Russia and Ukraine: Tragic
Three key things to remember about the Ukraine over the next few weeks and months: First, the Ukraine is vital to Russian defense. An unfriendly Great Power with armies in the Ukraine is as threatening to Russia as an unfriendly Great Power with armies in Mexico would be to the United States. Second, the Ukraine, or at least a substantial majority of its population, even in the Russian-speaking parts, doesn't want to be dominated by Russia, and has a long, extremely bloody history of being dominated by Russia, with responses to Ukrainian resistance that often came close to genocide. Ukrainian defense policy has to keep in mind the long history of Russian attempts to dominate the Ukraine, and try to prevent similar domination in the future. Third, an unfriendly Great Power, such as Russia, in the Ukraine is as threatening to Poland as an unfriendly Great Power in Mexico would be to us.
Russia has a five century tradition of striving for preemptive self defense, which is to say that they strive for a position where the Russian core is surrounded by subordinated groups, and then those subordinated groups become regarded as vital to the Russian national interest and must be surrounded by another layer of subordinated states, and so on until the cost of maintaining the unwieldy mass becomes too great for the Russian core to bear.
Long before that point, the cost of controlling so many unwilling subjects keeps the vast majority of Russians poor, keeps the country technologically backward, forces them into dependence on exporting natural resources, leaves them with only military industries sometimes almost competitive with the rest of the world.
The cost of controlling that empire also includes continuing dictatorship, because the violence necessary to hold down so many unwilling subjects breeds groups of violent men, who don't stop being violent when they are dealing with other Russians, as the fate of most of the old Bolsheviks under Stalin shows. Building a tool capable of holding down the empire means building a tool capable of upholding a dictatorship.
There are cynics who believe that Russia is incapable of being held together by anything other than a dictatorship, and that may be right, but trying to hold onto layer after layer of unwilling buffers makes anything but a dictatorship essentially impossible.
Russia has a five century tradition of striving for preemptive self defense, which is to say that they strive for a position where the Russian core is surrounded by subordinated groups, and then those subordinated groups become regarded as vital to the Russian national interest and must be surrounded by another layer of subordinated states, and so on until the cost of maintaining the unwieldy mass becomes too great for the Russian core to bear.
Long before that point, the cost of controlling so many unwilling subjects keeps the vast majority of Russians poor, keeps the country technologically backward, forces them into dependence on exporting natural resources, leaves them with only military industries sometimes almost competitive with the rest of the world.
The cost of controlling that empire also includes continuing dictatorship, because the violence necessary to hold down so many unwilling subjects breeds groups of violent men, who don't stop being violent when they are dealing with other Russians, as the fate of most of the old Bolsheviks under Stalin shows. Building a tool capable of holding down the empire means building a tool capable of upholding a dictatorship.
There are cynics who believe that Russia is incapable of being held together by anything other than a dictatorship, and that may be right, but trying to hold onto layer after layer of unwilling buffers makes anything but a dictatorship essentially impossible.