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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

If you ask me, "what's better, do business with EU/USA or have Crimea", of course I will pick Crimea every time. It's just feels pragmatically more useful to me, like how co-owning a bungalow on a sea shore is better than holding a Costco membership, if you had to pick just one.

That would be before the war, and as the war has started, based on the actions of EU/USA I have very little desire for Russia to engage in much business with either one. Let's keep it formal from now.

I can see in neighbour thread somebody perceiving there is no room for dialogue, which they treat as an optional thing and the one which is mostly benefical for the other party. Guess what, many Russians now treat business with USA/EU in the same fashion. Nice to have, but not essential and may be downwound on occasions.

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How do you (or anyone) personally benefit from "having Crimea"?

You can obviously travel there and see all the Imperial palaces and gardens, swim the sea, visit the museums and have a really good time. In awesome weather, which is of short supply in what's left of mainland Russia.

On the other hand, the usefulness of cordial relations with EU/USA is debatable.

You could make a point that if Russia had good relations with Ukraine, Russians could travel there on their own by just crossing that border. However, Ukraine shown by their repeated maidan coups and anti-Russian rhetoric that they can't be relied upon.

Unfortunately Putin's idea of "good relations with Ukraine" is a situation where the latter is greatly reduced in territorial scope, and whatever remains is kept as a pliant vassal state.

With thousands of civilians slaughtered and maimed, just to make a point.

As Eador quotes, "dying is the way of men".

Ukraine's reduction is someone else's problem. For some reason, Russian Federation did act like it was a nursery home for ex-Soviet independent states, but there's no obligation to put their interests past our own.

"Dying is the way of men"

Putin's attitude towards his own people, basically.

I mean, you could have travelled there even before the 2014 hostilities began. So it's not like you gained anything in that regard, right? Now if Russia loses it, the travel there might be more difficult for some time.

Yes, one may be thinking of it as "not losing something". But it's much easier to not lose something when it's in your possession than when you depend on goodwill of some third party.

Actual Russian Federation experience with all post-Soviet states ranges from bad to mediocre. It's as far cry as possible to e.g. the EU affair where one might say "I'm completely OK with %region% being a part of other country since I am always free to move there if I want, the local population is protected by laws and conventions as good as they are in my country, and even discussing political borders creates unnecessary strife". Perhaps it was the original idea behind CIS but it became very bad very fast.

Well, from my point of view, the war just makes all of this only worse. I imagine going to the Crimea for a family vacation isn't a great prospect with the risk of bombardment or even a takeover.

But that's probably something where we differ. I view this Russian attitude as "we can't live as well as we'd like to so we'll at least make other suffer too". This is completely self-inflicted.

There was no war in Crimea from 2014 to 2022 and even today it's mostly spared. Some other parts of Ukraine has went through a meat grinder, which reinforces the opinion that overrunning and firewalling it was a good idea.

The Russian attitude is that if a third party makes some offer to any post-Soviet country, they should match it with an offer to Russia itself that is same or better, and are eventually ready to go to war over that.

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