Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="vantexan" data-source="post: 5188514" data-attributes="member: 24302"><p>The Ukrainian capital Kiev was the capital of the first Russian empire.  Russians still feel a very strong affinity for the area.  Most everyone in the country speaks Russian but Ukrainians are a separate ethnic group with their own language.  Ukrainian is much more likely to be spoken as a first language in western Ukraine than in eastern where there are a lot more ethnic Russians.  Khrushchev gave the Crimean Peninsula to the Ukraine Soviet republic.  Not certain of the reasoning for that but I suspect it was a way to make up for Stalin starving millions of Ukrainians to death.</p></blockquote><p></p>