Integration is often just tribalism at a larger scale. In Russia, for example, there's a popular line of thought that basically denies that Ukrainians are a separate nation - the claim is that they're just a "misled" subset of Russia, that their language is just a particularly badly distorted Russian dialect etc. It's not about integration - it's about Russian domination.
For another example, Turkey treats Kurds in a similar vein.
Well Ukraine never actually was a separate nation except very briefly after the revolution, then after the dissolution of the USSR.
Also, Ukrainians are ethnically almost identical to European Russians, and more than half of them speak Russian. Ukrainian is an archaic dialect and probably would have died out if not for a resurgence in nationalism.
Edit - to add to this, the way Ukrainian identity formed in the first place is that "Ukrainians" were the part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers (Poland-Lithuania and Austria-Hungary), so they developed their own identity by virtue of essentially being Russians cut off from the empire (they kept Cyrillic writing, attempted to keep the Orthodox religion, etc...). Even in Gogol's writings he refers to the Russian Empire, not Ukraine as a nation (even if the current Ukrainian authorities have censored/modified his writings).
Oh, and I'm an ethnic Ukrainian in Canada whose family originated from the part of Ukraine occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire...
Edit2 - Sorry, just facts. "Ukraine" never was a country until last century. Maybe one of you down-voters could point out a Ukrainian state pre-1919 that identified as Ukrainian. Because Kievan Rus wasn't Ukrainian, it was Rus-sian....
> "Ukraine" never was a country until last century.
Nothing in the comment you replied to clashes with that. At all. The actual point, which stands unmoved, is something for which both Russia/Ukraine and Turkey/Kurds are mere examples.
> Maybe one of you down-voters could point out a Ukrainian state pre-1919 that identified as Ukrainian.
Why would they have to? They gained independence 1991. That's the most significant bit, no?
> Nothing in the comment you replied to clashes with that. At all. The actual point, which stands unmoved, is something for which both Russia/Ukraine and Turkey/Kurds are mere examples.
Except they really are all different situations. Turks and Kurds are completely different ethnic groups with different languages, origins and history. Kurds are closely related to Iranians, not Turks.
> Why would they have to? They gained independence 1991. That's the most significant bit, no?
Because there's revisionist history which states Ukrainians and Russians are different ethnic groups. They're not. They've shared the same history and culture for over a thousand years, they're the same ethnic group. Yes they're different nations now, but they're not different peoples.
> Except they really are all different situations.
That's the point of analogies. You point out similarities, not that things are the same. They're not even possible between things that are the same.
> Yes they're different nations now, but they're not different peoples.
Yes, and? The comment you replied to goes "there's a popular line of thought that basically denies that Ukrainians are a separate nation". Which, seeing how they're a separate nation, is just valid as Turks wanting to lord it over the Kurds.
Thank you for an excellent illustration of what I was talking about.
For those curious about how exactly this is distorted, briefly: Ukraine was not "part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers". What is today called Ukraine was part of a single unified state called Kievan Rus, very roughly corresponding to today's European Russia + Ukraine + Belarus - indeed, it was its heartland, where the capital Kiev was located.
Once Kievan Rus disintegrated because of feudal strife between its constituent principalities, its eastern parts were overrun by the Mongols, who integrated it into their empire as a vassal state of sorts (keeping the local dukes mostly in place, but using them as glorified tax collectors, and continuing to pit them against each other to keep them weakened), whereas the western parts were overrun by the then-ascendant Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which annexed the land outright, and mostly integrated the local nobility into its own hierarchy. Map:
This is the point at which then-unified (mostly) East Slavic culture and language breaks apart. Western parts get more exposure to European culture, initially via Lithuania, and later also via Poland when the two form a commonwealth; Catholicism partially (but not wholly) replaces Eastern Orthodoxy, and language gets borrowings from Polish and Latin. Eastern parts get more exposure to the (then mostly Turkic) Mongol culture, with Eastern Orthodoxy becoming even more entrenched per Mongols' usual policy of supporting local religions and using them to control the rulers, and the language gets many Turkic borrowings.
If you look at the map again, you'll see that the Mongol parts are (roughly) what would eventually become Russia, and the Lithuanian parts are what would eventually become Ukraine and Belarus.
The parent is technically true that there was no state called "Ukraine" before WW1. But there was definitely a nation, calling itself and its language Ukrainian, and distinct from the neighboring Russians and Poles, whose statehood mostly dominated over the corresponding territory.
The "Cyrillic writing" point is similarly bogus - Cyrillic alphabet and Eastern Slavic language was used heavily in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well, to the point of becoming the main language for clerical and legal works. First printed books in Eastern Slavic were printed in GDL. However, it would be incorrect to refer to that language as "Russian". It was an ancestor language common to modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Historically, wherever that language was spoken, its speakers generally referred to it as "Rusian" (as in "language of Rus"). In Western sources, it is usually referred to as Ruthenian. Conflating it with Russian is one of the tricks played in this kind of propaganda.
TL;DR version is that there's a substitution trick here: Russia claims to be the sole legitimate successor to Kievan Rus, and all other successor states to be "breakaway parts" (ironic, given where Kiev is located). A rough analogy would be if Italy said that it's the Roman Empire, and France and Spain are its breakaway provinces, and do not constitute nations in their own right.
> But there was definitely a nation, calling itself and its language Ukrainian, and distinct from the neighboring Russians and Poles, whose statehood mostly dominated over the corresponding territory.
And which state was that? The Cossack Hetmanate? Which rebelled against the western occupiers and eventually joined the modern Russian Empire?
