Here is a German general from 1919 laughing about creating Ukraine through propaganda and plainly stating Ukraine is fake, gay and definitely retarded.
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Yeah, bearing that out, the first attempt at creating an independent Ukraine in 1917-21 bombed catastrophically the instant they lost German support. I don't think the Ukrainians won a single major battle in their original failed war of independence - got regularly dunked on by both Red & White Russians, the Blacks (anarchist useful idiots for the Reds), and Poland. Kiev itself was actually overrun by both the
Reds and
Whites at different times. AFAIK the Ukrainian People's Army was hopelessly lacking in motivated fighters compared to its adversaries and its best-equipped & most motivated formations, the ex-Austro-Hungarian Galician Sich Riflemen units, were stuck fighting (and eventually still lost to) the Poles in the far west.
Also the Entente never recognized the Ukrainian People's Republic; Britain, France, the US, etc. considered Ukraine to be a Central Power puppet, and
a French expedition actually fought the Ukrainians with the (White) Russians to take Odessa for the latter's benefit. Besides the Southern Whites dunking on Ukraine as much as the rest of its neighbors, while the Entente twisted Kolchak's arm into recognizing Polish & Finnish independence, they also pointedly left Ukraine out of such protection, so that even if the Reds had lost the Russian Civil War there still wouldn't have been an independent Ukraine anyway. Since the Whites' fighting slogan was 'One & Indivisible Russia' and they considered Ukraine to be the 'Little Russia' in 'All the Russias', they never would've parted with it for nationalistic/sentimental reasons on top of the obvious economic benefits; Ukraine was home to quite a few of the high ranking White leaders in a literal sense too, besides Kolchak's family originally being from the Budjak area, for example
Mikhail Drozdovsky (one of their sharpest frontline commanders, following his death an elite 'color' division of the Southern White forces was named after him - the others IIRC being the Alexeyev, Kornilov and Markov divisions) was from Kiev.
Fun final fact: the guy Germany found to become their top collaborator in Ukraine,
Pavlo Skoropadsky, was a conservative Russophile
who only sided with the Germans after the October Revolution because the alternative would be Ukraine being overrun by the Reds early, and after the Germans pulled out tried to bend the knee to the Whites in exchange for maybe some sort of autonomy after the war. Unfortunately for him, the Ukrainian nationalists of Symon Petlyura et al. didn't like that plan,
threw him out in a coup while he was at his weakest (and killed the White Russian attache sent to his court, Feodor Arturovich Keller, for good measure) and decided to bet on 'total independence or nothing'. Well, anyone who's ever seen a map of Europe in the 1920s knows which outcome they got out of that bet...