No, the makeup of the Soviet military in WW2 was pretty proportional in terms of Ukrainians (and other minorities) to Russians. However, much of Ukraine was denied to the Soviet Union as a recruiting ground due to early Nazi successes, so one could argue that Ukrainians were overrepresented in comparison to the overall manpower that the USSR had at its disposal.
There's a reason Stalin demanded a western front be opened, and it wasn't because he wanted to share credit for the victory over Nazi Germany with the Western Allies. Without D-Day or a similar opening of a western front, the Soviet advance would have been much slower, much bloodier, and the final outcome of their offensives much more dubious.
Also, if it’s a parallel to Earth, I guess we’re supposed to assume that the Christian underclass eventually takes over and are just as bad as the formerly pagan Romans they added into their fold.
To me, it's: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.
Ancient peoples DID think the Earth was flat.
The conception of a spherical earth was only widely accepted in academic traditions derived from late Greek philosophy and even in those cultures, had a mixed reception in popular conceptions of the earth's shape until the 16th century.
My schools did this back in the mid-2000s and early-2010s. Strict rules on cell phones and electronic devices, weren't even allowed to have them on you, much less use them.
Never worked. Impossible to enforce without having the teachers play prison guard.