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My own ancestry is 5/8 Ukrainian and 3/8 Romanian from Chernivtsi with my sister scoring 38% Baltic. They came to Canada around 1900 before any of the more recent population movements.
Here are her results, which I also posted in Ion's thread for Moldova/Romania: 24.23,37.67,14.3,6.77,10.93,2.01,0.58,0,2.27,0.48, 0,0,0.74
Ivano-Frankivsk did become part of Moldavia for a while at the end of the Middle Ages, but I'm not sure how significantly that could have affected its genetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PokuttiaIn 1388, Władysław II Jagiełło, needing financial support for his battles against the Teutonic Knights, placed Pokuttia under the administration of Petru II of Moldavia, a Moldavian voivode, for a loan of 3,000 coins of gold.
In 1485, Moldavian prince Stephen the Great, having lost his country's access to the Black Sea the previous year to the Ottomans, was in serious need of alliances, and swore allegiance to Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland, in exchange of Pokuttia, in what is known as the Colomeea oath.
So basically for 100 years.
From old pictures of my Ukrainian and Romanian relatives from that region, there didn't seem to be any significant phenotypical differences between the two groups. Also, my sister, who is 3/8 Romanian, did not score any lower in 'northern' admixture than my 1/4 Romanian mother. Although it's only a 1/8 difference between them. My Romanian relatives were native Moldavians, not descendent from the more recent Transylvanian migrants who were quite numerous especially in southern Bukovina.
Having said that, it is likely that many Ukrainians who moved to Chernivtsi from Galicia in the 1700s mixed with Romanians there and later (in the 1900s) moved north to neighbouring regions like Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil.
I guess the question is how similar the Ukrainian populations south of the Dniestr (and NE of the Carpathians) were to Northern Moldavians. Whether there is historic continuity between the two groups, as per your hypothesis, or whether they were initially fundamentally different and whether more recent mixing has made them similar. I do remember reading that local slavic populations in Moldavia were Romanianized when the Moldavian state was initially founded, which is something you alluded to.
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