Ukrainian ethnogenesis is happening in real time. If that is worth fighting for is up to Ukrainians and their native Russian speaking president.
However to portray it as something with a long history is fundamentally dishonest.
It is somewhat similar to the American revolution where people with common language and history rebelled against their parent nation and over time formed a new national identity of their own.
Bohdan Khmelynytski was a medieval peasant warlord. He can only be considered a founder of the Ukrainian nation in retrospect. At his time the main mission of his calvary was slaughtering poles and jews unfortunate enough to live in territory he controlled, as a kind of precursor to NAZI death squads several centuries later.
It is a historical fact that Ukraine and Russia are two branches of the same tree and are essentially the same ethnicity speaking different but mostly mutually intelligible dialects.
I mean Zelensky (who Khmelnytskyi would have killed) speaks Russian as his first language.
However to portray it as something with a long history is fundamentally dishonest.
It is somewhat similar to the American revolution where people with common language and history rebelled against their parent nation and over time formed a new national identity of their own.
Bohdan Khmelynytski was a medieval peasant warlord. He can only be considered a founder of the Ukrainian nation in retrospect. At his time the main mission of his calvary was slaughtering poles and jews unfortunate enough to live in territory he controlled, as a kind of precursor to NAZI death squads several centuries later.
It is a historical fact that Ukraine and Russia are two branches of the same tree and are essentially the same ethnicity speaking different but mostly mutually intelligible dialects.
I mean Zelensky (who Khmelnytskyi would have killed) speaks Russian as his first language.