Briton, Dutchman, and New Zealander are arguing about Ukraine and the USSR. To me, this looks like the start of a good joke
No offense. You can argue about it. But you have no arguments, but only baseless takes and links to Wikipedia. To be honest, I don't understand what you mean by that. It looks like you not quite understand what is written there, what causal effects were about the events described there.
Before all these events, when Americans or even some Europeans were asked to show Ukraine on the map, they could not show anything, or they said that it was somewhere in Russia. It always amused me that when somewhere Ukraine or Belarus is mentioned, and if they wondered where it is, who it is, then they had one answer, these are Russians. And for sure, those who consider themselves smart people tried to argue with them and say that these are different countries. But that's not quite right. Yes, formally, after the collapse of the USSR, these are different countries, there are different flags and anthems, and they even said that there are different languages. There really wasn't that much difference between Russians and Ukrainians and Belarusians.
For me, when politics did not interfere much in business, Ukrainians and Russians have always been one people (if we are not talking about "Western Ukraine", but Polish in fact) With slight differences in language. What is usually called a dialect. And it began simply with a change in the sound of some phonemes. Purely linguistically, even now there are fewer differences between Russian and Ukrainian language than between Russian and Tatar language. And Tatarstan is a republic of Russia. Otherwise, we have the same culture, the same traditions. But during the formation of the USSR (and still after its collapse), politicians began to create separation between peoples, and then was followed by the people due soviet propaganda, Ukrainians began to look for new literature for themselves and call it the Ukrainian language, borrow even more words from Polish, but happened naturally due to the geographical reasons, and ofcource cuz of the seizure part of Polish during the Second World War, that is territories which are now called Western Ukraine. Formally, some part of Ukraine began to speak Polish, and the language in the western part of the country began to mix even more.
The fact that someone refers to the USSR and the borders of Ukraine.. is ridiculous, the borders during the times of the USSR were formed in the same arbitrariness as it was done with the states in the USA for example. And there was no "Ukraine" before the USSR. During the formation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic some not smart politician found a map and started to drive random lines. This is how the borders of the republics were formed during the Soviet times, where there are clear ethnic and linguistic differences, it was easier to draw borders. But this was not always the case, as, for example, in the case of Ukraine. No ethnic differences of peoples in the formation of borders were taken into account, because these differences are so ungrounded and incomprehensible that no one could appeal to them.
After the end of the Civil War, she became a co-founder of the USSR and became part of it as a union republic. In 1939-1940 part of the territory was annexed from Poland during the cooperation between Stalin and Hitler during the Second World War. And after that, added Transcarpathian Ukraine and Northern Bukovina. And then Khrushchev gave the Crimea to Ukraine. And that had no particular reason to do so. (Some consider this moment the beginning of the subsequent conflict) Because of this, it turned out that in all these territories there were only those who spoke pure Russian and knew nothing about Ukraine (as a subject of the territories). And this division of people happened. Residents of western Ukraine were more willing to be exposed to propaganda about Ukrainian identity and they perceived it more easily, residents of the newly made eastern Ukraine did not perceive it. And most of them spoke Russian and they still (at least until February 24) called themselves Russians.
But now Putin has done a lot to make this Ukrainian identity appear. Because even many residents of eastern Ukraine no longer want to speak Russian. If always Russians and Urkains were about one people, then in 2014 the first political reasons for the division into a real Ukrainian identity began. On February 24, 2022, these reasons became even more. very ironic, but Putin did much more for the emergence of Ukrainian identity even than the politics of the USSR.
This is what Ukraine is today in my own words without any links to wikipedia and youtube.