It’s all disinfo on both sides. I reject it all and rely on the history of the area and common sense. It is an incredibly dangerous stalemated quagmire and has been since the massive NATO escalation last spring. Anyone “in the know” telling you otherwise is simply blowing smoke.
The history of the area is that Ukrainians are a separate branch of East slavs - distinct from Muscowites.
They were under the dominion of Muscowy from the late 1700s onwards, but loosely. That changed from the 1870s to 1914 but then loosened when there was a de jure (but not de facto) independent Ukrainian soviet republic.
You keep talking about “Russian ethnicity” yet ignore the fact that there are plenty of people who speak Russian as their first language but consider themselves Ukrainian. And plenty of people whose parents came from what is now the Russian federation and yet consider themselves Ukrainian.
the Kremlin invading Ukraine twice was just wrong and is wrong