The strategy seems to have gone 0-2 with Russia and China; can you name an instance in which it succeeded?
Same with US states. Texas etc keep muttering about secession, but the economic complications make it an insane idea.
It's not inherently a bad strategy, but it tends to fail when you're dealing with huge would-be hegemons - which certainly applies to China and Russia.
Ukraine and Russia were same country like almost forever. No one sane was expecting a war between them.
Don't underestimate ability of polititians to screw things up.
Various types of Germans also did have a large number of wars agains one another.
Russian position is indeed that Ukrainian claims on the statehood in 1991 or even 2014 borders are absolutely bogus.
Personally, I also find it hard to respect the immutability of international borders that are younger than I am.
Compared to that, Russians have super great attitude towards southwestern Russian variety. They do recognize the existence of Ukrainian language (dialect continuum) and that some people might want to speak it unharmed, for starters.
Ukrainian state rewrites history like there was no yesterday, but you could definitely study Ukrainian in any UkrSSR school from 1960s to 1991. I wonder if you could find a school that will teach any Languedoc, anywhere in Languedoc.
I'm also pretty sure that Germans from different parts of Germany aren't big fans of each other as a group.
(Note: It was published before the war so the statistics of where what languages are commonly used have changed dramatically.)
Nobody really cares what these far western ukrainians are up to. Russians don't really want them. Maybe with the exception for one dude from Vinnitsa.
Valuev Circular [3] (1863), Ems Ukaz [4] (1876) banned the use of the Ukrainian language in print. Religious books on Ukrainian were banned century before [5].
Census [6] (1897) maps Ukrainian language majority far beyond Ukraine current borders. Annexed by RSFSR, Russified by force. Continuum of ethnocide by Moscow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eneida
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kotliarevsky
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuev_Circular
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Ukaz
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Ukrainian_langua...
Еней був парубок моторний
І хлопець хоть куди козак,
На лихо здався він проворний,
Завзятіший од всіх бурлак.
Nationalists like to draw fantasy maps. Want to see mine?
Roma, Romania, do you claim Italian is "Romanian dialect"? Muscovy was Rus colony, grew under Golden Horde, renamed in 1721. Rus Grand Prince Володимѣръ Свѧтославичъ — Ukrainian name Володимир (Volodymyr) not Moscow Владимир (Vladimir). Language of Kyiv can't be dialect of its former colonies language.
Slav languages are mutually intelligible. I've checked spoken Slovak, Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian. Do you claim these are "dialects" of Moscow language?
Eneida translated to Polish:
Eneasz rzutkim był młodzianem,
Podobnym całkiem do Kozaków,
Radzącym z każdym złem spotkanym,
Zawziętszym nawet od burłaków.
I don't understand a word of Polish text.
So it makes sense that everyone who is fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian will be consuming Russian content 90% of time. Hence people no longer use Surzhik anywhere east of Kharkov (or Khabarovsk), even if some of their ancestors actually spoke it. It just don't make sense to do that anymore.
It does not help that literature Ukrainian has a lot of borrowings from Polish, Romanian and Hungarian and is not really accessible to people who did not visit Ukrainian state schools. However, Russian is very accessible to basically everybody in Ukraine and the rest of ex-USSR.
Regarding folk songs, people actually did a lot of digging in this area starting with late Soviet times, and now there's huge revival of folk music in Russia. Many contemporary pop or rock bands use Russian (Slavic, maybe even Ukrainian) folk motives in their songs, which are usually in Russian. By doing so, they enrich Russian culture, which I've started this comment from.
Use of Russian language shrunk by 2x in last 30 years, while Ukrainian language increased by 2x in last 30 years. At some point, it will flip.
Regarding folk songs, just name one Russian folk song in Russian language, for which I will not be able to found author by 5 minutes of googling.
And it is also obviously in Russian: https://forum.d-seminar.ru/threads/zhuravel-xor-ukrainskaja-...
The rest of the offensive Ukrainian chauvinism I will skip.
For example, Ukraine holds word record by number of folk songs, while I was able to found none of folk songs in Russian (Russish) language after years of searching. Folk songs exists in Russia Federation, but they are not in Russian (Russish) language. Cuban Cossack Choir - folk songs are in Ukrainian language, Ural Cossack Choir - Ukrainian, for example.
That has nothing to do with Russia vs Russian conquered territories, besides, France has Occitan, there is the German based dialects, Catalan, some Basque and a whole raft of others.
> Since they held absolute political powers nobody was even there to question it.
Except that that didn't quite happen in the way you suggest. You could make a similar statement about Fries in NL or maybe Limburgs or Diets. And it would be just as much wrong.
> Compared to that, Russians have super great attitude towards southwestern Russian variety. They do recognize the existence of Ukrainian language (dialect continuum) and that some people might want to speak it unharmed, for starters.
Sorry, are we on different planets or something? You mean: those very same Russians that are currently bombing the shit out of anything Ukrainian and who wish to eradicate the Ukrainian nation and culture?
> I'm also pretty sure that Germans from different parts of Germany aren't big fans of each other as a group.
They are as alike as the Dutch and the Belgians, we joke about each other but at the end of the day there is no hate and zero chance of a war.
No assimilation and cultural genocide policy in any form. It has just dwindled to these numbers on its own. Also has no relation to the topic that we discuss. Don't forget to call whataboutism.
I gather that reflection is not a strong side of Western Europeans.
