Good riddance to East Ukraine

If pro-Europe Western Ukraine wants to ally with the European Union and flourish as a responsible 21st-century world power, while pro-Putin Eastern Ukraine wants to sell its soul to the devil, good riddance.

If you think the U.S. is sharply divided into red and blue political zones, you haven’t seen a map of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election results. The Ukraine makes the entire U.S. look as purple as Florida.

Recently, Western Ukrainians decided they had had enough of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s corruption, and organized protests against his capitulation to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the lavish lifestyle he lived in the midst of widespread poverty. Protestors are livid that Yanukovych’s forces have killed hundreds of opposition party members.

Yanukovych, who was believed to be hiding out in the Crimean Peninsula, somehow managed to flee to Russia, where he issued a defiant statement on Thursday. Meanwhile, Putin has stationed troops in Crimea, the only Russian-majority province in the Ukraine.

In typical blame-the-other-side-for-being-just-as-bad style, Russia is denouncing armed Western protestors who simply want to restore order to the capital.

“If you consider Kalashnikov-toting people in black masks who are roaming Kiev to be the government, then it will be hard for us to work with that government,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said.

You see, the current Russian administration prefers soldiers in fur hats brandishing swords, lashing women in public with horsewhips and squirting pepper spray at people

The anti-Yanukovych protestors despise the idea of Russia giving them a $15 billion bailout in exchange for Ukraine becoming Putin’s pet, and have requested assistance from the International Monetary Fund to stave off bankruptcy. It is obviously the more responsible choice and preferable to Western Ukrainians who don’t want to enslave themselves again to a hostile foreign power via multibillion-dollar deficits.

So what exactly is the point of maintaining Ukrainian “territorial integrity” — i.e. forcing West and East Ukraine, which despise each other, to remain united? It’s not as though the former Soviet Union settled into a peaceful, stable constellation of nations in the early 1990s and has remained idyllic ever since. Splitting the country into West and East Ukraine would be a blip on the timeline of post-Soviet geopolitics.

The only valid reason for the West to want to keep the country together is that Eastern Ukraine happens to yield a majority of the country’s economic output, due to their large industrial manufacturing base and plentiful natural resources. It would certainly sting for Western Ukraine to have to untether its economy from that abundance. But split the country in half, with Western Ukraine allying with the European Union and Eastern Ukraine hewing to Russia’s totalitarian model, and which half of Ukraine do you think is going to be thriving ten years from now?

As Mitt Romney correctly noted during the third 2012 Presidential debate, Russia is our primary geopolitical adversary. Any country or region that hasn’t learned the lessons of the Cold War and allies with Putin deserves what it gets.