Putin's ethnonationalism is the essence of fascism. He doesn't get to decide the identity of my native Russian speaking Latvian wife, who is definitely not a Russian. She doesn't feel Russian and is utterly uninterested in having Putin protect her or having a toxic Russkiy Mir "inheritance" handed to her by a foreign kleptocrat. Same for her entire extended family, which is part Russian, Latvian, Polish (her mother), Belarussian. At the end of WWII my Polish mother in law was in Grodno. She didn't change, but the border did and she became Soviet and married a guy from Novgorod.
Russia's "right to protect" as a pretext for expanding Russia's borders is an indefensible Hitlerian-Sudeten geopolitical scam. If you accept that, Germany can reannex Alsace and Lorraine, Hungary can invade Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, where I taught a one week entrepreneurship course in 2018, the Arabs can invade Andalucia again, the Chinese all of SE Asia, the Japanese Hawaii, the French Quebec and Wallonie, Belgium. You have a choice between the UN Charter's rules on sovereign state borders, which the decolonized states of Africa have seen the wisdom of accepting, or we go back to spheres of influence and ethnonationalist chaos.
Other language groups have de-ethnified:
Native speaker of French doesn't = being French.
Native speaker of German doesn't = being German.
Native speaker of Spanish doesn't = being a Spaniard.
Native speaker of Chinese doesn't = being Chinese.
The Donbass was Russified by the genocidal Holodomor. If you doubt it was a genocide, ask Raphael Lemkin. It is no more "eternally Russian" than Tatar Crimea and Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
Here's the antidote to Putin's top-down ethnonationalist idiocy:
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/lost-in-russified-whataboutistan-3b6d27874592
If you have any doubts that Russia has already lost the war, watch this dispassionate vivisection of Russia's Clausewitzian collapse from the Australian defense economist Perun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94bqk8cB9iQ&t=5s
Whatever happens militarily, Russia will never reach the political goals it stated at the outset of the war.
A sovereign Ukraine is eternal, while Russia's centuries old imperial identity based on the genocidal conquest of subjugated peoples is brittle and contingent. Russia is destined for the dead empire cemetery. Its future neighbors are Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians.
