Here are the Maps I was Talking About

Dear readers, never mind the title. This is a post for a friend in Kiev that I Skype with, and this was a subject of our last talk. I hope the rest of you will enjoy it as well, although this will be familiar to some readers from Russia-Ukraine debates on Anatoly Karlin’s blog.

I was telling him about maps based on the 2001 census (Ukraine did not conduct a census for 18 years now), which eerily seem to copy Russia’s 2014 territorial acquisitions, official (Crimea), and unofficial (Donbass Republics). The map shows Russia only took the areas where the “Russian cultural element” was predominant, places where people identified themselves as ethnic Russians, and their native language as Russian. I provide translation underneath the pictures. You can also see that in the Donbass, the Russian element appears weaker than in Crimea. Maybe it is this what Zatulin means when he says that the people of Donbass are not Russian enough? But it would have been better if he kept his autistic opinions to himself.

Anyway, Here is what I meant when I said Russia’s territorial interests in Ukraine appear “ethnically motivated.”

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