Russian-speaking Ukrainians Support Kyiv

We’ve made this claim numerous times though it wasn’t based on scientific evidence but rather on listening to webstreams of the Euromaidan revolution and the Russian-declared war against Ukraine.

In the first example, numerous active participants and leaders of the Euromaidan protests and later revolution spoke Russian. They were interviewed by a variety of news outlets and their observations in favor of Ukraine and against Yanukovych, Putin and Russia were emotionally expressed in Russian occasionally with local expletives because they were Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriots.

During this recent historic moment in Ukrainian history, more than 100 men and women were killed by Yanukovych’s henchmen and it safe to say that a majority of those slain were Russian speaking Ukrainians. One video showed a distraught mother cursing in Russian against Yanukovych and his junta for killing her son.

Then, after Russia invaded Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were heard in webstreams explaining why they are supporting Ukraine and why they must defend their Ukrainian motherland. We recall Col. Yuriy Mamchur, considered the hero of Crimea, lead his troops in the Russian language while his soldiers sang the Ukrainian national anthem in broken Ukrainian as they charged the Russian lines. And then there were the Ukrainian cadets who spoke Russian but sang the Ukrainian national anthem in Ukrainian as they were forcibly evicted from their academy.

This were anecdotal observations but they were enough to challenge Putin’s claim that his invasion of Ukraine was intended to defend Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. Of course, he lied again. His only intention was and is to invade, conquer and re-subjugate Ukraine.

However, these sketchy facts that served as the basis for strong convictions have been substantiated by a Harvard University study that shows that Russian-speaking Ukrainians support Kyiv. Furthermore, the study suggests that Russian-speaking Ukrainians may be significantly more supportive of Kyiv’s standoff against Moscow and the pro-Russian separatists.

The study, written by researcher Bruce Etling at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is one of the first serious explorations of Russian, Ukrainian and English language social media content regarding the turmoil in Ukraine in the course of the past 11 months.

“Our general reading of newspapers and traditional media about the protests was that Russian speakers tended to disapprove [of the protests] and Ukrainian and English speakers tended to approve, and that would then just bleed into social media,” Etling said. “We wanted to see if that was what really happened.”

Actually, the opposite was true. Etling remarked that what was surprising, “very surprising,” was the portion of Russian-language content coming specifically from within Ukraine that was backing the Euromaidan protests.

“In Ukraine, among Russian-speakers, 74% were supportive of the protests, and only a quarter were opposed,” he said.

Additionally, the study revealed even among Russian-language content within Russia, support was nearly equal with opposition, at least at the beginning.

“That was really unexpected. It was so surprising that it was so overwhelmingly positive,” said Etling.

The study, called “Russia, Ukraine, and the West: Social Media Sentiment in the Euromaidan Protests” and published on September 25, noted, “This exploratory research shows that there was more support online in Russia for the Ukraine protests than one might expect.”

Etling concluded in the study: “It is also interesting that Russian-language sources in Ukraine are so supportive of the protests. This may be explained by the fact that many Ukrainians use both Russian and Ukrainian, and that language may not divide the country as clearly as many press accounts (and Putin – TC) may have us believe. However, it is also possible that these early results point towards more support among Russian-speaking Ukrainians for the protests than the Russian government and mainstream media claimed.”

A Reuters story observed, pointing out Putin’s media control, that “While support for Kyiv generally remained stable among those in Ukraine, for Russians within Russia opposition to the protests grew over time, reflecting what some have seen as a hardening of positions on both sides of the border. That may be a result of nationalist feelings, but Etling said that may also be due to increasing media control and self-censorship there.

“I definitely think self-censorship in Russia is becoming increasingly problematic,” Etling said. “It’s becoming so difficult to express for someone who’s opposed to the Russian government’s view in Russia to talk about Ukraine war in a negative way.”

These heartening findings about the undeniable unity of the Ukrainian nation in Ukraine regardless of language preference also prove again that despite what Putin claims, sooner or later his lies are debunked.