> However, it would be incorrect to refer to that language as "Russian". It was an ancestor language common to modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Historically, wherever that language was spoken, its speakers generally referred to it as "Rusian" (as in "language of Rus"). In Western sources, it is usually referred to as Ruthenian. Conflating it with Russian is one of the tricks played in this kind of propaganda.
So Russian is one of the modern versions of the older Rus language, but isn't? Not sure I follow your logic here, you're pretty much agreeing with me then claiming for some reason Russian doesn't count as being descendant from the older Rusian language.
> Russia claims to be the sole legitimate successor to Kievan Rus, and all other successor states to be "breakaway parts" (ironic, given where Kiev is located).
You're missing a key part of history here: Muscovy, the Cossacks and others all rebelled against various invaders, and formed a common state: the Russian Empire. Which included both Moscow and Kiev for centuries.
> A rough analogy would be if Italy said that it's the Roman Empire
Do you not remember the part where there were a bunch of Italian city states that did eventually rejoin to form the Italian state? Italy wasn't Italy until quite recently. Also, France and Spain were Gaul and Iberia, inhabited by Celtic groups that were invaded by Rome.
This isn't analogous to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, whose people all came from the same original group.
> This is the point at which then-unified (mostly) East Slavic culture and language breaks apart. Western parts get more exposure to European culture, initially via Lithuania, and later also via Poland when the two form a commonwealth; Catholicism partially (but not wholly) replaces Eastern Orthodoxy, and language gets borrowings from Polish and Latin. Eastern parts get more exposure to the (then mostly Turkic) Mongol culture, with Eastern Orthodoxy becoming even more entrenched per Mongols' usual policy of supporting local religions and using them to control the rulers, and the language gets many Turkic borrowings.
Gotcha, so this is basically the modern revisionist, racist Ukrainian propaganda that Russians = Mongols, and Ukrainians are pure white Europeans, right? Never mind that fact that much of Ukraine (all of Crimea for example, and the south of Ukraine) was ruled by Tatars (one of the offshoots of the Mongol horde) for a decent amount of time. And there was absolutely no intermingling there right? Ukrainians didn't succumb to any Tatar influence or genetics, right?
Edit - also, I'm aware of the entire history of the Rus empire from when the Varangians (Vikings) settled in Novgorod, to when Prince Oleg went from Novgorod to Kiev, to Vladimir the Great, etc... Maybe because my family came during a time long before Ukrainians and Russians were feuding, but even though we've maintained fairly strong Ukrainian identity the modern anti-Russian propaganda is never anything I learned growing up. Just something we see in the media now.
> And which state was that? The Cossack Hetmanate? Which rebelled against the western occupiers and eventually joined the modern Russian Empire?
First of all, I didn't say there was a state. You know there can be nations without statehood? Indeed, I already mentioned one such example - the Kurds.
But, yes, for the brief existence of the Hetmanate, it was an Ukrainian nation-state.
As far as "joined the modern Russian Empire" - it didn't, not quite. It signed the treaty of Pereyaslav with the Tsardom under Khmelnitsky, yes, and which was supposed to preserve their autonomy. The treaty on which Russians essentially reneged, by claiming that the tsar was an absolute ruler, and could not be bound by treaties with his own subjects. In 100 years, the autonomy was dismantled, the local nobles that resisted were suppressed, serfdom was introduced in direct contravention to the terms of the treaty, and Ukraine became, for all intents and purposes, annexed by Russia. Not willingly, either, and not without resisting - does the name "Mazepa" ring a bell?
> So Russian is one of the modern versions of the older Rus language, but isn't? Not sure I follow your logic here, you're pretty much agreeing with me then claiming for some reason Russian doesn't count as being descendant from the older Rusian language.
Russian is not a "modern version" of the older Rus language. It is a language derived from Old East Slavic. So are Ukrainian and Belarusian, but the three have diverged sufficiently over time to be separate languages in their own right. Just as Czech and Polish are demonstrably different languages that diverged from a single common West Slavic language. And just as East and West Slavic, in turn, diverged from a common proto-Slavic.
> You're missing a key part of history here: Muscovy, the Cossacks and others all rebelled against various invaders, and formed a common state: the Russian Empire. Which included both Moscow and Kiev for centuries.
"The others" were mostly conquered, not rebelled. Tver, Novgorod, Pskov, and so on. Ukrainian alliance with Russia was a desperate measure - they needed military support to succeed in a struggle against Poland. 50 years later, they went to ally with Swedes to get military support in a struggle against Russia.
> Gotcha, so this is basically the modern revisionist, racist Ukrainian propaganda that Russians = Mongols, and Ukrainians are pure white Europeans, right?
No, of course not - that's just your own projection, because the propaganda that you're translating includes that bit for "but they're lynching negroes". Russians aren't Mongols, they're East Slavs, same as Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The Russian language does demonstrably have more Turkic borrowings than Ukrainian and Belarusian, though - and the latter two have more Polish borrowings (something, I must add, that people who talk like you do are always keen to point out when they try to make an argument that "Ukrainian is just Russian corrupted by Polish").
None of this has anything to do with race, or make one language "better" than the other. It does, however, make them different languages. And it does make people speaking them different nations.
By the way, while we're at it - there's a difference between "nation" and "ethnicity", too.
Oh, and statehood, too. In theory, there's nothing preventing the three Eastern Slavic nations from having a shared statehood - provided that it's for their mutual benefit. The problem with the Russian take on this problem is that the resulting shared statehood somehow always ends up being called "Russia", has its capital in Moscow, has Russian as a state language etc; while the other two end up as non-descript provinces, and their language, distinctive culture, and any other "separatist tendencies" suppressed by force. That, in a nutshell, is a difference between integration and occupation.
