And what no school kids around here do:
The Soviets conducted a holocaust within Ukraine in the 1930’s, thanks to Stalin 1) being pissed at them for resisting “inclusion” into the USSR, and 2) his collectivization of farms and decimation of the peasant class.
It’s called the Holodomor, the Great Famine or the Terror Famine, depending on the storyteller. In brief, Stalin “annexed” Ukraine, a country with some of the best farmlands and raw materials deposits in all of Europe. Stalin coveted, then took the country, stripped the peasant landowners of their farms, shipped a bunch to the gulag, and presided over a famine which killed millions of Ukrainians. In Ukraine it is believed that more died there that in the holocaust, not that anyone wants to make it a contest.
The Holodomor was not allowed to be taught in Soviet schools, of course, but the people of Ukraine know it well - and apparently Putin does not, else he would not have thought his troops would be greeted with flowers and flags. (Sounds vaguely reminiscent of the miscalculation of our own government 20 years ago.)
Ukraine has 1/3 of the population of Russia; it is quite large, and it will be ungovernable forever by Russia because the ethnic animosity runs deep, throughout every generation in the country. Ukrainian citizens saw what happened the last time, I suspect they are not eager for a repeat.
Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).
https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor
PS: This will not end well for Russia, even if they win. And as Thomas Friedman pointed out in yesterday’s column, Russian leadership shuffles and changes with every unsuccessful military or quasi-military embarrassment. That leads to destabilization which, while not good, might be an improvement. Or not.