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I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?
What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.
Let's first imagine the wild success of the SMO. That is, Russian tanks drive all the way to the center of Kiev in 2022, Zelensky escapes
in a dress, Poland props up LNR and VNR. That's where ideologically motivated SBU and military officers escape to along with hardcore nationalists, everyone else shrugs and goes on with their lives.Well, in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia. Not a perfect one, of course, but Russia is a very top-down country where the very bottom of the pyramid is adept at avoiding the attention of the rest of it. Ukraine has a very different ethos of resisting the top layers, and the 2014 revolution legitimized this resistance. Poroshenko's reforms made municipal governments responsible for a much larger chunk of the taxes, further reinforcing the idea that people were in charge of their lives, and this change worked.
Maybe in February 2022 the average Ukrainian could've calculated the QALY drop caused by a prolonged armed resistance and decided to give up, but vibes beat math, and the vibes said, "we're finally doing some cool nation building and we'll lose all this if we don't resist".
Before the invasion Ukraine's GDP per capita was 2-3 times lower than Russia's. Obviously now it's even worse. "Nation-building" aside, is there any particular reason I should believe it's better to be Ukrainian than Russian?
All I see is one corrupt oligarchy feeding its population into a meat grinder to avoid having their power taken away by another corrupt oligarchy.
Setting aside the possibility of skew, since I had a surprisingly hard time finding median data…Is this the right question?
Maybe I’d prefer being a Russian to being a Ukrainian. But I think I’d prefer either to being a former-Ukrainian. Even if Russia wasn’t at all interested in cleansing language or religion, would Russian wealth somehow trickle down? There’s not much reason to think former-Ukrainians would see any benefits under Russian colonization.
All else being equal I assume that both countries are equally exploitative towards their people. Ergo, all else being equal, the population of the richer country will be richer and the population of the poorer country will be poorer.
I would expect Russian elites to siphon more from annexed Ukrainians than from their own lower class.
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