THE DIVIDED SELF - THE EXAMPLE OF UKRAINE

The divided self

One good place to start to get an idea of the underlying differences between the people of West and East Ukraine, and this war, could  found in their different ideas of who they are, how they see themselves, and how these differences might be reconciled if that is possible.

To understand this approach, first, try reading my earlier post The United Self.

Roman or Orthodox

Look at who's fighting whom in Ukraine, and if you take out the idea that this is a proxy war between America and Russia, which of course it is, then you are left with looking at a people - the Slavs - who live mainly in eastern and south-eastern Europe and speak variants of the same Indo-European language. 

This group splits into Western and Eastern Slavs, on religious lines, being Roman or Orthodox Christian. 

Then there is the influence of empires : Western Slavs link to the Polish-Lithuainian empire, Germanic peoples this time (Poles, some Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs), and Eastern (Russians, some Ukrainians, and Belarusians).

And consider the historical animosity between Western Slavs and Russia, dating from WW2 and the Great Patriotic War, where Russia survived and overcame German aggression.

A complication was introduced when Byzantium was taken by the ottomans and is the capital Istanbul of Turkey today Crimea was once part of the Ottoman Empire that was taken back and repopulated by the Russians. (Kruschev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1953 to try and balance out Russian populations in Russia's favour, but this was a mistake corrected in 2014.)

So after this short recap and with Maiden in 2005 and and the the

Swiss type cantons

Just what this means can get very complicated but I think the idea is that each administrative unit and there would be too in Ukraine I guess each administrative unit starts off as sovereign and then agrees to hand over certain powers to a federal assembly. 

I dont know how a Federation differs from a Confederation; how the Russian side might fit as a modern-day Soviet; I guess there'd be two Constitutions and two assemblies.

Could Minsk be revived as a starting point? After all, it's non-implementation was the immediate cause of the war -  

(As I understand it - and I'm probably a victim of my ignorance - most of us have forgotten, if ever we knew, that Zilenski promised peace justice and anti-corruption but then fell into the hands of the Kiev right wing ("Nazis"), who take their attitude from the time of the Polish-Lithuanian empire and the German war with Russia.

Anyway, a starting point is to list powers that a central authority could be accountable for.

Powers handed over could be: external relations (foreign affairs) &  defence, currency, telecomms, citizenship, civil and criminal law, economic policy, customs duties.