Stupid question, I know: Why shouldn't Ukraine split in two?

[Igel]

99. It won't.

You'll get the following.

1. Nobody be happy with "their" portion. Just ethnic Russians? Well, look at that right strip. It's partially ethnic Russians. But the ethnic Russians will say it has to be all ethnic Russian, some will say it has to be some part ethnic Russian, but since it's also ethnic Ukrainian (how the map labels it predecides how most people will understand it) others will say it has to be all ethnic Ukrainian. And if you split it, not only do you have to decide if it's 38% Russian, 39% Russian, 40% Russian, but also which bits are going to be Russian and which bits Ukrainian.

What could possibly go wrong?

2. Ethnic Russians will also, to improve their status and simply hurt the other side, want all the Russian speakers in their camp. Some may opt that way; others won't. But with Putin in arguing, what the speakers want will be decided in the Russian media, just as many DUers have decided based on just what they see and what they know, not thinking there might be more that they don't know and it might be important. It won't be decided by the people, whatever those sitting safe and warm 8000 miles away might think.

3. Russia supervised ethnic cleansing of Abkhazia. Nobody cared. In S. Ossetia many "liberals" who just like what Russia does for whatever reasons decided that the ethnic cleansing in S. Ossetia was a good thing. It punished the evil Saavashkili. Yeah, we hate collective punishment, and it wasn't Saavashkili himself who was ethnically cleansed, but it was "close enough": A lot of Georgians were punished collectively in order to hurt a politician DUers and Russians despised.

We forget that a great thing that happened to the USSR in response to WWII was the mass ethnic cleansing of Poles. To make Russia happy Poland was moved a couple of hundred miles west--it punished Poland and gave Russia the Polish territory it coveted in the partition of Poland with Hitler; and it punished the Germans and created a refugee mess for both countries. Stalin was pleased. He, and many Russians, have a mindset that often the best way to help yourself is to hurt others--and to hurt them on suspicion that they may either hurt you, may want to hurt you, or may just make you look bad. You don't actually have to benefit (although it's best if you benefit while make everybody else suffer).

Will Ukrainians do the same thing? If not to start off, then in response to having hordes of refugees they'll respond in kind. Such things become ethnic cleansing parties.

4. There's the inevitable self-cleansed folk that feel forced to leave.

5. There are claims and calls for reparations. In response to the ethnic cleansing of Germans from the Czech Lands, 50 years later there were claims. There's still an outstanding claim from Italy against Slovenia for the mutual ethnic cleansing agreed upon after WWII there--Slovenia accepted Slovenes and distributed Italian property to them but Italy confiscated Slovenian property and left the Italians that arrived with nothing.

It's always the more powerful who presses the claims. Germany against Cesko and Poland, Italy against Slovenia,

6. It doesn't help to find a "fair" solution when one side is occupying another, has nuclear weapons, and a seat on the UN Security Council and surrounds you on two sides. We think Israel's unfair to the Palestinians? They only have 2 out of 4 advantages, and that's if you accept that Israel has nuclear weapons and would use them 3 miles from their border.

7. It'll take a long time for the disinformation to die down. Russians are truly terrified about all the horrible things that have been happening to them. No, nothing horrible's been happening. But if Putin says they're facing real threats, that their rights have been trampled, that they've been grievously wronged and they need protection, then, well, they believe him rather than the people they distrust and feel have been ungrateful to them. Remember: The ethnically Russian sections were *the* prosperous sections under the USSR. Now they're poor with high unemployment. Yanukovich was "conservative" in that he, like the Communist Party, wanted to have a lot of state subsidies and interventions to keep the former proletariat happy. What was must continue--the essence of conservatism. They wanted plans to keep production going to obsolete plants, subsidies to the firms and companies, etc. The more laissez-faire Ukrainians--who weren't proletarian and were pretty much battered by Stalin and Soviet policy for anywhere from 45 to 70 years--are trying to take away their rights, their entitlements, and, again, are being ungrateful towards their superiors, the elder brother, Russia.

(Why the destruction of statues of Lenin? Why the resentment of that destruction? Think of "oppressor" versus "hero" in ethnic terms. It's like the destruction of statues of Robert E. Lee by an African-American group.)

The response from the US will be mixed, as it was after Vietnam. For some, there was immediate justice and peace becauses their beautiful minds were no longer troubled by the conflict. It wasn't until over a decade later that a lot of people could even admit that N. Vietnamese was repressive. Others quickly focused on the boat people and reeducation camps. Some noticed that with N. Vietnamese support, Laos almost immediately fell. While Pol Pot didn't get support from the N. Vietnamese late in the game, he was an ally for a while and for longer sheltered in N. Vietnamese territory in Cambodia--we like to point out that Israel "started" Hamas by funding it briefly decades ago, but reject the same kind of accusation when it's even more aptly placed at the feet of a group that many on the left rather liked in the '60s.

So it'll be if Ukraine's partitioned. It'll be immediate nirvana. The ethnic cleansing, corruption, strong-arming, injustices, refugee camps will simply not exist for those who can worry about making sure they have the right level of medical benefits or are trying to get from 7.0 to 6.9% unemployment. Our inconveniences are far more important than massive social disruption.

There's a Russian proverb, svoya rubashka blizhe k telu, "Your own shirt's closer to your body", that means your personal interests are more important than the (or any) interests of other people. Yup: Looking out for #1.

Putin knows the saying and it has no taint of atavism. So do Americans, but we act like we don't--we disparage those who express the idea but it's really just disparaging those who *say* it out loud, because it's something we pretty much all do in practice. Form over substance.