Rune, i find your lists are inaccurate at best or dishonest at worst.
Regardless, you don’t address the elephant in the room. Just how big do you have to be to validly declare independence? Can a breakaway polygamist farming community in the middle of Utah become it’s own country tomorrow if preacher Dad holds a family referendum? Do you draw any line on self determination?
Ok. With such compelling arguments I’m forced to amend my position immediately. But since you gave no hints as to in which direction or what is inaccurate or dishonest I must suggest you come up with your own list.
Come on. This is the real world. There are no rules other than those we make up on the way. But I already gave you some guidelines I think could be used: it should be a clearly defined geographic, and preferable political and historic entity. Crimea is such. Eastern Ukraine or Transdniestra – not so much. Were the US states so when they sought independency in the 18th century? Not especially. Not especially oppressed either. Unfair tax doesn’t really cut it. I’m sure you’d be happy to know I still support US independence though. Also there should be some considerations towards viability. I have my doubts for Greenland and the Faroe Islands. But whatever, their choice their pain.
There is no validity. There is no one to assign validity. There are no rules.
Sometimes people want to change the status quo, be that social or ethnical. If there are enough of them and/or they succeed through force that’s that.
It is a grey field whether you consider someone has ‘the right’ to rebel.
What I do consider wrong is inciting these kind of rebellions in other countries.
I’m not so interested in “rules” as I am about preventing wars. Splitting up countries more often than not creates wars. So, unless there is some compelling reason (eg, gross oppression of a minority), we are best when we keep the borders as they are.
Interesting, then, that the majority of people, including a majority of Russian-speaking people, in Eastern Ukraine want Ukraine to stay united - according to actual data.
See, this is what makes the whole argument such an exercise in futility. You guys are simply arguing on the basis of incorrect assumptions - the incorrect assumption that the majority of Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians really wish to join Russia. This is simply not true. If a free and fair vote were held tomorrow, these folks would lose, by a large margin - unless it was carefully gerrymandered.
Even Putin knows this, which is why he’s come around to putting the brakes on referendums. Those pro-Russian groups on the ground want to hold referendums in areas they control, knowing such votes would be neither free nor fair.
To be clear: contrary to the propaganda, this is not a clear-cut “ethnic conflict” that can be “solved” by seperating the battling ethnicities. Certainly Putin and his cronies, appeasers and apologists keep trumpeting that it is, and doing everything in theor power to make it so - but it isn’t.
How are you going to keep them?
By not letting Russia break them up (only to magically reform those territories into their own national borders)? Seems like a reasonable plan to me, assuming Russia does in fact decide to back down.
OK, for instance: Germany separated during WW2 so I guess you didn’t mean that was peaceful, so I assume you put it in the “peaceful” list because the Soviets stopped blocking reunification. Umm, ok. Scotland isn’t separated yet, yet on your peaceful list. Soviet Union was “mostly peaceful”, except for the wars in Georgia and Chechnya. Awesome example. Then your “Not peaceful” list is tidied up with “various European colonial empires”.
Not sure what me having to spell it out for you means.
Not talking about the Ukraine per se here.
How do you prevent a determined people from getting what they think is their due?
They are the ones prepared to use violence.
How do you stop them without becoming the oppressor you are already made out to be?
You start off by not cheerleading these break-ups, but the most important thing is for the large regional powers (e.g., Russia) to not fan the flames of separatism. Same goes for the US. You do not recognize the new “countries” and you encourage peaceful co-existence thru trade groups.
The worst thing that can happen is what we saw in Crimea. That may not have been violent, but it sets the precedent and now you’re seeing all sorts of violence break out as different groups are thinking: Hey, me too!
Now, I’m not naive enough to think that we can always stop these sorts of things, but knowing what we do know about how much violence they can generate, we absolutely should not be encouraging them. That is, not when there is no evidence of human rights abuses.
Like Syria and Libya?
You mean the US was totally in the wrong there?
I read what he is saying is that there must be a hefty cost/benefit balance to the local population in favour of splitting up, before we should violate national boundaries.
