https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi–Yemeni_war_(1934)

Tricolour line is what the Kingdom of Yemen controlled before the war, dashed line is what they claimed but never controlled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Arabia

[South Arabia/“Greater Yemen”] historically included Najran, Jazan, and Asir, which are presently in Saudi Arabia, and Dhofar of present-day Oman.

Tbh I just grabbed it off Wikipedia and now looking at the source (landline poll by Ukrainian professor with Canadian money and text full of nationalist prose) I believe these numbers are exaggerated, but I also don’t think fully fantastical.

Russian Wikipedia, while still libbed, tends to use better sources, and they cite studies that looked at language use on the internet.

This one shows the ratio between mentions of speaking Ukrainian and Russian in profiles of Ukrainian users on Vkontakte (Russian Facebook), in 2015. Most of the country is bilingual, with exceptions being the Donbass, Crimea and far west.

This one shows predominance of either the Russian or Ukrainian word for “news” in Google Trends, in 2011, 2015, 2020 and 2024.

I think you are putting words in my mouth. The graph I showed is only of native speakers, I already know that there’s a lot of bilingualism and code-switching eg. speaking Ukrainian at home but Russian at work. I only brought up this graph because you claimed “only in the West is Ukrainian spoken natively”, which isn’t true: most Ukrainians in the south and some in the Donbass do, but public life has historically been conducted in Russian. Russian is also more prevalent in big cities anywhere: while Lviv Oblast on this map had only 3.8% native Russian speakers, the city of Lviv had closer to 10% at the time. In my other comment I showed a map of “creole Russo-Ukrainian” that shows lower percentages in the Donbass, implying a more purely Russian public life.

I’ve spent lots of time looking at ethnic and linguistic maps of the world in my spare time, curious to look beyond the political lines on a map. So I’m very aware of the ways linguistic maps can give the illusion of sharp language divisions.

People do speak Ukrainian natively elsewhere, it’s that Western Ukraine only speaks Ukrainian, whereas the rest of the country is bilingual to varying degrees

Share of native Russian speakers by oblast in 2001:

Surzhyk is a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, not usually considered a language of its own, spoken mostly in the countryside. It was looked down upon as impure and “Russified” Ukrainian, but in recent years it has become associated with “patriotic” south-eastern Ukrainians learning the language and so has been given grace as “better than Russian”.

As for statistics:

As of 2022, 81% of the population of Ukraine speak the Ukrainian language in their personal life, at the same time 34% speak Russian, meaning that a significant portion of Ukrainian residents constituting 19% of people speak both languages regularly.

Caveat that the map is from 2003

And the nearest big city, Vladivostok, has a big port, so a lot also crosses the border by boat to ports in Rason and Wonsan

Ignoring the obvious, “Rossotrudnichestvo” stands for “Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation”, as I understand it it’s basically Russian USAID

Why not “protest”, it covers more than the liberal kind

Surprised no-one has commented with yet

German eagle would be a better comparison, as the Chrysanthemum long predates 20th century Japanese militarism

The other two are “Midnight Black” and “Silver Gray”. I’m good at reading low-res text, let me try the small text box:

Design Inspiration

Inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Troopers uniform modernized for the guardians of the space domain

My mother is an Eastern Europeean immigrant herself and constantly stereotypes “Ukrainian refugees” as having expensive cars. I mean, there’s probably a higher share of them in the Netherlands because you need the money to travel that far, but ugh…

Can we call it something other than “bullying” please?

Germany if they had British island mentality

UN News has this nonsense:

Borderline revolt [ ]

Ukraine said it supported efforts to correct historical distortions affecting Africa and other parts of the Global South but objected to the way some maps using Equal Earth depict Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia.

Its representative warned that endorsing the projection without adequate safeguards could open a “Pandora’s box,” allowing maps to create ambiguity over disputed territories.

The European Union supported the resolution but addressed the same concern.

Speaking on behalf of the bloc, Ireland stressed that the measure applied only to the relative size of landmasses and had no bearing on sovereignty, territorial status or internationally recognized borders.

The bloc also said its support did not constitute an endorsement of the maps displayed on the Equal Earth website.

The “Pandora’ Box” in question:

There’s this “vertical map” sometimes used in China that I’m fascinated by, almost always in the left configuration but there exists a version that doesn’t cut off the Americas. It’s named the Hao projection after its inventor Hao Xiaoguang.

More commonly used in China is this, whose official name is checks notes “Latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection”, what a mouthful…

Rudy Zhulyany Airport

If the Berlin Wall was in Hamburg

Aren’t a lot of Jews anti-Zionist?

In terms of percentages it’s around 10-20 percent of them outside Israel, on the higher end in the US and on the lower end in Europe. Not that many in relative terms - especially when accounting for Jewish institutions being near-universally Zionist - but still hundreds of thousands.

I see Zionism as more of an oppunistic imperialist offshoot

Herzl and his successors have gone door-knocking by the British, the Ottomans briefly, the British again, the communists briefly, former Nazi Germans, the Americans and now the far right in general. Usually these alliances have rested on using a Jewish state to inhibit enemies in the regions for the allied partners. If circumstances change and Zionist ambitions become an obstacle rather than an asset, support wanes.