- Joined
- Jul 13, 2007
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The eastern regions were occupied by foreign nationals and started using a foreign currency and paying taxes to a foreign nation.
That would be like if Texas during the Civil War started using the British pound and started to pay taxes to the British Empire.
This happened way before the Russian government ever "officially" annexed them.
Don't get me wrong I think we have very little interest in dumping resources into a fruitless forever war in eastern Europe.
Ya sorry this is not correct.. I took this position into consideration for a while, and have abandoned it.
The Civil War started right after the Maidan Coup in 2014. If you look at the election in 2014, you can see that the eastern regions strongly supported the more Russia friendly option, voting against the western puppet. The eastern regions were ok with being part of Ukraine as long as the President was somewhat friendly to Russia. That was the tipping point. To the extent that Russian nationals began settling the region before or after 2014 is not really relevant.
The western regions have been majority ethnic Russian ever since Khrushchev gave that territory to Ukraine in the early 50s.
And before the ethnic Russians were the majority, there were many Tatars and Jews. I doubt the Tatars will try to lay claim to any parts of Ukraine at this point...