainian spoken in the West but distinct from the real Russian spoken in the east. Add to that a sizeable minority even in these middle parts that natively just spoke Russian and the fact that Russian was the lingua franca in which everyone understood each other, and you quickly see why the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to force western Ukrainian language on the entirety of Ukraine was inevitably going to lead to disaster.

Because this "Ukrainian nationalism" is actually the opposite of self-determination - it's a project of cultural erasure that was forcibly imposed, an attempt by a small fanatical minority to artificially homogenize a diverse population and create a "national identity" on the basis of ethnic hatred. Sooner or later a project like this that is purely defined in terms of what it isn't rather than what it is was bound to implode on itself.