There are dozens of ethnicities in the Russian federation - you should visit the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg - but only one of them is called "

There are dozens of ethnicities in the Russian federation - you should visit the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg - but only one of them is called "Russian", and it is essentially indistinguishable from what you might call "Ukrainian". In fact, present day Ukraine has a very complex history and is a mixture of ethnic (sub)-groups, and to the extent that you can even talk about a "Ukrainian ethnicity" it contains more internal diversity than the "Ukrainian vs Russian" difference. And obviously you can't use language as a determinant. If you've ever spent any time in Ukraine you would know that until recently most "ethnic Ukrainians" spoke mostly Russian, even in the West. This is largely the case even today - Zelensky's mother tongue is Russian and his Ukrainian is still pretty rough. And there are ethnic Russians in Ukraine that speak better Ukrainian than Russian. But setting that aside, and ignoring the fact that even if you accept Ukrainian and Russian as separate ethnicities, they are still incredibly close, like Norwegians and Swedes, it's still hard to understand how this could be an "ethnic cleansing", the bombs and artillery kill Russian and Ukrainian civilians indiscriminately. I mean if you bomb a city where ethnic Russians make up say 40% of the population, which is not uncommon in Donbass where most of the fighting is taking place, then that proportion won't change. If anything, the overall proportion of Russians in Ukraine will decrease since they are bombing the parts of Ukraine where most of the very large Russian minority lives. So obviously the war is not about ethnic cleansing. If they just wanted to kill Ukrainians there are millions of them in Russia. It's about political control. Present day Ukraine also contains many ethnic sub-groups and groups, in the East a large portion are obviously Russians, in the West there is of course a strong Polish influence. But even setting aside the complex demographic history, and being generous and