History tells me that there is a huge difference between Western and Eastern Ukraine. Indeed, the Western Ukrainians are part of the Austro-Polish-Lithuanian tradition, Catholic and European leaning.
Indeed, Bandera's hometown of Lviv was actually called Lemberg at the time of his birth. It was the capital city of Austrian Galicia.
The very first concentration camp built in Europe was built by the Austrians in WWI at Mauthausen. That was where they imprisoned all the Russophiles in the territory we know as Ukraine. The Austrians had the Western Galicians round up all the Russian speaking Orthodox people in the territory and put them in the camp , where they languished unless the agreed to convert to being "Ukrainian".
So you see, there was always this massive split in the Ukrainian territory. Ukraine means "borderland" and that was why - it was always a border (or buffer) region between the Catholic Germanic/Aryan Europeans and the Orthodox Slavic Russians.
I believe Putin - just like any Russian leader - wanted Ukraine to remain just such a border region, a buffer between the Russian sphere of interest and that of the Western powers.
As far as having a right to exist, I believe this has been misinterpreted. I believe Putin intends that Ukraine does not have the right to STOP being the mixed, diverse ethnic, cultural and religious state that it has always been. In other words, the culturally mixed Ukraine does not have the right to become a unified "mono-cultural" nation of Western Ukrainian Catholic nationalists.
Say what you will about Yanukovych, he at least realised the duality of the nation he headed, and was willing to allow both the Orthodox Russians in the East and the Catholic Galicians in the West to exist according to their own values, language, culture and religion.
In fomenting the 2014 Maidan Coup, however, the US intervened like some arrogant deus ex machina and arbitrarily plucked the radical Western ultranationalists from their Galician enclaves and set them up in power in Kiev.
The balance of power was thus upset, the Western influence was artificially given preeminence, and that was when laws were passed that sought to ban all things Russian from Ukrainian life. As we have seen recently, even the Eastern Orthodox religion is being outlawed and eradicated.
The Western powers, led by the United States and buttressed by their domestic allies "on the ground" in the form of far-right Nazi Banderite ultranationalists from the Western provinces, have pursued a "nation-building" exercise of the disastrously racist, colonialist type that the US is so fond of.
Only instead of bringing Western/American culture and values to the benighted and dangerously adversarial Muslims, they are bringing Western/American culture and values to the benighted and dangerously adversarial Russians.
