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Who are Ukrainians and what is their origin? The ethnogenesis of peoples is a continuous process, mixtures, migrations and self-consciousness are natural social phenomena. In the case of the Eastern Slavs, these processes led to the end of the century. XVIII to the formation of two new peoples, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians, separated from the medieval Russian ethos and ethnos. The decisive factor that led to the emergence of the new Ukrainian identity was the Polish rule over the old Russian territories, which broke the political, linguistic and spiritual unity of medieval Russia. The phenomenon begins somewhere around 1400 and ends at the beginning of the century. XIX Where Russian ends and Ukrainian begins remains a controversial topic, with many Ukrainians speaking Russian believing it to be Ukrainian, while the dialect of western Ukraine is imposed by state authority without regard to regional realities. At the same time there are families where the parents consider themselves Russian and the children Ukrainian and objectively speaking they are all right! Belonging to one people or another is ultimately a form of personal identity. The most eloquent case is that of the Cossacks who did not choose to identify themselves as an independent East-Slavic people, but some of them identify themselves as Russians, others Ukrainians, and then there are a lot of other regional identities (Huts , Ruthenians, Lemki, etc.) who are today to Ukrainians, as Ukrainians were to Russians 300 years ago. As I said, ethnogenesis is a continuous phenomenon and it would not be excluded that certain political fragmentations lead to the emergence of new ethnogenesis among the Eastern Slavs (or anywhere in other corners of the world) over 100 or 200 years.