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My view is that if you grow up with language that language is yours, it's not the language of another country. In Ukraine people grew up with the Ukrainian and/or the Russian languages and then they belong to Ukraine in the sense that people in Ukraine grew up with these languages which means it is part of their thinking, their mentality, history. A language with which you grew up is your language, not that of another country. A guy in a village close to Kremenchuk said that he speaks Russian, which was the norm in the centre of Ukraine. He also said that he didn't like to put up walls (which refusing to speak a language does).
What would Belgium do if there was war with the Netherlands? Suddenly the Dutch speakers will decide to speak French? There is an issue with that in that there is a different metality in the French and Dutch speaking parts of Belgium so they wouldn't want to do this nor be part of the French 'side'. The Dutch speaking part does better economically and this and some other issues cause some resentment esp. of the Dutch speakers towards the French speakers it seems.
In Ukraine this mentality issue is not an issue except mostly in the Donbass area, and the issue is not caused internally but by history and further caused by Russian propaganda, about e.g. Bandera.
Let us have a look at what the Russians say but check out my page on an indoctrinated woman from Yalta as well.
So, the Germans captured Bandera who was fighting for Ukraine, not for the Soviet union. They thought he would be useful in that way so they let him go but he fought against both the Soviets and the Germans... For this reason Bandera was a hero for Ukraine, but something strange happened in Russia:
- a false equivalance of "if you are fighting the soviets you are a nazi" (not true, just wanting to get rid of controlling system)
- a false equivalence of "if someone was fighting the soviets he was fighting russians and thus: an enemy current russians". Not true, he was fighting the Soviet system, their leaders and of course against any average people who took up arms for that system, in particular when committing violence against Ukrainians.
Last modified: 2024-9-22