I think I’ve said before, Ukrainians and Russians are the two sides of the same coin. Few Ukrainians don’t speak Russian and any Russian in Ukraine can speak Ukrainian. They aren’t hunting down Russians. Most of the Eastern European couples we know are Russians who married Ukrainians.
Slavyanka’s mother is Russian. No one knows you’re Russian heritage unless you tell them and she doesn’t live in fear of her neighbours. They’re very close knit with their neighbours, whatever their ethnicity. If you’re fresh off the boat from Moscow, they can tell by the accent, same as we can tell a Newfie or a Californian can tell an Alabaman. That’s as far as it goes.
They have been fighting ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Consider that after starving anywhere from 1.5 to 20 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor, Stalin replaced them with ethnic Russians. Now they want to take that part of the country and create an independent state. Would you be so well-disposed if Sikhs in Brampton decided to create an independent Sikh state within Canada? Or Chinese in Vancouver decided to do a paramilitary takeover of the lower Mainland?
