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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

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"some language differences", my god.

To him this is likely "a mild disagreement" as ukrainian civilians are being actively targeted by Russian missiles. Quite a tone deaf and horrible point of view.

That too but I was referring to language differences. Untrained/unexposed russian won't understand UA language. They wouldn't even be able to pronounce it correctly if their life depended on it.

> Untrained/unexposed russian won't understand UA language.

As a Russian who is hosting Ukrainian refugees I can definitely say this is false. I can understand probably around 90% of raw speech in Ukrainian without any support and 0 prior experience.

Ukraine was part of Russian Empire for about 350 years, since 1659 if I am not mistaken. Certainly, there is a lot of shared history and culture.

The history of both nations is hugely different. I would recommend this lecture series by Timothy Snyder to enlighten you: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz...

Yes, there are lots of family and friendship ties between the countries. It's sad that Putin has destroyed any chance of good relationships in the future, and basically solidified Ukraine as a nation in opposition to his aggression.

I lived in Ukraine and when you cross the border between Russia and Ukraine you will notice absolutely no difference. Everything is the same. People, infra, houses, food. Only the language is different.

Yeah, after 300 years of being occupied by Russia, finishing off by being ravaged by the Soviets, you get that.

Second the recommendation, learned a lot watching this.

If you don't have time to watch all 23 episodes, the last one is a bit of a summary, discussing the history of European imperialism and colonialism, particularly Nazi German imperialism (conquering Ukraine was a central strategic goal of WW2), and pointing out some European hypocrisy in their reckoning of this history, and how Russia is exploiting that to pursue its own imperialist and colonialist goals.

Ukrainian is a completely different language than Russian... In fact it shares more similarity with Polish and Bulgarian than it does with Russian.

Here’s a good video to help clarify things for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQLM62r5nLI

Except Ukrainians are prepared to fight Russia to preserve their freedom and independence, that's the main difference. The majority of Russians just put up with a totalitarian regime after another because that's what they were always used to do. Also there are language differences, but almost everybody over 40 in Ukraine can speak Russian, mainly because Moscow tried very hard and pretty much succeeded erasing their history and culture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasions_and_occupa...

Even Russia is very diverse ethnicaly and culturaly, as expected of such a huge country. The differences between the Far East, Sankt Petersbug, Daghestan and Buryatia are quite significant.

And what’s your point? You could say the same about the US and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand, or any number of Spanish speaking countries in the Americas, or any number of countries in Europe, Africa, Asia... should we support one invading the other?

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