Looks like Pooty-Putin wants to follow Stalin’s lead.
Millions of Ukrainians perished in the NKVD-caused famine of the early 1930’s. It was understandable that they would welcome the invading Nazis as liberators.
Ironic that N.S. Khrushchev, son of Ukrainian peasants, would become Soviet premier following the death of Stalin. For his role in the famine exterminations, Khrushchev was already well known as “the hangman of Ukraine”.
Stalin was not even Russian & spoke the language with a thick Georgian accent.
My take was that Khrushchev felt so guilty about what he had done, that he gave the Ukrainian SSR, the Crimea, to try to win them over. Of course back then, it was meant more as a symbolic gesture, little did he know the ramifications it would have many years later.