The roots of the problem start with genocidal Russification, which began in earnest with Peter the Great and continued under Catherine, Alexanders I, II (banning baptisms and all media in the Ukrainian language) and III, Nicholases I and II, Stalin, Brezhnev (banning university theses in Ukrainian) and Putin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Ukraine).
Your conflation of "Russian speakers" with Russian national identity is Putinist propaganda you naively accept without realizing it. In another article (or response) you wrote that Russia has 1000 years' experience of war. This nonsense accepts Putin's/Dugin's idiocy that the Viking Vladimir (Voldemar in Latvian and Norse) convert to Christianity in 988 intended to found Russia. When Kyiv was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 Moscow was a forest. When the Cossack Hetmanate accepted aid from the Russian Tsar against the Polish-Lithuanian lords, they thought they were signing a contingent contract in which they had rights, as they'd had in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Russian Tsars had other ideas, having no concept of contractual governance. You can learn this story in class 9 of Tim Snyder's Yale course (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IBll--m7qI).
My Russian-Latvian wife is a native speaker of Russian, but certainly not Russian. Nor is her extended family living outside Russia and Belarus. My paternal grandmother was a native speaker of Russian and Yiddish, but certainly knew she wasn't Russian like Orthodox Christian Russians.
Your response throws separate issues--language, national identity, rights of secession, contingent and contractual vs non-contingent national sovereignty--into the same bucket in a bolshoi kisch-misch--big mess. That kisch-misch is both Russian and Yiddish shows how complex these issues are, in which it's dangerous to alles gemischt (German for confuse everything). So here I'll deal with them singly:
Contingent vs non-contingent national sovereignty (or unity):
Contingent: Quebec and Canada, Scotland and the UK, which both had state-sanctioned referenda, which the secessionists lost. In 1707 Scotland joined England in a voluntary union--the UK.
Non-contingent: Spain-Catalonia and Vasconiia (but very debatable), Italy-Leghista "Padania" in 1996, France-Corsica, the USA vs the Confederacy in 1861-65, Ukraine since 2014. American secessionists said their union with the north was voluntary and contingent. Lincoln's government said no. Donbass secessionists think Ukraine is like Scotland and Quebec. Every Ukrainian leader since the Maidan Revolution of Dignity agreed with Lincoln and said no.
China puts Tibet, Taiwan and Uighur Sinjiang in the non-contingent category. The locals disagree.
Language and National Identity
Ukraine's civic nationalist view of national identity says language is a red herring--a non-issue. Zelenskiy's distinctly unfluent Ukrainian language skills tell you this view is right. On the Borderlands podcast I've met a Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman who lost her tank commander father in the war. Her family started speaking more Ukrainian together since speaking the language of the occupier that killed their father/husband was now so emotionally fraught. The father the daughters lost didn't speak very good Ukrainian, but gave his life for Ukraine, as thousands of other halting speakers of Ukrainian have.
How Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Latvians live on a continuum of Ruslat, Ruslish (Russian-English) and Rus-Ukr, just as Hispanic-Americans live in Spanglish and Quebecois live in Franglais, despite Quebec government policies, tells you how linking language to ethno-nationalism is Russifying nonsense propaganda.
Referenda, Rebellion and Language
If Mr. Baud's thesis is valid, then the CIA had nothing to do with the coups against democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973. You could argue with stupid statist language policies in Ukraine in 2014, Quebec since the 1980s, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia now. Ukrainian language policy, however stupid, didn't come close to being as repressive as Spain under Franco vs Catalan and Basque (I lived in Barcelona in 1976 and 1980-81, learned fluent Catalan and saw the linguistic opening and linguistic politics and policy up close).
None, no matter how stupidly statist and heavy-handed produced secessionist rebellions as in the Donbass. The difference? No power next door feeding it.
Again, Mr. Baud accepts without argument the Putinist/Duginist ethno-nationalist thesis that language determines national identity. The battle over autonomy in the Donbass was more about the unviable legacy fossil fuel and heavy industries of the region and how a western-EU facing Ukraine would consign them to oblivion. Language was a red herring smokescreen.
Baud's idea that there weren't any Russian troops in the Donbass is about as valid as the idea that the "little green men" who occupied Crimea weren't Russian troops. Putin later admitted they were Russian.
Baud's idea that most Ukrainian troops were foreign mercenaries is also false. He needs to talk to my British Riga Business School colleague, Col. Glen Grant, who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on institutional transformation and for the Kyiv Institute for the Future from 2014-21 to get his facts right. From 2018: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/glen-grant-ukraine-can-build-army-beat-putin.html
The idea that Russia's invasion was defensive is similar to the idea that Germany's Operation Barbarossa preempted a planned Stalinist invasion of German-occupied Poland. It's pure nonsense.
Baud's idea is that Putin's invasion was purely contingent and that his July 2021 "essay" denying Ukraine's existence and his telling Bush 2.0 that Ukraine is not a real country, didn't drive the invasion. Proximate causes don't eliminate the structural ones.
If you invest your money with same naivete with which you ingest ahistorical Putinist propaganda sources, you will lose it.
