My family members and their friends that live in Zaporizhzhya certainly don’t feel like they have been liberated. They have been occupied by force and my son’s grandmother has had to watch tanks rolling through her city.Technically, yes. But Crimea and parts of Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolayiv, and Zaporizhzhya Oblasts are now 'Russified', so I guess we could also call it 'recapturing lost territory' after that part of Historic RUSSIA was sliced off into it's own little enclave of a country. What does "Ukraine" mean in Russian? I'm sure you know.
It’s hardly little either.