The Kremlin thought Russian troops would be greeted as liberators in Ukraine's predominantly Russian speaking south and east. Instead, Ukrainians of all linguistic backgrounds have rallied against the Kremlin's invasion.
This should not have come as a surprise, least of all to the men in Moscow. Russian speaking Ukrainians have been organizing to defend the Ukrainian state from Russian aggression since at least April 2014, when Moscow-backed forces first began seizing administrative buildings in the Ukrainian Donbas region.
"In the first week after those events started, ordinary steelworkers in Mariupol were organizing on the grassroots level to form local patrols," Dr. Olga Onuch, an associate professor at the University of Manchester, told Newsweek. "These were Russian speaking Ukrainians getting together to defend their neighborhoods and their families from Russia itself."
"Ukrainians have an attachment to place, and that attachment extends to their state," Onuch added. "In the past eight years, that attachment has only grown. And yet Russian intelligence continues to make the repeated miscalculation that Russian language equals Russian identity."
The sociological reality that Onuch describes is not unique to Mariupol.
"Eighty percent of the guys in our unit speak Russian amongst themselves," Aleksandr Bespalyi, a soldier in the territorial defense forces of Odesa region, told Newsweek in an interview conducted in Russian. "But 100% of us are united against Russia and against Putin. Language has nothing to do with it."
"Our commanders speak Russian, Ukrainian, Surzhik," Bespalyi says, referring to the Russian-Ukrainian creole common in rural Ukraine. "Everyone speaks the language that's most comfortable for them, just like they always have."
Bespalyi's description of a multilingual military unit might come as a surprise to outsiders. However, it is representative of just how fluid Ukraine's linguistic reality truly is.
"The bilingualism was so seamless," said Canadian journalist Neil Hauer, who traveled to Ukraine from his base in Armenia in the run-up to the war. "There would be conversations where one person was speaking Ukrainian, and the other person would be speaking Russian, and they just went back and forth without any problem."
"There was nothing political about it," Hauer says. "I spent the month before the war in Kyiv, and I can count on one hand the number of conversations I heard on the street that were in Ukrainian. The same was true in Kharkiv, in Mariupol, in Mykolaiv. Then we all saw how each of those cities fought back when Russian troops invaded."
"In Ukraine, human rights are systematically violated on a massive scale, and discrimination against the Russian-speaking population is enshrined at the highest legislative level," Russian president Vladimir Putin said on February 15, just over a week before the start of Russia's unprovoked invasion. "According to our judgements, what is happening in the Donbas is genocide."