Comments by "Dale Crocker" (@dalecrocker3213) on "'The war will be over when all Ukrainian territory is under the Ukrainian flag' | Lesia Vasylenko" video.

But where is Ukraine? What is Ukraine ? At the moment it is a country arbitarily created in the borders of the former semi autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This was an entity created for the administrative and geographical convenience of the Soviet Union - without these functions it is an anomaly. The area to the West of the Dnieper can have some claim to a separate historical identity - and Russia acknowledges this. Crimea and much of the land to the south and east cannot be so categorised. They exist as parts of modern Ukraine solely because they were appended to the Soviet republic. They have a very high proportion of Russian inhabitants and close economic ties with Russia. They are also extremely rich in minerals and as long as these resources continued to be channeled through Russia the situation remained relatively stable. Sadly, however, America and other Western entities have schemed to exploit these resources and this dreadful, dreadful war is a direct consequence of this takeover bid . To imagine that modern Ukraine is an oppressed and united country fighting for freedom and democracy is a somewhat naive view, to say the least.
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@billmoretz8718 That's my point. That agreement signed in the chaos of the collapse of the USSR did not reflect the true historic , ethnic, geographical and economic realities of the situation . The same applies to the intertwined histories of Russia and Ukraine which largely ignored the arid steppes to the East of the Dnieper - which having been found to be rich in valuable minerals are now at the centre of this bloody dispute.
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@mattcarolan90210 I can so argue for the simple reason that Ukraine was one the most corrupt countries in the world at the time and couldn't conduct a free and fair election for love or money. Apart from that, how can you possibly conduct an election concerning borders when the borders containing the electorate are the main point at issue?
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@mattcarolan90210 Broadly speaking that's exactly what I'm saying - apart from the fact that conducting fair elections in corrupt police states is impossible and that, in any case, democracy doesn't work in situations where you have high concentrations of a distinct minority interest in specific areas. Playing lip service to nationalism was one of the ways the Soviet leadership tried to hold the whole thing together. It has now backfired badly. Redress was possible had Kiev and .Moscow been left to sort things out between themselves - but that went down the tubes once Western interests set their sights on all that lovely oil ,gas, steel and rare earth minerals.
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@billmoretz8718 They weren't THEIR weapons they were Soviet (ie Russian) weapons stationed there. They could only be fired on orders from Moscow (The idea that these weapons could be replaced by NATO weapons a little over 30 years later is one of the reasons Russia is somewhat peeved of course.)
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@billmoretz8718 It can certainly try. Organising a coup to replace a Russian-leaning President with a Western leaning one and consorting with a Ukrainian oligarch to appoint a charismatic puppet to lead the country into a needless war are just two examples. The deliberate manipulation of the Minsk Accords is another.
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@nudisco7882 Russia still acknowledges Ukraine 'sovereignty' - but only to the extent that Crimea and Donbass are not included in it. As I said previously, it is Western greed for mineral resources and America's expansionist war-based economy which has upset the balance of power here. The good ole US of A has been doing this kind of thing ever since it first set one redskin tribe against another, made a treaty with the winner , broke it, then claimed the redskins had broken it and then used this as an excuse to take all their land.
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