Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
As expected, Ukraine is very much off the radar here in Quebec.
Seen by many as a kinda Russian, kinda not Russian place.
Some people might see it as one of a number of peoples struggling to maintain their identity in the face of a huge dominant neighbour.
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For people in the West during the Cold War era, the common thought was that "USSR = Russia", even though the USSR was a multinational federation of which Russia was just one of fifteen units. Sure, Russia was the largest, but it only made up about 50% of the population. Demographically, Russia's dominance in the USSR wasn't much greater than Ontario's dominance within Canada.
Many people in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will actually be quite offended if you think of their countries as being "Russian". Their break from the USSR was by far the most "clean", in the sense that they want absolutely nothing to do with any of their former federal partners. It's all about the European Union for them, no questions about it. The popular opinion in all three now is that the Soviets were an illegal occupier and that all the ethnic Russians who moved there in the Cold War era are akin to West Bank settlers. In keeping with this view, Latvia and Estonia actually deny citizenship to ethnic Russians (even those who were born there), on the grounds that they and their parents/grandparents never had a legal right to live there in the first place. In both countries this is something like 20% of the population, denied all democratic rights and rendered legally stateless.