[int_19h]

But, similarly, don't confuse cultural identity with political one. That is really the crux of the issue here - self-identifying as Ukrainian or as Russian is very much a political question in Ukraine, and has been since their independence. This is also why you have this weird situation where several prominent Ukrainian military commanders and politicians have close direct relatives in Russia who are pro-war politicians there and who often were themselves born in Ukraine (or, conversely, the Ukrainian ones were born in Russia). So somebody may be Russian not just linguistically but culturally and ethnically as well, be born and raised in Russia, and still self-identify as Ukrainian today and speak the language solely as a marker of their chosen affiliation. And because it is a political identity in those cases, it can be very fluid - i.e. those very same people might be ones who have voted for Yanukovich 15 years ago precisely because he was seen as pro-Russian-language.

Ironically, this war will probably end up doing more to truly hammer out a single cohesive Ukrainian nation out of all the ethnic Russians in Ukraine than all the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists before it - assuming that Russia loses the war, that is.