I'm just going to interject that today's the 3rd March which, although a controversial date in Bulgaria, marks if not the actual achieved, then the beginning of, liberation of Bulgaria. This could only be possible at that time thanks to the Russian empire's efforts.
It is now often propagated by pro-Western shills that the Russian army was almost entirely composed of Ukrainians. A fact they back up by saying that the Russian army was composed (mostly) from conscripts from oblasts of today's territory of Ukraine, who were majority Ukrainian. It is now common to mention the Finnish volunteers, a thousand men who participated in their state's war, since the territory of Finland was a part of Russia back then. Therefore, we must not give exceptional acknowledgement or praise to the Russians, because they weren't the only ones fighting for the cause of Bulgaria. Because, clearly, the ones who fought the most must not have been Russians. Then I want to ask this question:
When Dostoevsky wrote of the ire the soldiers of the empire felt when they saw that Bulgarians, under yoke of a muslim imperium, lived comparatively better than they did, of recently, as free men, those soldiers who hated the Bulgarians for being relatively richer than them, who had gardens of their own, who had large houses that were not just simple zemlyanki, who were well fed, who, in their eyes, toiled for their own soil, I'm asking you, were they Russians or Ukrainians?
I'm not going to disprove the claim that Ukrainians made up the majority or whatever, I think it's rather pointless. Because there was no Ukrainian nation-state that took up arms for someone else. Instead the Ukrainians took part in an Orthodox-Islamic war in which ultimately they fought under Russian commanders, under the flag of the Russian Empire, their state.
Whatever a Bulgarian thinks about 3rd March, and I think many are right to have disdain for this date, because the large state that encompassed almost the totality of the Bulgarian race was destroyed not long after the signing of the San Stefano treaty, the truth is that the initial steps for the foundation of a new Bulgarian state were actualised thanks to the Russian empire and Romania, and partly Serbia, because they took advantage of the Russo-Ottoman conflict in 1877-1878. Ukraine, Finland, whatever, were non-entities.
Russia may not have been our friend soon after, but it was our friend during the actual war.
The same pro-Western shills love the Anglo-Sphere, which during the war was more concerned with the casualties of the muslims, civilian or military, than to care about Bulgaria, a former Christian state that was at the heart of Slavic Orthodoxy.
I hate my people.
