> Sounds like a reasonable thing to say even if you disagree. pretty sure many Turkic, Mongolic, etc. people lived in what is now Russia long before a Russian

> Sounds like a reasonable thing to say even if you disagree. pretty sure many Turkic, Mongolic, etc. people lived in what is now Russia long before a Russian state existed. That's treating the phrase an an ethnic thing, you might say "well clearly they mean Russian as a Nationality" but in that case Russia already belongs to Russians.