> those very same Russians that are currently bombing the shit out of anything Ukrainian
That's called "a civil war", and that's how it viewed by many Russians and some Ukrainians. Indeed that's not a great condition to be in.
> who wish to eradicate the Ukrainian nation and culture
Again, this accusation is coming from a proud member of a nation who eradicated a couple of cultures very recently. "While I had already been born" recently.
People of Donbass were fed up with Ukrainization to the extent that these two Republics do not have Ukrainian as co-official. But Crimea, and the "new territories" of Kherson oblast and Zaparozh'ye (whatever left of them, arguably) have Ukrainian as co-official. Crimea also has Crimean Tatar as co-official. If anybody wants they can study their language and their culture, including in schools. That's what was not permitted to Russians in many, many ex-USSR countries.
12.04.2014 Moscow occupied Slovyansk, "referendum" a month later.
February 2022 Moscow occupied Kherson, "referendum" half a year later.
Do you claim "people of Kherson was fed up, started civil war"?
It is un-civil-ized genocidal war, by calling it civil war you are denying the existence of Ukraine as a state it's the same as saying you support this war and atrocities Ruzzian Federation commits and occupation of Ukrainian territories. Go and preach this on runet instead.
After Belarusian, Ukrainian is also closer to Slovak, Polish, and Czech than to Russian – 38% of Ukrainian vocabulary is different from Russian.
You may want to read some on that. Start with:
What does that have to do with hypothetical hatred of Ukrainians?
As far as I know, Russian peasantry was absolutely not spared in the collectivization, making for the bulk of immediate casualties. And why would Stalin care about them? Was he Russian?
No, there is no comparative study of the effects of repressive policies, because starving millions of people to death and not allowing outside help in (read "The Russian Job" by Douglas Smith) is not practiced on such scale anymore, even by Russia. The Wikipedia page on Holdomor quotes orders to subjugate Ukraine regardless of cost. That in itself negates any notion of Russians having a "super positive attitude" towards Ukraine. Do you know why "(...) you could definitely study Ukrainian in any UkrSSR school from 1960s to 1991."? Because it was not possible while Stalin was alive. It was not possible, because it was Stalin who gave orders to subjugate Ukraine at any cost.
[edit] more on the history of the freedom to use the Ukrainian language in Ukraine under Soviet rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization
If you have any complaints about Stalin, you can mail them to Georgia, and indeed I'm the first one to do the same.
It's the US won't stand for anymore wars like that. And for 50 years after WWII they could enforce that. You can note the general absence of large wars in North and South America as evidence of that.
Stick and carrots. Both are required.
not to mention that china was on a reasonably good trajectory until a certain yellow bear ascended to the throne
Edit: I'm being throttled so I'll respond to similar comments here. TheOtherHobbes similarly notes:
> The EU. France and Germany used to be deadly enemies. No one sane is expecting a war between them any time soon.
In particular, France and Germany weren't peacefully reconciled through economic integration. There was a war, and the victors of that war installed democratic governments in both France and West Germany and inducted both countries into a broader alliance.
> Same with US states. Texas etc keep muttering about secession, but the economic complications make it an insane idea.
It took about two decades after Texas was admitted to the union for the states to fight a civil war against each other.
genman says:
> Remember WW1? WW2?
Not personally (I'm not that old) but those were not instances of economic integration easing military tensions; they were instances of extremely bloody world wars. And the First World War in particular was already deemed impossible because of the degree to which European economies were already economically integrated. That theory did not pan out.
wolverine876:
> The EU (in its early forms) was formed by the countries that just fought each other in WWI and WWII, and for centuries before that. The EU was specifically intended to prevent another war.
Again reversing cause and effect. The Allies won the Second World War and installed friendly governments across western Europe (and also in Greece); following this, those friendly governments formed the EU.
The EU (in its early forms) was formed by the countries that just fought each other in WWI and WWII, and for centuries before that. The EU was specifically intended to prevent another war.
Not quite, the Western Union (predecessor to the EU by way of the was formed by the BeNeLux countries, the UK and France. Some of those were at war in preceding centuries but they were on the same side during WWI and WWII. It didn't have a lot of clout because very rapidly afterwards other more powerful institutions were formed and it was superceded. But it was more of a continuation of some of the collaboration that stemmed from being allies/liberators in the war than that they were on opposing sides. Later institutions included Germany and Italy as well.
As I recall, Churchill was a strong proponent of the EU's [edit: I can't believe I used the wrong word:] ancestor (the European Communities? Some oil and coal community?), as a way to prevent further wars. Churchill blamed nationalism specifically.
You're saying the EU wasn't required? That seems like a bold statement, but probably too much to sort out in HN comments.
I'm a bit confused by "but" in that sentence. I'm not sure if a 'not' or another word is missing there. Certainly many saw unification as beneficial - again, it was the key to many. Many still do.
Unification was underway prior to the EU, the EU is the eventual larger body but it took some steps to get to the point where it could be properly established, mostly on account of the various countries still reeling from WWII and being very busy with reconstruction efforts (and piss poor to boot, the first years after WWII were almost as bad as the last years of the war and in some places even worse besides the reduced immediate risk to life). Doubly so for those countries that ended up on the far side of the Iron Curtain, but then again, they weren't part of the EU for many years to come. But for many of them the only thing that changed is that German uniforms became Russian uniforms and usually that wasn't accompanied by a higher degree of civility by the occupiers.
How do you establish the arrow of causality (and of course, to some degree, it points both ways)? Objectively, we know that a major intent and design of the EU (and its earlier iterations) was to prevent another war.