Все про Україну Everything about Ukraine
And from which part do they come from? Didn't Russia loose more than 1 million people in 2021 alone?
The poor, underdeveloped parts.
"do you have the slightest idea of how little that narrows it down?"
That's what they always do. Take land by force then move Russians there.
Sometimes the order is inverse. When a critical number of Russians live in one place (for example, Crimea), Russia has that spiritual strength to claim rights over that land and, if necessary, take it by force.
Well, you move the people on the periphery into the middle of Russia where it's harder to break away with any familiar ethnic groups, then you move people from the interior who don't have links to people on the periphery to the periphery.
At the same time, residents of Mariupol and other occupied settlements are forcibly deported to Russia, the National Resistance Center added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.[9]
Mariupol will be out of their hands before they have the chance to do this.
If Russia does something like this and a bunch of those people defect to Ukraine, I might actually die laughing. I don't know how likely something like that is but it would be a truly bitter irony for Russia. I imagine there are at least some people who want to leave Russia but can't and Russia would be doing them a huge favor.