Are Russians and Ukrainians really one people?
TLDR: No. But not because they are fundamentally different, but rather because there’s really no such thing as either…
I’m going to assume basic understanding of DNA and Genetic Genealogy, as well as Principal Component Analysis here. You can see my older articles for the technical background necessary, as well as a detailed walk through Genoplot, which I will be using here. Suffice it to say that you can sequence modern (and, when available, ancient) human genomes, extracting hundreds of thousands of data points that can then be used in statistical analysis to find similarities across individuals and groups. And people have been doing this for a couple decades now, so plenty of data and results already exist.
Let’s start with an overview of Eastern Europe from the modern genetic viewpoint (and Genoplot even has a PCA preset in place)
You can see a clear line from Bulgaria to Latvia, with Finland branching off. This is what is known as Balto-Slavic people, who have been mixing for millennia — the history that is echoed in the language groups of the region. The Finns, however, are Uralic people, though their close linguistic relatives the Estonians are actually genetically closer to the other Balts.
We can also zoom in on the folks in question — the Russians and the Ukrainians from various regions — bordering the Estonians on one end and Germans on the other.
And now here it is. While on average, there is a difference among the groups, the individuals in each cluster overlap all over the place. Moreover, the choice of summarization statistic (mean vs median) will affect the results as well. Still, we can see the Lviv and Carpathian Ukrainians closer, as expected, to the Hungarians, Czechs, and East Germans. And we can see North Russians closer to the Baltic people. But in the middle… all hell breaks lose.
We can take a strep back (up) and look at the averages across the wider North-Eastern Europe, as well as include some ancient samples (such as the Scythians and various Vikings) for historical context.
And while things may seem like they they are much cleaner here, you have to realize that individuals, like some of the Vikings here, often fall somewhere in between.
There’s no one Ukraine, as there’s certainly no one Russia. Yes, we all generically came from a Blato-Slavic and Scythian mixture, shaken up by our germanic Viking ancestors. But in the past 1000 years or more, evolution at the genetic level did not stand still, and neither did people.
