Comments by "Voryn Rosethorn" (@vorynrosethorn903) on "Ukraine's First War against Russia | Cossacks, Khmelnytsky Uprising, Zaporozhia #ProjectUkraine" video.

A couple of things, Ukrainians and Cossacks aren't as simple as being one, for example the Soviet union forced Cossacks to learn Ukrainian as a way to suppress local dialects and Cossack culture. The civil wars often had little concept of nationalism before the birth of the concept. The Russian civil war wasn't nearly as straight forward as outlined, white officers were surprised by the loyalty of many Cossacks to the old regime though other factions had little and Cossacks as a whole were largely reactive, settling down with agreements before taking up arms when the red started murdering civilians on mass with the clear intent of genocide. Cossacks due to their unique social structures played a very different role to Ukrainians in the war (though both were extensively victimised, though the Cossacks were even more pointedly so, the jews also got special attention but likely not with orders from the top but rather anti-Semitism adding on to the depravity of the Soviet troops).
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@dmytrodelen Source is the book The Cossacks by Shane O’Rourke. Yes they were an estate (which is why I didn’t bother replying to the first chap, he is correct) under the Tsars but that doesn’t mean they were simply analogous to the people around them, they had a very unique culture, unique social structures which the Tsar’s were unable to properly replicate via population transfers and the induction of outsiders into the estate in other regions. They were largely self contained communities and even in the west where they had much more of a history with and among Ukrainians the main similarity was the fierce loyalty to the orthodox church, given how proud the cossacks were however of their uniqueness it would be wrong to think they were not distinct from the wider surrounding population. Wrangel is the the officer who seemed to show the most surprise over cossack loyalties which was likely because he had long served with them and viewed them as being freedom loving and having separatist sympathies (it should be noted that in many this separatism did not pay consideration to Ukrainians but was the independence of cossacks as a people). I should have also mentioned (especially as I left a half mangled sentence in there) that the were little groups of cossacks in all factions of the civil war and large groups in certain factions during certain period’s. Cossacks certainly are (and were) important to Ukrainian nationalism but the situation was a lot more convoluted on the cossack side of things and the soviets despite their treatment of Ukrainians made the attempt to turn cossacks into Ukrainians, Russians or corpses (an effort paid off in destroying all historical continuity at least).
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