The Origins of Ukraine and Ukrainian Language Introduction I am originally from Moscow, Russia and I am one quarter Ukrainian by my grandmother, so I know a little bit about my history and the roots, more so than many other people who offer their opinions on the situation in Ukraine and Crimea. Prologue The Rus land and people were named so after the old Russian word 'ruslo' meaning the riverbed path, thus used as reference to the people living along the rivers, the Rus peoples, hence many rivers in old Russia are called Ros or Rus*2, which includes the modern-day region of Ukraine, while the people living in the fields called Poles, i.e. Polish, from a Slavic word 'pole' meaning field. The word 'ukraine' derived from around 18th century references to the region by a word 'krai' meaning region or the edge, thus U-krai-na translates as 'the edge region,' yes it is and always was a district/region of Russia that was always occupied by the ethnic Russian-speaking Slavs. Even today there are ethnic Russians living in the Western Ukraine, called Rosiyany*4, who are autonomous and have their own government and language, while their government is still under the influence of Kiev authorities, their language is old Russian dialect, originally preserved to this day by their regional culture. The Three Founding Progenitors of Ukraine The Catholic Vatican & The Pope The Habsburgs of Austro-Hungarian Empire The Communist Bolsheviks & V. Lenin The Catholic Vatican & The Pope As far as the beginning of the split, after the collapse of the Rurik dynasty with the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1594, on 20 June 1605 self-proclaimed false-tsar Dmytri I triumphantly entered Moscow, but only one year later he was killed, in 1606, thus then followed a war with the catholic Polish-Latvian knyazjestvo i.e. principality, until around 1612, whose armies have conquered all the way to Moscow, even managed to capture the capital briefly until their expulsion in 1613. However, the Moscow was weak and did not want to mess with the new catholic missions set up all over the conquered lands who were busy all this time converting the believers of the Russian Orthodox Church into Catholicism, thus trying to brake the Russian Slavic Orthodox homogeneity, styled in continuation of the Byzantine tradition, which resulted in the formation of the so-called "Eastern Right Catholics" in English, or called Greco-Catholics in Russian, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, whose priests are the only Catholic priests who are allowed to marry, for the reasons of making it easier for them to convert at the early stages of the war to control the Christendom, with the conversion of the first parish of Uzgorodskoy Unii (Uzgorodskaya Uniya) in 1646. The Habsburgs of Austro-Hungarian Empire At the end of the 18th century the Austro-Hungarian empire invaded the Western parts of the future Ukraine, with the cultural invasion soon followed. The House of Habsburg of Austro-Hungarian empire has set up many committees stuffed with the Polish linguists who made up the official Ukrainian language by replacing the Russian sounding words in the local regional Slavonic dialects with the words taken from Polish, Czeh, Slovak, Borgarian, and other Easter European languages, resulting in the production of the first Ukrainian language dictionaries, grammar, and a small number of books, small because nobody could read it at a time, until later, when the Bolsheviks have arrived on the scene. The Communist Bolsheviks & V. Lenin It was Lenin and Bolsheviks of newly formed Soviet Russia who have adopted the Ukrainization*3 as the official USSR policy, along with their aggressive anti-Russian nationalism stance, which is due to the initial International Communist mantra -- "proletariat of the world unite" -- however, this was soon dropped by Lenin, who wanted to return to the national focus, but not Trotsky, who wanted continue with the communist international agenda, hence his early retirement. Lenin and the Bolshevics were first to draw up the Ukrainian borders, and profusely stared publishing and popularizing first Ukrainian literature, art, film, and culture in general, presenting it as somehow distinct from the rest of traditional Russian-speaking regions, which is of course a complete nonsense. However after a few hundred years of cultural assault these tactics managed to create divisions significant enough to be exploited by the nefarious political & private interests, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Joseph Stalin, continued after Lenin with the Ukrainization regime, and even carried out the public trials of the polish-influenced linguists who have kept the original sabotage of the Russian language going in the regional dialects by producing and maintaining the Ukrainian language based more on Polish, Czeh, Slovak, and Borgarian words than the original Russian counterparts, hence they got publicly executed. Also, comrade Stalin on one hand was exterminating Ukrainian villages with the Holodomor hunger blockades, my mother's mother was the only survivor from such a village near Kiev, and on the other hand finishing implementation of the industrialization and Ukrainization plan set by Lenin of what was and is indigenous Russian-speaking territory and cradle of the old Kievan Rus. Kievan Rus Russia is a name of the military alliance formed by the old city states, equivalent of the modern-day NATO, organized to repel taxing and raids of the Ottoman empire, via Khazars*6, and the regular raids by the numerous nomadic tribes. Kievan Rus*6 was at the heart of ancient trade routes, so and so, that the city of Novgorod, means new city, was built to house the great number of German and European traders, while Great Duchess Anna Yaroslavna of Kievan Rus has famously married Luis I of France. Modern Ukraine Without the contribution of efforts from the Vatican, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the founding grandfather Lenin with comrade Stalin the whole Ukrainian self-identity would have been still purely Slavonic Russian with regional dialectic differences, such as still existing to this day in western Ukraine the Rosiyany*4, or Russophiles*5, "The "Russophiles" did not apply the term to themselves, and called themselves Rus[s]ians or Ruthenians (Rusyny). Some Russophiles coined such terms as Obshche-rossy (Common Russians) or Starorusyny(Old Ruthenians) to stress either the differences within their faction, referring to commonness with all Russians, or their unique stand within the whole of the Russian nation. The ethnonym Ruthenians for Ukrainian people had been accepted by both the Russophiles and the Moscowphiles for quite a long period of time. The new name Ukrainians began to be accepted by the Ruthenian Galicians (as opposed to Polonian Galicians) around the 1890s, under the influence of Mykola Kostomarov and the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in central Ukraine."*5 Similarly, the Sicilian dialect vs classical Rome, different enough to not being able to understand each other, same goes for some Germanic tribes, various English varieties, the Catalonia in Spain, and most other countries, where in the cities people speak the literary, official, language, while in the surrounding villages people speak in different regional dialects, some different enough to be incomprehensible to others. Out of the modern day Ukraine, there are only two regions that come to mind as predominately Ukrainian-speaking (due to being under the Astro-Hungarian influence) and those are the Galicia and Bukovina. Lviv in Galicia is 50/50 Ukrainian/Russian speaking, while Chernivtsi has also a large Ukrainian-speaking population because it was traditionally part of Bukovina which was occupied by Austro-Hungarian empire. Then to the South to Carpathian mountains is Uzhhorod, predominantly Russian-speaking, and the rest of the Ukraine, the whopping 90% of it is purely Russian-speaking and has been since the dawn of Russia herself, with most cities speaking literary Russian language: Odessa, Donetsk, Kharkov, and of course old Kiev are all Russian-speaking and always were. The Western Ukrainian neo-nationalists tried to convert Kiev from Russian-speaking to a recently created (18th century) Ukrainian language without success for the last twenty years. Epilog In summary, the independent from Russia Ukrainian culture is pure mythology and fantasy. Ukraine was and will always be an inherent part of Russia and historical Kievan Rus*6, Russian culture and history. So this story goes, from Russia with Love. <3 ______________________________________________ *1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization *2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ros_River *3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization *4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_Ukraine *5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Ukrainian_Russophiles *6 - https://www.facebook.com/notes/alexander-braun/the-origins-of-russian-language-and-mother-russia/10155029978885442