Moldovans in Ukraine () are the third biggest minority recorded in the 2001 All Ukrainian Census after Russians and Belarusians. Unlike many other minorities, Moldovans often live in the countryside (71.5%) rather than in a city (28.5%), the majority in the northern and southern historical region of Bessarabia. There is an undergoing identity controversy among the Romanian speakers of Ukraine over whether self-identified Moldovans are a part of the larger Romanian ethnic group or a separate ethnic group.
History
After 1812, Russian Empire annexed Bessarabia from Moldavia. Initially, Romanians under Russian rule enjoyed privileges well, the language of Moldavians was established as an official language in the governmental institutions of Bessarabia, used along with Russian,Charter for the organization of the Bessarabian Oblast, April 29, 1818, in "Печатается по изданию: Полное собрание законов Российской империи. Собрание первое.", Vol 35. 1818, Sankt Petersburg, 1830, pg. 222–227. Available online at hrono.info as more than 90% of the population was Romanian.Viata Culturala din Basarabia intre 1812-1828 The publishing works established by Archbishop Gavril Bănulescu-Bodoni were able to produce books and liturgical works in Moldavian dialect of Romanian between 1815 and 1820,King, Charles, The Moldovans, Hoover Press, 2000, , pg. 21–22 used both in Principality of Moldova and in Bessarabia.
From 1829 to 1905, the Russification policies were implemented and all public use of Romanian was phased out, being substituted with Russian. Romanian continued to be used as the colloquial language of home and family, mostly spoken by Romanians, either first or second language. Many Romanians changed Russified family names. This was the era of the highest level of assimilation in the Russian Empire.Colesnic-Codreanca, Lidia. Limba Română în Basarabia. Studiu sociolingvistic pe baza materialelor de arhivă (1812–1918) ("The Romanian language in Bessarabia. A sociolinguistic study based on archival materials (1812–1918)"). Chișinău: Editorial Museum, 2003.
In 1918, after being military occupied by Romanian troops, Bessarabia united with the Kingdom of Romania. In 1940, Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviet Union. Around 65% of Bessarabia is part of the modern-day Moldova, with the Ukrainian Budjak region (part of the Odesa Oblast) covering the southern coastal region, and part of the Ukrainian Chernivtsi Oblast (Romanian: Cernăuți) covering an area in the north.
The late Israeli scholar, mainly a Holocaust specialist, Dov Levin has made available statistics that showed that there were no representatives in the organs of Soviet power, etc., in Hertsa and the Bukovinian raions of the Chernivtsi region with a Moldovan identity in 1940-1941, but only with a Romanian one; the birth and death statistics and those on the number of students during the same period show the same thing.See Dov Levin, "The Jews and the Inception of Soviet Rule in Bukovina", in Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. 6, no. 2, 1976, p. 52-70, and the articles in Hebrew that he cites. On October 11, 1942, the (Soviet) State Committee on Defense decided to extend the decrees on "the mobilization of the NKVD labour columns, German men, able to work, 17-50 years old - to the persons of other nations, being in war with USSR-Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns."; the order was signed by Stalin.Nikolai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 116. As a result, in May 1944, in the village of Molodiia and some other northern Bukovinian localities, those men who declared a "Moldovan" nationality were incorporated into the Soviet army, while those who declared a "Romanian" nationality were sent to the work camps in the area of Lake Onega, where most of them died.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 168. The Soviet era dominance of the "Moldovan" identity in parts of northern Bukovina was due to the fact that the inhabitants of the Chernivtsi and Sadagura rural raions, and of the Bukovinian part of the Novoselytsia raion, were pressured in 1944 to adopt a "Moldovan" national/ethnic identity.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 172.
There were allegations from Romanian ethnic organizations and activists in Ukraine such as the teacher Zinaida Pinteac that in the 2001 Ukrainian census, individuals, especially, but not exclusively, in the Odessa region were pressured to declare a Moldovan rather than Romanian ethnic and/or linguistic identity.George Coman, “SOS romanii din Ucraina!” (“SOS the Romanians of Ukraine”), in Ziua, March 4, 2003, originally accessed at http://www.ziua.ro/archive/2003/03/04/docs/5846.html, though the link is currently not working.Natalia Munteanu, "Școlile românești din sudul Basarabiei, pe cale de dispariție", in moldNova, July 4, 2017, at https://moldnova.eu/ro/scolile-romanesti-din-sudul-basarabiei-pe-cale-de-disparitie-18321.html/, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20240827004739/https://moldnova.eu/ro/scolile-romanesti-din-sudul-basarabiei-pe-cale-de-disparitie-18321.html/ through the WayBack Machine According to a major book on the Romanian minority in Ukraine, this phenomenon does not seem to have very widespread.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 33 and passim. According to Kateryna Sheshtakova, a professor at the Pomeranian University of Slutsk in Poland who did field research among the 15 self-identified Romanians and self-identified Moldovans in the Chernivtsi region of Ukraine, 'Some Moldovans use both names of the mother tongue (Moldovan or Romanian) and accordingly declare two ethnic affiliations.'Kateryna Sheshtakova, "Ethnic Identity and Linguistic Practices of Romanians and Moldovans (On the Example of Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine), in Studia Humanistyczne AGH, Tom 12/2, 2013, p. 65. She recorded one statement that "I am Moldovan, but to be more precise, we should say I am Romanian".Kateryna Sheshtakova, "Ethnic Identity and Linguistic Practices of Romanians and Moldovans (On the Example of Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine), in Studia Humanistyczne AGH, Tom 12/2, 2013, p. 72. She also recorded one subject who believed the language had been transformed from Moldovan to Romanian: "That language, is it Romanian or Moldovan? R: Now, it's Romanian. There is no Moldovan now. Then, it used to be Moldovan, but written with Russian letters. And now everything is in Latin". Shestakova suggests that those self-identified Moldovans who see differences between Moldovan and Romanian tend to be from "the older generation".Kateryna Sheshtakova, "Ethnic Identity and Linguistic Practices of Romanians and Moldovans (On the Example of Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine), in Studia Humanistyczne AGH, Tom 12/2, 2013, p. 72, second paragraph, first sentence. Opinion polling from the Chernivtsi oblast, as well as the discussions of the delegates of the Meeting of the Leaders of the Romanophone Organizations from Ukraine of December 6, 1996, indicated that many of the self-identified Moldovans believed that the Moldovan and Romanian languages were identical.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 230-231, 237-238 and passim. Popescu and Ungureanu noted that, while the leader of the Moldovans from the Odesa Oblast, Anatol Fetescu, the leader of the "Luceafarul" Society of Moldovans from Odesa, disagreed with the line that the Moldovan language should be called Romanian, the leaders of the Moldovan organizations from the Chernivtsi Oblast and five other specific oblasts agreed that the Moldovan language is, and should be called, Romanian. Previous similar congresses of the Romanian-speakers from 1992, both for the entire oblast, and by raion, from the region had unanimously supported the same position, including the president of the raion administration of the Novoselytsia Raion, with a mostly Moldovan ethnic identity population, in 1992, Gheorghe Ciubrei and other leaders from the raion. See Popescu and Ungureanu, p. 237-238. By comparison, in the Republic of Moldova, “more than half of the self-proclaimed Moldovans (53.5%) said that they saw no difference” between the Romanian and Moldovan languages according to a survey conducted by Pal Kolsto and Hans Olav Melberg in 1998 which also included the Transnistrian separatist region.Pal Kolsto with Hans Olav Melberg, “Integration, Alienation, and Conflict in Estonia and Moldova,” in Pal Kolsto (ed.), National Integration and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Societies, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), p. 34-35. According to Alla Skvortsova, an ethnic Russian researcher from the Republic of Moldova, "Our survey found that while 94.4 percent of the Romanians living in Moldova consider Moldovan and Romanian to be the same language, only half of the Moldovans (53.2 percent) share this view".Alla Skvortsova, "The Cultural and Social Makeup of Moldova: A Bipolar or Dispersed Society?", in Pal Kolsto (ed.), National Integration and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Societies (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), p. 168. In the Chernivtsi Oblast of post-Soviet Ukraine, both the self-identified Romanians and the self-identified Moldovans have always been educated in Romanian-language languages; there were no Moldovan language schools because there was no demand for them.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 32 and passim.