—Why is urkaine’s independence sacrosanct?—
1) liberty has a value in itself, and one cannot claim a desire for liberty without reciprocally assiting others. Although the reason for that is longer than I want to get into right now.
2) there is no reason ever, why a people cannot secede to form a nation by secession from an empire, except occupation.
2) It is always moral for a higher trust people to govern a lower trust people, but Russians are a lower trust people than Ukrainians.
4) Poland and Ukraine are genetically related peoples (indistinguishable) and there is no reason that Ukrainians cannot possess the same quality of life as the Poles. Poland has a GDP per capital of 14K and Ukraine, despite similar geography and demographics has one of 4k. Ukrainians could triple their standard of living if they could join either Poland or the EU, which would displace the oligarchs, and with the oligarchs and Russian corruption, post-soviet poverty.
5) The Russians have murdered far too many people in this country, desecrated graves, destroyed traditions, made people disappear in the night, destroyed a once-healthy high trust European culture, destroyed families, destroyed ethics and morality, destroyed the middle class, occupied, impoverished, and supported a predatory and corrupt regime. They don’t want Russian leadership they want prosperity.
6) the borderlands sphere, consisting of the north eastern European countries: Boland, Czech republic, Hungary,, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, and at the outside, Romania form a cultural and genetic region.
The southern eastern European countries of the mountain-sphere: Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia, would be better off forming their own federations. These countries had more ottoman influence and they will always be harder to govern.
Belarus has decided to remain, like the Kazhaks, in the Russian steppe-sphere. Much like cuba lived off soviet contributions, belarus lives of russian.
WHY DOES UKRAINE MATTER TO RUSSIA?
Well, to be a great power requries about .5B people. Russia has 140M. The Kazahks have 17, the Belarus 10, Ukraine about 45, the poles 38, the baltics not enough to matter.
Russia has poor ports for a world power: the black sea (crimea), kalinningrad (conquered german city of Koenigsburg), and it’s artic locations. So as an ARTIC power it’s got bases, but as a TEMPERATE SHIPPING power it doesn’t.
Without access to water russia cannot be a great power.
WHY DOES RUSSIA WANT TO BE A GREAT POWER?
They want to restore orthodox civilization, and frankly who can blame them. Otherwise they’re a small population with an enormous land mass to defend, and without the people, economy, and infrastructure to defend it.
Russian mythology and paranoid psychology does not easily accept the status of second-rate nation, subject tot he will of others. Especially when internal control requries such heavy-handedness. Weakness is not tolerable.
So the die is cast, and unless russia wants to rule the islamic world by remote, using israel, saudi arabia, and turkey, she has no possible method of obtaining territory and economy sufficient for a great power status.
So she has three choices: join the west (which is what we all want really – them to rescue us from liberalism and us to rescue them from corruption and the absence of rule of law.
She can try to unite with china, which merely means she will be a client state of 140m managed by the economiy and might of a different race (chinese) who have a very poor record of treatment of satellites.
Or she can try to progressively obtain control over the middle east. And why is this sensible for russia? Beause almost all the oil in the world is in a big puddle between saudia arabia, and the artic above moscow.
IN other words, russia can make a play to rule the resourc-cursed destert and steppe peoples. Why? Islamic demographics and religion dooms them to permanent underclass. Russia, israel, and turkey can create a technological and miltiary caste system that basically farms the arabs and iranians as cattle.
THIS IS HOW GROWNUPS TALK ABOUT WORLD AFFAIRS.
(and if you can’t talk economics and incentives you need to learn to)
BACK TO UKRAINE.
A romantic would say that we preserve Ukraine. A scientist would say that the southeast and access to the black sea are lost because Russians successfully transplanted so many of their people into that region that they have done to Ukraine what Europeans did to the American Indians: destroyed them through invasion and conquest and immigration.
So the rational solution would be to give russia her warm water ports and return the center and west of Ukraine to poland, making Poland roughly the population of Germany, but with three time’s germany’s 120k square miles, at ~300K square miles of territory, and the best farmland outside of west france. Capable of feeding all of europe forever. Poland and germany alone then would be equal in population to russia, and economically leaving germany+poland/ukraine with ~5T in GDP compared to 2T of russian GDP.
Russia then is both safe and economically incapable of western expansion.
