Recent stories about Russian passports being distributed in Crimea, Ukraine have raised quite a ruckus. But that doesn’t seem to be the only place in the Ukraine with some ethnic nationalism issues, and a new report we’ve translated from Izvestiya after the jump tells the story of Moscow’s possible assistance to the Ruthenians – an ethnic group located in Transcarpathia, the western-most Oblast of the country, near the Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, and Romanian borders. For centuries, the region was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and known as Subcarpathia. (Everything depends on where you’re looking from: if your vantage point is Vienna or Budapest, the region is in the foothills “below” the Carpathian mountains, hence “Subcarpathia”. But if you’re looking from Moscow or Kiev, it’s on the “other side” of the mountains, hence “Transcarpathia”!) After World War I, it became an autonomous region in the very east of the newly-formed country of Czecho-Slovakia. And then, after the Red Army had “liberated” it in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), Stalin decided to keep the region for himself and attached it to Ukraine. The local inhabitants are known as the Rusyn; Ruthenian is a Latinized version of the word. The Ruthenians have never had an independent state of their own, but, as mentioned above, did enjoy a measure of autonomy in the inter-war period. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Ruthenians had hoped for autonomous status within Ukraine, but this did not happen. For a small, nearly unknown nationality, the Ruthenians have certainly left their mark on the world. Many came to the US and Canada during the big immigration waves from Eastern Europe in the decades preceding World War I. A very large part settled in Pennsylvania and worked in the coal mines and steel mills. Their descendants include Andy Warhol, the actors Tom Selleck, Robert Urich, and Sandra Dee, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, comic book illustrator Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spiderman), jazz pianist Bill Evans, and the inventor of the LED, Nick Holonyak. The highly acclaimed 1978 Vietnam war movie The Deer Hunter is about Ruthenian-Americans in Pennsylvania.