this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
38 points (79.7% liked)

Asklemmy

44413 readers
1144 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I have zero knowledge of the history or geopoliticial millieu there, I know there's obviously lots of Ukrainians who speak both languages but not sure that translates to them wanting to necessarily join Russia per se.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] yogthos@lemmy.ml 14 points 19 hours ago

That is indeed the case, it's important to keep in mind that Ukraine was created by USSR out of parts of Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. I highly recommend watching a lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and he gives an objective analysis of the situation. Let's take a look at some slides from the lecture here. First, here's the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

here's how the election in 2004 went:

this is the 2010 election:

As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to: