Is Ukraine about to explode?

The Ukraine is weak.

 

Will hopefully just be the same thing as in Georgia.
I hope they make it into EU soon!

 

Only someone who doesn't understand Ukraine hopes they make it into the EU.

 

Maybe so - I don't begin to claim I understand Ukraine - but they can't live on an islamd. Either they have to look to the West for ties or they have to fall under the influence of the new Imperial Russia.

I don't envy them the choice.

 

Never claimed to understand them, but they are a European country and the EU will only be done when it's borders are with China and Iran (so we take in Russia and Turkey as well) This is idealistic and won't happen soon, but would anybody have thought 20 years ago that we'd have Poland and the back then not existing baltic countries in the EU?

 

Bring Democracy to the Ukraine. Let's invade that ******** hole.

 

No, but at this point, its pretty clear they've cast their lot with Russia. Ukraine lacks the most fundamental social structures necessary for Democracy, let alone EU membership. They can't even run a decent election, let alone stop killing reporters or poisoning non government sponsored candidates (supposedly Yushchenko was poisoned twice this year while campaigning). What Ukraine's choices are isn't terribly relevant to what the EU should do about them.

This coming from someone who thought that the US couldn't even be a member of the EU becaue its barbaric. The EU integration of the former eastern bloc countries is hardly proven a success yet. And most of them weren't part of the USSR. As for your goal of a nearly global Europe - I think you're slightly nuts. Didn't the Roman Empire teach you anything? Probably not, no. You're seeking to draft Turkey into this too? Why? How are they any more European than Egypt?
Its not idealistic, its stupid.
And allowing Ukraine into the EU anytime soon would be REALLY stupid.

 

It is funny how many random phrases from that show made it into popular speech.

It is the Moops. They did it.

 

Ukraine may be weak and a sh**hole, but it's loaded with nukes and has a wealth of natural resourses. Europe will be happy to have Ukraine, provided all the native population is expunged into Russia and the country can be resettled by the Swiss. Seeing as this is unlikely to happen, screw Ukraine altogether.
By the way, Yushchenko's election, a Western "liberal" as he is, would only make Ukraine a democratic country if the above condition were fulfilled. With the current populus, all he would succeed in would be creating a nationalistic, deeply divided state, stuck between its desire to be as different from Russia as possible and its natural condition as erzatz-Russians.
They may as well re-unify and end this farce now.

 

That's remarkably similar to how I feel about Russia. Never in history has a country with so much natural wealth contrived to do so little with it.
As Alexei Tolstoy wrote, "and still there was no order........"

 

That is how I feel about Saudi Arabia. Granted, they have done something with their natural wealth, but expensive palaces for the princes and lots of expensive hookers in France and Spain is not quite the best use of all the money.

I had a law professor who specialized in the law of the Soviet Union. Excet by the time I got to law school, it was the law of the FORMER Soviet Union.

We used to joke with her that the way things were going, she should call herself a specialist in the law of the "soon to be again" Soviet Union.

 

But they only have oil. Russia has literally everything, save perhaps large natural supplies of rubber. Its the largest producer of natural gas in Europe, I believe. It has most types of ore, produces nearly all of the world's nickel, has oil as well, coal, has diamonds, has a breadbasket that could feed Europe, etc. etc. And still...............

 

Does that mean she once wrote a biography of Stalin?

 

No, she just did a lot of writtings on Soviet law -- they had one.

She is really a specialist on international law. She was one of my favorite teachers -- we had diametrically opposed views, but we could be civil and actually enjoyed discussing things together.

 

True, but seeing that their most plentiful and cherished natural resource is cucumbers, let Europe have them.

 

Hell, they've got 150 million people, many of whom are in good enough physical condition to overturn foreign cars following a World Cup loss or stab 11-year-old Tajik girls numerous times while screaming "Russia is for Russians". One would think finding 11 men with an aptitude for kicking a ball far and true would not be much of a challenge. And yet, there we are.

The Ukies' frantic attempts to show how different they are from us make me laugh hysterically. They make overtures to Poland, they change their language to purge it of "Russian influence". They try to prove that ethnic "Ukrainians" existed in prehistoric times.
Yet all one has to do is try to fit into a Kiev trolley-bus at 5pm on a weekday to see all the cultural proximity one needs.

 

All this doesn't change the fact that the elections were corrupt. The majority of voters wanted change (according to the demo polls) but due to the election fraud, they won't see it. I'm Flemish, and if you look at it, we aren't very different from the Dutch, but this doesn't mean I want to be dependent of them. If a vast majority of voters wants change, it should be given to them, instead of changing results and so advantaging Russia. It's no surprise that the first to congratulate the new president was Poetin.

 

hell I'd do it just to get Shevchenko.

 

Shevchenko + Eddie Johnson + Donovan = 6-0 victory in the Azteca

 

Did Poland run a right election between 1950 and 1989???

That#s what the deatch penalty is from a European point of view, and it is clear that no country with death penalty will ever be allowed to join the EU. The US

Just ask any Polish farmer, plz. What can we say more after not even a year than 'work in progress'? And the eastern european countries are not in a far worse shape than Portugal, Spain or Greccer were when they joined the EU.

Didn't it teach the americans anything?

 

What?

So considering these republics have Presidents ordering deaths of journalists ON TAPE, how far do you think they are?

Exactly - we don't know how well it will go.

Crapfest. That sentence was a crapfest, You're so ludicrously wrong its funny.

What should the Roman Empire have taught the Americans? You didn't come close to understanding my point. The United States is not expanding territorially into any regions.

OK........but that doesn't make them European. You don't know the history of the Balkans - that's fine. But check on it first. The Turks were peripheral figures in the Balkans until it came time to collect taxes or fight wars.

That's so remarkably wrong is laughable.

You don't have a basic grasp of economics, facts or history. Who exactly is hard to understand? To suggest that Portugal or Spain were, in 1989 even remotely close to Ukraine's current plight is stupid on a level not seen here since verybdog started his "gay marriage will doom the human race" thread.

 

According to most polls in America, the voters here wanted change too. So, did it stop them from "voting on values"?
Voters are fundamentally stupid, this is democracy's biggest flaw.

Still, though I do not like Yanukovich in any way, his election is more logical. The Ukies should stop pretending to be Westernized and just resign themselves to the fact that they are the same partially aborted children of the USSR as Russians are.