Much is made of Ukraine's "sovereignty" and how it was "violated." I like to point out that the American position on sovereignty, from its beginnings, has been that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the citizens. Once the government of Ukraine decided to conduct genocide against Donbass Russians (listen to Poroshenko's speech of damnation), it forfeited any claim to just powers, including sovereignty. Russia was the only government that stepped in to protect the people's sovereignty in the Donbass.
You could make the argument that the typical model of sovereignty has never really applied to Ukraine. It's an artificial construct of the Bolsheviks which has had various parts added on to it time and again. It existed essentially as a pluralistic state but with a unitary administration mainly of former soviet officials and gangsters who declared independence as a means to help themselves to enormous amounts of Soviet state property. It never confronted the oligarchs like the former KGB in Russia did. There was no capacity in the system to reform it to a more federalised system that may have allowed the country to survive.
The Ukrainian government was fed the notion from the very beginning that by separating from Russia it would prosper even though most of its Soviet industries were tied into Russia's economy and it never has. Ukrainians seem to have come to widely believe that joining the EU would be the magic bullet to their problems when really many of the changes needed to make Ukraine become more westernised could only really come from inside like crushing the oligarchs and clamping down on corruption.
Ukraine post 1991 has been a Greek tragedy. If the West had actually tried to help them without playing geo-politcal games against Russia it might well have been the best long term medicine for Western-Russian relations as the country may well have served as a bridge between Russia and the West.
Much is made of Ukraine's "sovereignty" and how it was "violated." I like to point out that the American position on sovereignty, from its beginnings, has been that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the citizens. Once the government of Ukraine decided to conduct genocide against Donbass Russians (listen to Poroshenko's speech of damnation), it forfeited any claim to just powers, including sovereignty. Russia was the only government that stepped in to protect the people's sovereignty in the Donbass.
You could make the argument that the typical model of sovereignty has never really applied to Ukraine. It's an artificial construct of the Bolsheviks which has had various parts added on to it time and again. It existed essentially as a pluralistic state but with a unitary administration mainly of former soviet officials and gangsters who declared independence as a means to help themselves to enormous amounts of Soviet state property. It never confronted the oligarchs like the former KGB in Russia did. There was no capacity in the system to reform it to a more federalised system that may have allowed the country to survive.
The Ukrainian government was fed the notion from the very beginning that by separating from Russia it would prosper even though most of its Soviet industries were tied into Russia's economy and it never has. Ukrainians seem to have come to widely believe that joining the EU would be the magic bullet to their problems when really many of the changes needed to make Ukraine become more westernised could only really come from inside like crushing the oligarchs and clamping down on corruption.
Ukraine post 1991 has been a Greek tragedy. If the West had actually tried to help them without playing geo-politcal games against Russia it might well have been the best long term medicine for Western-Russian relations as the country may well have served as a bridge between Russia and the West.