Response to a Comment About Ukraine & the Threat of Ethnic Russians Within

I saw this comment on my debate with pedophile-apologist Vaush from what appears to be a left-leaning Ukrainian who addresses my arguments that Ukraine would not have the problems it’s having with Russia right now if they had excluded ethnic Russians from their state in 1991.

He says:

I wanna address some of this guys Ukraine takes (I’m from Ukraine). He suggests that if we expelled “ethnic russians” from our country then russia wouldn’t have invaded or would have “much weaker” reason for that. First of all, it doesn’t matter what reason they come up with. Protecting ethnic russians is not the only one they voiced. They also said plenty of delusional stuff like “denazifying” Ukraine, getting rid of those famous biolabs that we used to create combat mosquitoes with bio-weapons to target russians, fighting NATO expansionism and so on.

The denazifying Ukraine bit plays right alongside the “protecting ethnic Russians” bit. It’s the same thing. The Kremlin claim was that the Ukrainian government are ethno-cultural supremacists (Nazis) who hate ethnic Russians and want to wipe them out. That’s basically the same pretext. The biolabs thing was just icing on the cake to add weight to their case after the invasion already kicked off. NATO expansion has always been a card they’ve played against neighbour countries and it could have been used to justify an invasion of Ukraine, absent the other talking points, but that alone is a much weaker case than the “we need to protect ethnic Russians from genocide” line. That claim was their rallying cry from the outset and without it I don’t see it going the way it did.

Moreover, the large presence of ethnic Russians in the East of the country made possible both the seamless seizure of Crimea by Putin and the Kremlin-backed pro-Russian uprising that captured the Donbass in 2014. Without all of those pro-Russian ethnics living there, I doubt there would have been a rebellion in the East at all. During this war Putin has used ethnic Russians in Ukraine as spies, saboteurs and collaborators to accomplish his war goals. Without those traitors in the country, Ukraine would be in a much better place.

My argument is that considering the sordid history between Russia and the Ukrainian people, it was always a danger to allow large swaths of ethnic Russians to be citizens in this new Ukrainian state, who could be weaponized at any time by the Kremlin to cause trouble. And that’s exactly what has happened. The political struggle in Ukraine seems to be between Ukrainians, most of whom lean towards Europe, and Russians who lean towards Moscow. They are constantly fighting on those terms in the political arena. These Russians give Moscow sway over Ukrainian politics in general, since they’re a major voting bloc. If they had been excluded in 1991 via a peaceful population transfer to Russia, Putin would not have the leverage he currently has.

They could also used the fact that we expelled all the russians from the country as a reason to invade. It doesn’t matter really, their real reason is chauvinistic imperialism. They just want Ukraine to obey, that’s it.

They could have but it’s doubtful that could have been done in 1991 when Russia was at its weakest point. If the exclusion happened some years after that, say in 2014, then maybe Russia could have used that to invade but they invaded anyway with all their sympathizers still in the country.

As for expelling ethnic russians, I don’t even know how is it possible in reality. I don’t think we’re that different biologically from russians, so the only marker is the fact that they’re speaking russian. But a huge amount of ethnic Ukrainians were forcibly russified during imperial and soviet occupation. That would be just dumb to expel up to the third of the population.

It wouldn’t be based on biology, but on their self-identification. Most Ukrainians themselves speak Russian, so you couldn’t just expel Russian speakers. It would be based on some kind of loyalty test. If they principally identified culturally, linguistically and politically with Russia, then they’d have to leave. Israel instituted a similar law where the citizens of the country had to pledge loyalty to the Jewish state. In this case they’d pledge loyalty to Ukrainian state-hood.

Besides, EVEN IF we somehow did it, it wouldn’t be creating an ethno-state, since we wouldn’t be expelling other ethnicities except russians.

Well, you could exclude other ethnic groups as well, or make them take the same loyalty test. This situation with Russia-Ukraine demonstrates that multi-culturalism is untenable and leads to conflict, even within groups of homogenous Whites with slightly different cultures. Not dissimilar to what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s.

It’s not a smart idea to have a huge amount of a different ethno-cultural group living in your territory, especially when their origin nation borders yours. It’s a bit different when that group moves thousands of miles away to a new country, like Poles living in the UK. There’s minimal possibility that Poland can use those immigrants to justify territorial expansion against the UK, thousands of miles away. However, even then they could use them as a fifth-column or recruit them as spies, as China has done with Chinese immigrants and Israel has done with Jews in the West.

Some controlled immigration between White countries can work and there’s not too much danger, but if the origin country borders the other, like with Russia/Ukraine, then it becomes a big issue. Sharing that border means that the origin country of the ethnics can make a territorial claim against you, as Hitler did in Poland and as Putin is doing in Ukraine now. It’s best not to let this situation arise in the first place with a more exclusionary ethnic policy.

Just to be clear, I don’t hate ethnic Russians (many Russians are decent people who oppose this war and are heavily repressed for doing so) I’m just pointing out the danger they have posed to Ukraine and how Putin has used them to fuck the country up from within. I just think they’d be better off in Russia itself, the largest country on earth with plenty of space for them. Ukraine would also be better off without people with dual-loyalties in their country, subverting it from within and aiding a foreign occupier.