Governments that are actively oppressive may well weigh in favour of a breakup. Also, cases where there is a consensus in favour of a breakup and a “deal” can be arranged through peaceable, democratic and diplomatic means.
The case where a minority is armed and encouraged by an outside country, where that minority lacks even a popular consensus in favour of it among its own “group”, and where the government (however incompetent and ineffective) is hardly oppressive, surely does not qualify: in short, whatever the arguments in favour of insurgencies in Syria and Lybia, there are none in favour oif insurgency in Ukraine. The “calculus” - risk of warfare on one side, benefits to the breakup on the other - is against it.
Well, the Ukraine is a clearly defined geographic, political and historic entity. Crimea was a part of that entity, albeit with a short history. The only reason it went peacefully was that the government in Kiev either decided it wasn’t worth fighting for, or were too weak to fight for it. I think it’s probably a little from column a and little from column b. Since they really weren’t in a position to do anything but get people killed while Russia took Crimea anyway, it was probably a wise move in the end. Eastern Ukraine is a different situation, and Kiev has had several weeks to get organized. If the early reports of today are accurate, there is a battle going on in Maripol today.
You really didn’t address the meat of my argument, though. The area that wants to leave benefited from the union, and now wants to take those benefits with them when they leave. Generally, that’s frowned upon by the current government, and leads to war if they can’t convince the union to let them go. I would say that if the group that wants to break away can’t follow the political methods available to them, the only meaningful definition of a viable state is one that can take on all comers. They’ve already moved to that arena of politics, so they cannot complain when they are dealt with in a similar manner.
Well, in Syria the US has really done very little except to threaten the current Syrian government about it’s use of proscribed (i.e. chemical) weapons against it’s own populace. We’d most likely do the same if the Ukrainians used similar weapons against it’s own populace. I’m failing to see the analogy, to be honest.
As for Libya, there was a full on, all out civil war going on. Assuming you actually mean ‘NATO’ and not (just) the US as being in the wrong, I suppose the difference there is that we didn’t have much of a hand in bringing about the civil war (a civil war that hasn’t happened yet in the Ukraine, but that Russia has pretty clear been taking a hand in pushing for), so it was an internal struggle that looked to be dragging on with an increasing loss of life. The other key difference is that NATO and the US weren’t out to gain territory from Libya by snagging off pieces for ourselves, and when it was all over it was pretty much on the Libyan’s to sort out the pieces and figure out what they wanted to do from then on. I’m not seeing that as a likely outcome in the Ukraine if the Russians have their way, since based on what they did in the Crimea, it’s pretty obvious that they are after direct territorial gains.
I concede that Libya is a closer analogy to the Ukraine than Syria is, but ‘closer’ isn’t really all that close, so I’m not seeing how this puts the ‘US’ on par with Russia. Would you care to expand on your brief post there to show how you think they are similar or why they are relevant to this discussion?
The Kiev installed governor of Kherson Oblast praising Hitler in a 9 May victory speech to a gathering of war veterans, widows, and children and grand children of veterans. Fun times. Odarchenko (YouTube)
How about a translation? I mean I do see communists protesting, but I have no idea what offended them.
… in what way is he praising Hitler? 
Previously we erroneously thought Hitler attacked because he wanted to steal our land, now we know the Nazis were liberator come to free Ukraine from the Soviet yoke. Pity he didn’t liberate England too…
There’s a man who knows how to pour oil on the waters.
According to some comments, what he said was:
Again, dunno how accurate that is.
“said that Hitler came to Ukraine proclaiming liberation of Ukraine from bolsheviks, but people didn’t trust him and pushed the aggressor back.”
Don’t see much offensive there, although I see how the Communists with red flags standing there could get mad.
Anyway, here is some interesting info. Hitler’s armies had “ethnic” volunteers. Estimates are there were around 70,000 Ukrainian volunteers. In case you think “that’s a huge number, shows how Ukrainians are fascists”, the estimate of the number of ethnic Russian volunteers in Hitler’s military varies between 200,000 and 1,000,000.