There's something that intrigued me for sometime now. If we look older maps (like the ones attached), it's shown that what being called Eastern Ukraine from the time of Russian Civil war is owned either by Communist Sovyet or Monarchist White. If not mistaken it's also owned by Russia during the time of Empire.
That territory become Ukraine mostly on USSR administrative division (
@Feanor sorry if I make mistake on this, just based on what I found in open source). Thus for me raise question, when the "Empire" that govern all those Republics broken up and cease to exist, which territory that should be back to each Republics ? The territory that as it is, or the territory that belong to each 'States/Republics' before the USSR administrative division ?
This's will be different compared to Poland that gain practically most of Prussia due to division after War. Eventough some in German still thinking that those area should be return to United Germany, however most of Germans already accepted that due to consequences of Germany Wars.
While the results of territory of each ex USSR Republics (to differentiate with Warsaw Pact USSR satellites), many create due to administrative divisions. If Scotland leave UK, the territories of what's Scotland or England mostly based on what is traditionally belong to Scottish and English old Kingdoms. This's also similar if Catalonia leave Spain. However it's not that clear cut if we talk on ex USSR Republics territories.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro Russia or pro Ukraine in this matter. I'm just talk with their situation, perhaps the Russian in Donbass has legal base to argue that they are not Ukrainian and their territory is not Ukrainian. Can territory that divide based on administrative consideration of one ruling empire that govern them all, be challenged by people on that territory that want to revert back ?
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Ok there are two problems with this.
Problem the first.
History simply doesn't support this. The White movement itself was far from homogenous and was perfectly happy to ally with local nationalist movements and governments if it got them support against the Soviets. Second the RSFSR was hardly a neatly drawn nation-state along ethnic lines of distinction. Kiev for example, during the Civil War, changed hands from Soviet, to Ukrainian Rada, to German occupation, to Petlyura's dictatorship, and then to Soviet again. So depending on which point in the war you want to take the map, you can get almost any outcome. It's deeply wrong to think that the White Movement + Soviet Russia = Russian Nation State, especially since the White movement was badly fractured, did not agree on many things internally, and never really had any sort of "agreement" on territorial division with the RSFSR. They had agreements with many other parties in that war, but given that they weren't unified enough to even be theoretically consistent on those agreements, trying to take their sum as some sort of political arrangement is silly.
And in the Russian Empire there was no "Ukraine" as a single entity. There were multiple governorates (guberniyas) whose territory somewhat overlapped with most of modern Ukraine but not quite. Ukraine, the one that we know today, was established by Lenin's decree. In fact in the Russian Empire it was even questionable what it meant to be Russian vs Ukrainian. The two were often not treated as mutually exclusive. Imperial ethnographers routinely marked White Russians (Belorossy), Little Russians (Malorossy) and Great Russian (Velikorossy) all as Russian. And in literature, including Ukrainian literature from clearly Ukrainian authors like Gogol', you will find characters that are Ukrainian referring to themselves as Russian not as a denial of their Ukrainian identity but as an umbrella under which they fall.
Which takes us to the deepest level of the history problem. For Ukraine as a nation-state, there is no "before" the Empire. There were feudal entities on the territory of modern day Ukraine but none of them correlate neatly with modern day Ukraine, and the territory of "Novorossiya" in particular is called "New Russia" because it was conquered from the Crimean Khaganate (or Cirim-Yurt) by the Russian Empire. In other words areas like modern day Sevastopol' or Mariupol' weren't really Russia or Ukrainian pre-Empire. And much of the local population was displaced or driven out by masses of Russian
and Ukrainian settlers brought in by Imperial nobility. There's Kievan Rus but geographically and ethnically it includes the predecessors to both modern day Russia and Ukraine, and the word Rus itself probably comes from the Ruotzi of Scandinavia, and refers to the Swedish/Danish military "corporations" (for lack of a better term) that either rules various duchy's of Kievan Rus or served at the behest of its cities. There's the Grand Duchy of Kiev, of course, but it was quite small and is hardly a fitting territory for modern day Ukraine as a nation-state. To top it off it's a fool's errand to attempt to claim feudal states as analogous to nation-states. They simply weren't. This is what makes it so hard to untangle Russia from Ukraine, the two formed as nations intertwined historically. Russia didn't conquer a separate nation of Ukraine while building its empire.
Problem the second.
The position you have taken here is not anyone's position in this conflict. It's certainly not Ukraine's position, but more importantly it's not Russia's position either. Russia isn't claiming half or a third of eastern or southern Ukraine as Russian territory because of historic precedent from pre-Soviet or pre-Imperial times. Russia is claiming that Crimea, of its own volition, decided to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. Russia is citing the right of peoples and nations to self-determination from the UN Charter as the legal basis, and pointing to Kosovo, and others, as precedent. Russia, in its own version of events, simply did the neighbourly good turn of protecting the locals from rowdy right-wing elements and heavy-handed interference from an un-elected Kiev government, while they conducted their complete fair and
totally not rigged referendum, to decide what the people of Crimea wanted to do. Leaving aside the hilarious naivete of this narrative, in principle Russian annexation of Crimea is rooted in the right to self-determination of the locals, who happen to have a super-majority of ethnic Russians, and who have attempted to secede from Ukraine before, in the 90's. It didn't work out at the time, but 20+ years of Kiev rule didn't make people much happier about the lot they were dealt at the fall of the Union.
TL;DR - Ok, sorry this turned into such a gigantic off-topic mess. Feel free to skip it. The long and short of it is modern day Ukraine comes from the Ukrainian SSR, not any pre-Imperial Ukraine which mostly didn't exist as any sort of nation-state. And Russia doesn't take your view of the situation either, which makes the entire thing moot.
