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Comment by yabqk | Hacker News Reader

It’s hyperbolic, but yes, Ukraine is much more similar to Russia than to Western Europe.

Russia is much more European than Yemen. So is Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Albania, and Macedonia.

Moscow and, especially, St. Petersburg are pretty European historically and culturally. Western Russia accounts for 77% of Russia's population and is predominately influenced by the culture of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kyiv...

Europe isn't just Italy, Spain, & France...

Not every European country is Western European culturally...

You just moved the goalpost from "European" to "Western European", excluding Eastern Europeans because they're inconvenient to your point.

BTW, most Russians are European, living west of the Urals.

Sneak "western" in there and move the goalposts, why don't you.

Ukraine is culturally, geographically and geopolitically a European nation.

Russia and Ukraine are historically and culturally European. Russian expansion deep into Siberia is a relatively recent phenomenon. Sure, they're not Western European, but that's not what you said in your original comment.

Moscow and St. Petersburg - which make up a huge chunk of Russia economically, politically, and in terms of population - are very European historically and culturally.

But Russia is a gigantic country with a lot of population that isn't particularly European in any sense.

Ukraine on the other hand is basically 100% European any way you want to slice it beside Putin's revisionist history.

Technically, the last traces of what is known as Western Europe (i.e. catholic/protestant culture/architecture) end somewhere in the western Ukraine. Orthodoxy/Byzantium culture then starts in the eastern Ukraine.

The Russian world is a Muskovite imperialist invention my dear friend. You can't write Russian history without involving basically any other European country. Well, you could maybe leave Liechtenstein and Portugal out?

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