Do you realize how dangerous your line of though is Owlbread? The whole map of Europe was redrawn after WWII, with countries shifted hundred of kilometers and tens of millions of people forcibly displaced. The only way this continent is more or less stable is because we all agreed not to think to much about how things were before 1948.
My line is dangerous, yes - but would it really be like how things were before 1948? For one thing blood should be no component in it. I see the Russians of Crimea and the Crimean Tatars as belonging to the same nation - the Crimean nation, just as I see Scots and English and Pakistani people in Scotland as belonging to the Scottish nation. Just as I see ethnic Russians in the Donbass as belonging to the Ukrainian nation.
Frankly, it reminds me of the CKII empire you hod: rebellions all the time, people dying in endless civil war, but you now, it's fine because every province was of the historical culture/religion!
I think the issue of wars and rebellions and things like that comes up depending on the method with which this utopia is achieved. I'm not calling for an armed revolution right now or for us to start the work on building the Europe I have in mind next year or something - this is something that needs to be worked towards, maybe even over a period of a century or two. Far more important than doing anything now (apart from calling for civic nationalism and supporting independence movements around the world where possible) is to think and plan.
Also, the reason it's okay to require new immigrant to the UK to learn English while forcing Russian living in Crimea for 150 years to learn Tatar is that immigrants coming to the UK knows about that requirement and made the choice to come anyway. Russians in Crimea just have been born there, or came knowing they had the right to use Russian.
But they came knowing they had the right to use Russian because they'd just utterly decimated the Tatars and gotten them under their bootheels. They knew they were dominant and they were going to make that country a part of their own. On a moral basis I believe they should learn Tatar, the language of the Crimean nation (the last native language the peninsula has left, anyway).
this is the best i got but that's more than half a year too late
still, crimea was not occupied at the time, or anywhere close to it
besides i think you understand how difficult it is to search for anything ukraine related (digging this one up took me twenty minutes?)
That is a good find. We should try to find out what their conclusions were. I keep finding information about the OSCE being involved but I can't find out what their conclusions were.
The greatest advocate and lobbyist of NATO membership for the countries neighboring Russia is Putin himself.
It is sad how despite us living in the age of information(granted some 85% or so of the Russian TV broadcasting and major newspapers are under Putin's control, tune on for your daily ration of propaganda, but still) the Russians seem to still value military strength, bullying and parades on the Red Square higher than their own economy, standard of living or even freedom of speech. Most of them even buy the great conspiracy of poor Russia being bullied, blockaded and itself under a threat from the West. Sounds like Germany in the 1930s.
Everything the Russian leadership has done and said for the past couple of years has now lost all its credit. I predict more opposition members and journalists disappearing or getting shot at their doors in the future.
I agree with pretty much everything here.