PC: Majority of Russian speaking parts of Ukraine secede

Would it be possible for the Majority of the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine to Break off in 2014

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Bison

Banned
As someone that lived in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, most of the maps regarding the prevalence of the Russian language in the post-Soviet are including the one you cited vastly underestimate the amount of Russian spoken. In the Ukraine, while most people are bilingual, Russian still is predominant in cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, or Dnepropetrovsk (renamed Dnepro). While this is changing since the Maidan, it would still be untrue to postulate that anything east of Chernivtsy or Rovno is 'mostly Ukrainian speaking', no matter what polls will tell you.
 

Md139115

Banned
At the risk of starting the mother of all flame wars by accident (I’m American, I genuinely don’t know the answer to this and what might happen if I ask), how much difference is there between the Ukrainian language and Russian? They seem to be very closely related from what little I know.
 

Bison

Banned
At the risk of starting the mother of all flame wars by accident (I’m American, I genuinely don’t know the answer to this and what might happen if I ask), how much difference is there between the Ukrainian language and Russian? They seem to be very closely related from what little I know.

They're definetely not dialects, unlike Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, where it's mostly the same apart from some regional pronounciation/vocabulary differences; they're also further apart than Belarussian/Russian or Serbocroatian/Slovenian. Ukranian is more similair to West Slavic; it changes a Russian and South Slavic 'g' to 'h' in certain instances (also Belarussian), Russian 'o' to 'i', etc.) (ex: Lvov (R) -> Lviv (U), Chernigov (R) -> Chernihiv (U)) Much of Ukraine's grammatical conventions are closer to Polish, though most words and orthography are, with a couple exceptions and some of it's own innovations, corresponding in Russian. Ukranians generally speak and understand Russian to 100%, rather than the other way around. Russian - Ukranian intelligibility I'd estimate to be around 80 or so percent.
 
At the risk of starting the mother of all flame wars by accident (I’m American, I genuinely don’t know the answer to this and what might happen if I ask), how much difference is there between the Ukrainian language and Russian? They seem to be very closely related from what little I know.

@Bison answered the linguistics fairly well, but I'll add this. I just got back from Ukraine to the states and in Lviv most everyone's first language is Ukrainian and they speak Ukrainian in most situations, that being said, everyone understands and many people, including many young people, speak Russian fluently or near fluently. This includes very patriotic people with heavy Ukrainian roots. However, in Lviv you'll only hear Russian being spoken on TV or by people from Kyiv or some other parts of Ukraine. I spent a weekend in Kyiv (most of my stay was spent studying in Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk oblast) I do not speak any Russian, so I just spoke Ukrainian to everyone in Kyiv. I was lucky to hear Surzhnyk (a mix of Russian vocab and Ukrainian grammar) and only saw Ukrainian in menus and signs. Mostly everyone just spoke straight up Russian (without a Russian 'moscow' accent to be fair). Nobody I spoke to spoke anything other than English or Russian, or at least, that is what they spoke with me. Most people in Ukraine speak Russian as their first or primary language. However, this is changing and from what I have heard from my Ukrainian friends who are from further east to Dnipro and Kharkiv, or have studied there, Ukrainian is becoming more common, especially in public, which is true to an extent even in Kyiv. For example in Kyiv it isn't uncommon to be handed a Ukrainian menu by a waiter/waitress who doesn't speak any Ukrainian at all, in fact that was my expierance in most cases.

This is not surprising, considering that in Ukraine, language and politics are not connected as much as people believe they are. Rather, there are fundamental philosophical differences between regional mentalities and attitudes among most people. That being said, most Ukrainians in the East wished to remain part of Ukraine and be Ukrainian. In Kyiv, where nobody speaks Ukrainian, patriotism is in fashion. In cities like Dnipro, Odesa, and Kharkiv there were solid efforts to try and create terrorist states like in Donetsk and Luhansk instigated by FSB and terrorists that were put down, for the most part, without serious government intervention. Rather locals, and some more reform minded oligarchs, went out of there way to prevent such attacks. Russia itself was unable to project power into those regions and cities without committing to a full scale conventional conflict and so, have refrained from doing so for obvious political, economic, and military reasons.

Edit: To answer OP's question, is it theoretically plausible? In military terms, yes. However, the issue is that those people did not, nor do they want to secede. The efforts in those areas, which frankly, include damn near all of Ukraine, excluding the existing terrorist occupied areas, never had a strong anti-Ukrainian bent and still do not. Just because they speak Russian does not mean they 1. identify themselves with Russia and therefore against Ukraine 2. support or agree with the Putin regime, which is not as popular as polling in Russia would suggest. There is still a daily Kyiv-Moscow train. In Ukraine and especially Kyiv you hear people criticizing Putin in Russian, occasionally, even with Russian accents. In 2014 to have those ares "secede" would require a full on conventional Russian land invasion.
 
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2014 is a big mess, but you can easily do it during the breakup of the USSR. Just have Russia insist on a plebiscite and you have it. Doesn't matter if the areas were part of the Ukrainian SSR, at least I don't think so.
 
They're definetely not dialects, unlike Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, where it's mostly the same apart from some regional pronounciation/vocabulary differences; they're also further apart than Belarussian/Russian or Serbocroatian/Slovenian. Ukranian is more similair to West Slavic; it changes a Russian and South Slavic 'g' to 'h' in certain instances (also Belarussian), Russian 'o' to 'i', etc.) (ex: Lvov (R) -> Lviv (U), Chernigov (R) -> Chernihiv (U)) Much of Ukraine's grammatical conventions are closer to Polish, though most words and orthography are, with a couple exceptions and some of it's own innovations, corresponding in Russian. Ukranians generally speak and understand Russian to 100%, rather than the other way around. Russian - Ukranian intelligibility I'd estimate to be around 80 or so percent.

But at least during the Soviet times quite a few Ukrainians had been using a mixture of the "classic" Ukrainian and Russian.
 
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