I have just created the label "national education" to group posts on this subject, before writing my first post on the topic in 8 years:
Ukraine has a population of 43.8 million. 17.3% of the population identifies as ethnic Russian, and they are more represented in the East and are even the majority in the Crimea.
Not coincidentally, the Crimea is the first part of Ukraine that Putin invaded, in 2014, and Russia is currently holding many of the Eastern parts of Ukraine and has formally annexed four of them.
Indeed, Putin explicitly said that he invaded in 2022 to protect ethnic Russians and/or Russian citizens from genocide.
So the lesson we can learn here is that it's dangerous to have a large ethnic minority population if you're next door to a bigger country since they may use that as a pretext to invade.
